Explore what’s happening at LeadDev London

But what can be even more valuable is finding “sponsors”, who help us find new opportunities and improve.

As sponsorship is especially important for members of minoritized communities in tech, Lara Hogan walks through tactics you can employ today to be a sponsor for those around you, too.

In this talk, Sally will recount some war stories of taking a team of engineering managers and engineers through turbulent change and will reflect on what went well, what didn’t, and what she wishes she’d known beforehand.

You'll take away:

• Different types of change you might encounter or instigate
• How to land changes successfully
• How to cope with a lot of change - both for you and your reports
• Change management is not just for corporations!

What if we could change that narrative?  What if we looked at tech debt as a vehicle for novel innovation, growth for your best engineers, and managing it became a competitive advantage?

In this talk, I’ll discuss how we’re reframing technical debt at Netflix and what we’re investing in to help manage it better.

So how do you design APIs in an effective way - striking the balance between making good decisions that stand the test of time, whilst still empowering the business to move quickly and being able to react to internal and customer feedback?

In this talk, Jeff will take about his experiences at Stripe and OpenAI, sharing stories and lessons on creating APIs that are easy to use, yet powerful and adaptable for the future. He'll discuss strategies for making decisions in API design, even when the path ahead isn't clear.

You’ll take away:

• Guiding principles for shipping high-quality APIs that meet the demands of the business
• Tools to work through the inevitable ambiguity in the design process 
• Frameworks for establishing a contract with end users 

As engineering leaders, it’s our job to make the folks in our team the most effective that they can be and to grow them to their full potential. But if engineers don’t know how to develop in a structured way, they’re more likely to feel disengaged - viewing career conversations and reviews as tick-box exercises. And equally, as a manager, if you don’t have structured ways to evaluate development, you’re more likely to fall victim to bad habits around progression - promoting focus on word of mouth or impression, which could place another barrier in front of engineers who are underrepresented in tech. 

At ASOS, we run quarterly surveys with our engineers and we heard that they were struggling to know how to grow themselves - and so we knew we had to do something about it. In this talk, Ed and Gareth will take you through how we built a comprehensive competency framework; starting from an initial MVP to where we are today - a dedicated web app powered through markdown files in GitHub and a Blazor Server App. They'll delve into the evolution of frameworks and tools, all with one goal in mind: crafting an engaging and user-friendly platform to drive meaningful development and career conversations. They'll also take you through how we shared our matrix with folks outside of engineering - and how they ended up adopting it too.

You’ll take away:

• Strategies for navigating constructive career conversations, both for yourself and others
• Effective frameworks and resources for constructing competency matrices
• An understanding of which platform of delivery is most effective for the career matrix