LeadDev Berlin 2023
2023-12-04..2023-12-05
Berlin, Germany
[LeadDev Berlin 2019, LeadDev Berlin 2022, LeadDev Berlin 2023, LeadDev Berlin 2024]
who it's for
engineering managers, team leads, people managers, tech leads, director of engineering, senior engineers
topics
downturn leadership strategies; managing architecture; engineering manager hiring mistakes; measuring team learning; leading distributed teams in war zones; remote-first transformation; teaching Python to non-tech professionals; responsible AI ethics; AI for software development; tech debt prioritization; incident declaration practices; code quality ownership
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Leading through the downturn | Allison Malloy | 24m |
Shopify reports 61 million customers buying $9.1 billion in 4 days and the leader describes rebuilding after doubling engineering headcount in 2021, shifting… | ||
| There and back again: A journey of complexity | Tristan Heal | 22m |
A startup-to-SME-to-large company journey that actually modularises the frontend: claim is that moving session and integrations into an account library and… | ||
| Managing architecture | Lutz Hühnken | 27m |
Compares two concrete systems for steering architecture: a community architecture guild that conserves an early vision through meetups and principles, versus a… | ||
| Things I got wrong when searching for my first engineering manager job | Ferit Topcu | 11m |
Admits to having jumped in naively then lists concrete lessons: companies must invest in coaching and allow failure, calendar shifts to five meetings per day… | ||
| Growing future leaders: Nurturing team leads as a path to managerial succession | Anna Kurylo | 23m |
Creates two team leads who each inherit three ICs, keeps four senior ICs reporting to manager and reduces the manager’s load; trains leads on giving and… | ||
| How to completely fail at learning | Hywel Carver | 23m |
Claims companies are bad at learning and that targeted learning is about 66% more cost effective than hiring; lists six failure modes — leave it to the… | ||
| Learning is a core capability of software teams; here's how to measure it | Sorrel Harriet | 12m |
Claim: learning capability is the core team performance metric and it is measurable. Method: a 47-question LIC survey grouped into quality of task, social… | ||
| Leading a distributed team out of a war zone: Lessons in resilience and adaptability | Bohdan Kit | 28m |
A manager keeps an 8‑person senior engineering team productive from inside a war zone while launching ad‑free browsing on schedule, a feature that becomes the… | ||
| Managing in hard times: How to shift from growth to stability | David LaMothe | 07m |
Claims concrete operational shifts: use the Rule of 40 to trade growth for profitability, cut feature bets by reducing scope, and measure success by lowered… | ||
| Python powered people: Teaching non-tech professionals to code | Charlie Beeson | 14m |
An initiative called develop claims that over half the firm uses Python 18 months after launch, having taught almost 300 people in the first 18 months from… | ||
| Challenges in transforming a multicultural local-only company to a remote-first | Felipe Furlan | 26m |
Jimdo moves from a Germany-centered, multicultural office to a remote-first company after integrating 15+ nationalities, and finds onboarding, language… | ||
| Overcoming people-pleasing tendencies to become a stronger engineering leader | Nikita Rathi | 19m |
Claims that people-pleasing maps onto four named types and that simple, repeatable tactics reduce harm: the validation Seeker, the invisible Mara, the… | ||
| 50 shades of PR dark matter | Avishag Sahar | 14m |
Data shows PRs consume 23% of cycle time and scale to huge cost; research from Linear B finds pick-up and review idle time are the main culprits. The claim is… | ||
| Responsible AI/Ethics in AI engineering | Maria Gomez Aguirre, Priyanka Syal | 25m |
Conference notes list a concrete lifecycle: define ethical requirements during planning, decide whether AI is necessary, and pick model type; design for… | ||
| Making work (and life) less stressful by making better decisions | Nicky Thompson | 25m |
Explains concrete decision tools: a three-question HOT test (Happiness, Only-option, Two-way-door) to triage effort, make reversible choices with two-way door… | ||
| Pragmatic data organization leadership | Olalekan Elesin | 21m |
A data organization case study shows a reorganization that scales to a 70-person org and hits a surprising hiring outcome of 75% female engineers, adopts… | ||
| Growth in a downturn | Smruti Patel | 31m |
Shows exact tactics: read the P&L and cash runway, prioritize work by ROI and buy vs build, cap downside with surgical fixes instead of large lift‑and‑shifts… | ||
| Goldilocks doesn't need your story points. or your t-shirts | Ben Murray | 09m |
Claim: stop wrestling over Fibonacci numbers and t-shirt sizes and instead make work just right size then measure outcomes. Teams ask if a task is small enough… | ||
| AI for software development: A reality check | Birgitta Boeckeler | 27m |
Claims what works now: inline coding autocomplete and IDE chat with GitHub Copilot, natural‑language query builders like Google Cloud's Do it AI and Honeycomb… | ||
| Building teams in tumultuous times. Lessons learned after multiple layoffs | Chris Jimenez | 22m |
Four rounds of layoffs happen across a career including four layoffs two in management, a sector-wide wave hits with 400,000 people laid off ≈1,200/day, and… | ||
| Practical tech-debt prioritization | Sahana Carlsen | 10m |
A concrete prioritization framework shows relative scores for impact risk and complexity and ships as a Notion template; engineers estimate with left t-shirt… | ||
| Skills that empower engineers to drive business impact | Lydia Seidlitz | 11m |
Five concrete skills drive measurable product impact: user centricity, business acumen, data-driven decisions. Engineers perform rotations into customer… | ||
| Native to flutter: A tale of Tide's transformation | Anna Leushchenko, Giorgos Ampavis | 25m |
Tide performs a full Greenfield rewrite to Flutter, rebuilding a universal client in under a year with ~40–50 Flutter engineers split into seven subteams and a… | ||
| Building bridges beyond the screen: Cracking the code of remote team-building | Marina Planells Guasch | 28m |
A six-person dev team spread across four countries and three time zones runs a rolling set of experiments: a weekly team coffee (renamed from virtual breakfast… | ||
| Take back control of code quality | Joel Chippindale | 11m |
Claim: high‑quality code is simply code that’s easy to keep changing, and investing in it lets a team “go fast forever” — the crossover from slow to… | ||
| Go with the flow: Embracing and supporting menstrual needs in tech | Amy Roberts-Hoad | 10m |
Argues that menstrual needs measurably affect team performance and retention, citing that 25% never discuss periods at work, 89% feel workplace anxiety and two… | ||
| We should all be declaring more incidents | Martha Lambert | 24m |
Argues for declaring many more incidents as a deliberate tool: actual claim is that lowering the bar and autocreate incidents from every new error lets teams… | ||
| Coaching autism traits in tech | Dennie Declerq | 20m |
Claims autism is different wiring not worse or better and focuses on four traits: context blindness, a different stimuli‑response system, concentrated special… | ||
| How to make better modernization decisions | Indu Alagarsamy | 30m |
Uses Wardley Mapping to place capabilities on an evolution axis and decide what to build versus buy, uses Service Blueprints to map a home‑delivery… | ||
| nothing matches | ||