On November 3-4, I was lucky enough to attend the LeadDev conference in Berlin, and it was amazing! I want to share my favorite talks and what I got from them.

Scaling engineering organizations

Sangeeta Handa kicked off the conference by talking about scaling engineering organizations. That’s something I have been actively working on in the past few weeks, so it was very relevant! In May 2021 when I joined the payroll team at Factorial, we were 5 developers. 18 months later, we’re 25!

Sangeeta has worked at Oracle, Apple, and now Netflix, so I was expecting she’d be operating at a different scale, with hard-to-apply advice. It turned out that her experience and recommendations were very relevant to me! In practice, she divides scaling into 4 dimensions:

Human effectiveness,
Data effectiveness,
System effectiveness,
Business effectiveness.

Anita on stage with her title slide, “Scaling Engineering Organizations”

To increase human effectiveness, she introduced the concept of “energy ambassadors” - those team members who bring everyone together, and who are key to keeping teams healthy.

Scaling data effectiveness is about keeping our data helpful, even with massive amounts, as there’s a scale at which you need machine learning to process it for example. Even without being at Netflix scale, new steps in business growth call for looking at data differently.

System effectiveness for her is about guaranteeing engineers’ productivity: having the right tools for testing and deploying so that people can focus on activities that matter.

Finally, increasing business effectiveness is about making choices, and accepting that we won’t be solving all the problems at once. It’s about keeping an eye on the strategic trends and not pausing innovation, irrespective of the size you attain.

Leading software teams with context (visibility)

James Samuel talked about how to gain enough context when leading teams. This was also particularly relevant to me, seeing that at Factorial, we’re getting too big to organically follow everything that happens. We need order and prioritization, and as a manager of managers, it goes both ways: I need to pass on the proper context to my teams, as I get it from management, and I need to get it from them too and transmit the right pieces!

James Samuel on stage with a slide titled “Context! More Context!!”

He approaches gaining context from 4 different perspectives:

Process: Understand how stuff gets built on time and on budget
Operations: Understand if the stuff built will continue to run
People: Understand if the folks building the stuff are engaged and happy to continue building the stuff
Product: Understand if users are happy and getting value from what is being built

As an engineering director, I count on engineering managers to help me easily understand processes, operations, and in a certain measure, people.
However, I found that Product is where I need to place the most attention, as meeting with customers is so valuable to get more “real” feedback than the story that data tells. I’m also consistently pushing for everyone in my teams to do the same, either meeting customers live or listening to relevant recorded conversations.

The Making of a Manager's Manager

Anita Singh is a director of engineering at Gorillas and her talk was addressed to engineering managers wondering “Would I like to have my manager’s job?”

I transitioned from engineering management to engineering directorate last year, and just like her, at first, I thought it would be an easier shift than the one from engineering to management. It turned out to be so different! Her talk really resonated with my own experience, mistakes, and all. Being a manager’s manager is more responsibility and less control, which can be hard to navigate. I find the challenge stimulating enough to make it worth it, but she did make me reflect on my own situation: do I want to keep doing this? Do I want to get back to a different job?

If you’re also curious about the topic, you can find her slides here.

Anita on stage with a slide titled “Would you actually like your manager’s job?”

Stop! Strategy time! (...or are we really stopping?)

Lena really just gave us homework with her talk. She detailed her STABB framework for learning to be strategic and it was so inspiring, I really can’t wait to put myself to work with it.

STABB stands for:

Space: It’s about making space to think about strategy. Being intentional and setting time aside.
Think: Well, being strategic is not about staring at your screen and wishing for it, it requires reflecting on what’s important to us, our landscape, and our goal.
Act: Thinking is not enough though, we need to interact with the world. Asking questions to the team, customers, and to potential users can fall under that category.
Boundaries: Being strategic is also about saying “No!”. We can’t do everything and must identify what is more important than the rest.
Broadcast: Finally, you’re only as strategic as people perceive you to be. I loved her suggestion of an internal newsletter. In fact, I realized while listening to Lena that our Developer Experience team has been doing it already, and now I think I’ll try it out too!

And she included specific actions to do daily, weekly and quarterly.

There are a lot more details on her blog, so go ahead, read through it, and try it out!

Lena on stage with a slide opposing strategy and tactics

And a lot more!

Those are just my top 5 out of the 25 speakers who went on stage during those 2 days!

I also want to highlight, without getting into details:

Setting goals as a senior individual contributor

Sabrina Leandro shared her personal framework for success in the fuzzy world of senior individual contribution. You can find her slides here.

Tackling the toppling tech talent pyramid: a radical challenge to building diverse teams

Richard Ng made the case against the “pipeline” behind the source of the lack of diversity in tech, and raised the question: we’re problem solvers - why aren’t we solving that problem?

Reading recommendations

Many speakers also came up with reading recommendations. Here are the ones that I’m going to take on in the coming months, in no particular order or grouping:

All pictures are from the event’s photographer, Odeta Catana.

GrowthLeadDev Berlin wrap-up