LeadDev New York 2025
2025-10-15..2025-10-16
New York, NY, United States
[LeadDev New York 2022, LeadDev New York 2024, LeadDev New York 2025]
as the organisers put it
Join tech leads and engineering managers at LeadDev New York on October 15–16 for talks, case studies, and strategies to lead through constant change.
who it's for
engineering managers, tech leads, directors of engineering, platform engineers, developer experience engineers, product managers, people managers
topics
probabilistic forecasting with flow metrics; AI-assisted engineering practices; prompt-to-production pipelines; large-scale domain migration; test automation ROI and quarantine; conflict mediation and working agreements; 90-day engineer lift-off playbook; API-first monolith extraction; building and maintaining multiple SDKs; ethical AI transparency and bias mitigation; strengthening product-engineering alliance; feature-flag driven safe releases
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Estimation is a waste of time | Maria Chec | 28m |
Actual before-and-after numbers and charts show story point estimates vs real cycle times, with a shift to probabilistic forecasting using team throughput and… | ||
| Beyond the code: Leading engineering teams in the GenAI era | Addy Osmani | 26m |
Argues AI takes teams about 70% Problem of the way but the last 30% — edge cases, architecture fixes, tests — still needs human expertise; cites Google data… | ||
| Understanding how tech careers are shaped by power dynamics | Anil Dash | 29m |
Claim: power shapes decisions, careers, and advancement; evidence: systems run on power, budgets reveal priorities so where the dollars go is what they really… | ||
| No one left behind: Inside the largest domain migration in history | Divya Kamat | 18m |
Project moves fivefold footprint to 9 million domains and expands registrar support from two TLDs to over 360 TLDs in ten months, builds a migration engine and… | ||
| All the things I misunderstood about being a leader | Jason Lengstorf | 26m |
A first-time exec recounts concrete reversals: don’t hand down solutions, define outcomes not features; use the magic question what do you want me to… | ||
| Tackling tech debt | Meri Williams | 18m |
Advocates a concrete five step plan: visualize with DORA metrics and LinearB benchmarks, secure 50% time allocation and use API-first extraction from the… | ||
| Leading without committing: Managing teams outside your tech stack | Robin Bonatesta | 11m |
Lays out a concrete playbook: builds a cross-platform glossary and redesigns the logged‑in homepage to stop confusing terminology, uses exploratory testing and… | ||
| Tech lead to manager: A blueprint for successful transition | Pooja Varshneya | 12m |
Transition from tech lead to manager is a career change not a promotion, with first 90 days to six months framed into stages: early weeks listening to earn… | ||
| Pay your (conflict) debts on time | Liz Hustedt | 32m |
Argues that unresolved “conflict debt” silently erodes delivery and trust and that addressing it early saves months of work; demonstrates with a… | ||
| Predictable is better than fast | Chris Bigelow | 12m |
Claim: making teams and systems predictable beats chasing raw speed because predictable work reduces cross-team churn and long-term delays. Evidence: shipping… | ||
| Leading sustainably when everything is on fire | Denise Yu | 27m |
Claim: surviving layoffs and scarcity requires treating influence as a scarce currency and deliberately building political capital (ship value, cultivate… | ||
| Beyond the hype: What test automation really costs | Alessandra Moreira | 13m |
Focuses on UI and API automation (not AI agents or unit tests) and claims automation only speeds delivery when paired with clarity, alignment, and the right… | ||
| Marcy Lab’s 90-Day lift-off playbook: Building high-impact, durable engineers | Reuben Ogbonna | 15m |
A one-year, 2,000 hours one-year tuition-free fellowship trains career-ready engineers by prioritizing debugging, prompt fluency and judgment over framework… | ||
| From prompt to production | Aloke Desai | 11m |
Claim: integrating AI saves 5 hours a week on average if teams change process not just prompts. Specifics: use Warp and multiple agent tools, create a Slack… | ||
| From friction to function: Strengthening the product-engineering alliance | Kevin Goldsmith | 26m |
Concrete methods and outcomes: a reproducible balanced prioritization matrix that maps stories by business impact and technical sustainability, a disciplined… | ||
| Finding the spark: Unlocking growth potential on your team | Kelly Vaughn | 26m |
A practical framework lays out five performance types (two high, one medium, two low) with clear signals: rockstars deliver steady deep work, superstars seek… | ||
| The accidental AI revolution | Angie Jones | 27m |
An internal developer tool becomes a company-wide agent: Goose autonomous AI agent boosts engineers by 20% more efficient and lets 75% save 8–10 hours/week… | ||
| A reality check on AI’s impact on business transformation | Dilip Krishna | 26m |
Claims concrete ROI: 15% speedup from adding copilots, then 60% improvement after reorganizing teams so AI is the pilot with full‑stack engineers around it… | ||
| 3 data-backed ideas to deter AI code quality problems | Bill Harding | 27m |
Data from 250m+ lines across repos at Google Microsoft Meta and 1,000+ others shows three concrete risks of AI‑authored code: duplication surges (copy/paste… | ||
| Leadership in AI-assisted engineering | Justin Reock | 17m |
Claims are concrete: measured averages show a 2.6% change confidence gain and about a 1% decrease in change failure rate, while per-company results swing ±20%… | ||
| The uncomfortable middle: Growing as a Director in uncertain times | George Mandis | 12m |
Promoted during a one‑third downsizing, the role contains sudden responsibility for managers and teams with clashing dynamics, and the concrete actions are… | ||
| Beyond the code: hiring for cultural alignment | Alicia Collymore | 26m |
Hiring evaluates concrete signals: map company values to observable attributes, use assessment criteria for each interview and tie them to values, run… | ||
| Developing and supporting 12 SDKs with a team of three | *Leo Romanovsky | 09m |
Eppo by Datadog runs 12 production SDKs on nearly a billion devices with a team of three and centralizes logic in one Rust core with thin adapters plus a… | ||
| From hallucinations to hard truths | Rashi Agrawal | 11m |
A field report on what actually breaks and what fixes it: demos that went nowhere after rushing to build; the first AI feature that takes six months to launch… | ||
| Building ethical AI: Transparency, bias mitigation, and trust | Carla Vieira | 26m |
Details how generative AI’s nondeterminism widens harms and maps bias sources across the ML lifecycle, cites a Bloomberg stable diffusion result that links… | ||
| Supply chain: Data infrastructure pipeline | Jinal Hitesh Mehta | 11m |
Pipeline breaks when vendor count jumps from three to 500+ vendors so the team standardizes ingestion, converts all inputs to a daily cadence, and partitions… | ||
| nothing matches | ||