Welcome to the meetup for technical leaders! This event is hosted by Skyscanner. We welcome attendees who are currently (or soon to be) leading and managing technical teams.

⏰ Schedule

• 6:00pm - Arrival, refreshments, networking
• 6:45pm - Welcome
• 6:55pm - Talk 1 (25 mins)
• 7:25pm - Talk 2 (15 mins)
• 7.40pm - Break / Networking
• 8:00pm - Talk 3 (20 mins)
• 8:20pm - Networking
• 8:45pm - Close

🌟 Speakers

Host: Richard Davidson (Project Manager, FanDuel) @monkeybood

Speaker: Danae Shell (Co-founder and CEO, Valla) @danaeshell

Talk: Stop Recruiting for Rockstars: The Skills You Really Want to Hire For, and Why

In the race for talent and growth, it can feel urgent to find “rockstar” employees that will 10x your business. But are we all falling prey to 100-year old assumptions when we set out to recruit? Some of the most essential skills needed in modern companies are overlooked, undervalued, and not listed on the job ads we all see. This talk will explain how you can change your hiring approach to target those overlooked skills, gaining a competitive edge in the hiring market that will help you hire faster, retain more team members and get stuff done.

Bio:

Danae Shell is co-founder and CEO of Valla, an early stage startup that helps people use their legal rights. She is also Managing Director of #ENTRYLEVELBOSS, the career coaching centre of the future. A veteran of the Scottish startup scene, she has scale-up and leadership experience in well-known startups like FreeAgent and Care Sourcer.

Speaker: Tim Leslie (CTO, Float)

Talk: Real teams are rare

What's more important to people in your team, succeeding in their own tasks or achieving the team goal? Do you go into handover hell whenever someone leaves? Is being asked for help by a team member seen as a distraction? Real teams are rare but in many organisation they do exist. This talk aims to shed some light on the environment you need to create for your team to thrive.

Bio:

Tim owns a tractor, he commutes to work on an unreliable sardine can and he loves his family and his job. He has been CTO at Float for about a year and he has a particular interest in culture, organisational health and teams.

Speaker: Stuart Davidson (Senior Engineering Manager, Skyscanner) @spedge

Talk: Changing Change

If you thought software engineers get excited about writing documentation, wait till you see how enthusiastic they can be about change management! But for an industry that has more words for change than the Scots do for precipitation, why don't we take it more seriously? Let me walk you through an easy 10-step template and some examples of where I've used it in Skyscanner to manage change across an organisation.

Bio:

Stuart has been an engineering leader at Skyscanner for over 5 years. He thrives on leading impactful change including: getting to over 10K deploys a day into production; seamlessly migrating a 500+ engineering organisation to a new version control system; and introduced a more resilient Kubernetes architecture serving our core products.

🌟 Organisers

• Valerie Dryden (Director of Engineering, Care Sourcer) @outragedracoon
• Jim Newbery (Web Product Development Consultant and Coach, Tinned Fruit) @froots101
• Michael Ewins (Senior Engineering Manager, Skyscanner) @ewinsmi
• Richard Davidson (Project Manager, Fan Duel) @monkeybood