Welcome to the meetup for technical leaders! This event is hosted by Slack in San Francisco.

⏰ Schedule

• 6:30pm - Arrive, refreshments & networking
• 7:00pm - Welcome
• 7:05pm - Jean & Edmond
• 7:35pm - Randall Koutnik
• 7:45pm - Break
• 7:55pm - Hera Li
• 8:15pm - Networking
• 9:00pm - Close

🌟 Speakers

Host: Christian McCarrick (VP of Engineering, Auth0)

Bio: Christian is the VP of Engineering at Auth0. He is dedicated to improving the craft of software engineering leadership. He volunteers his time to mentor through the Everwise and Plato networks and teaches engineering workshops for new engineering managers. He also hosts a popular podcast called SimpleLeadership where he interviews top technology leaders in order to help other managers grow and be successful.

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Speakers: Jean Hsu & Edmond Lau (Co-founders, Co Leadership)

Bio: Jean Hsu and Edmond Lau are the co-founders of Co Leadership. They both started their full-time careers at Google, and Edmond's also authored a book called The Effective Engineer. Last year, after each spending over a decade building and leading engineering teams in Silicon Valley, they joined forces on an ambitious mission: to transform engineers into leaders.

Their vision is to help people bridge the gap from where they are now, to the life and career they dream of. And they believe that focusing on people and relationships first is by far the most effective way to get the best results in product and engineering.

Together they've run leadership experiences for hundreds of engineers and leaders spanning companies that include well-known names like Google, Airbnb, Dropbox, Twitter, Lyft, Slack, Asana, and more, to small fast-growing startups. They teach tools and frameworks to create the impact and influence you want as a leader in tech. And now, they're excited to bring their work to you.

Talk: 5 Powerful Leadership Mindsets to Create the Impact and Influence You Want

• "I'm waiting for the right opportunity.”
• "I need to have more experience before I can do that.”
• “I don't even know if I'm doing a good job.”
• “If I ask for help, people will think less of me.”
• “I'm not responsible for that change.”

We all have different limiting beliefs and voices that hold us back from the leader we want to be and the impact we want to have.

As part of Co Leadership, we've been working with 100s of senior engineers, tech leads, managers, directors, VPs, and CTOs through our dozens of leadership experiences, programs, and courses. And whether they're working at well-known companies like Google, Dropbox, Airbnb, Lyft, Stripe, or Reddit, or whether they're working at smaller organizations, they're often held back by this same set of limiting beliefs.

In this talk, we'll identify and break down the 5 most common limiting beliefs we've encountered — and the empowering mindsets that great leaders replace them with to have the impact and influence they want at work. We'll share stories of how these beliefs held us and other leaders back — especially in leading without authority — and you'll leave knowing that you're not alone and that there is a path forward.

So many roles — tech lead, engineer, manager — can seem ambiguous and unclear, but the flip side is that they are what you make of them. Leading without authority can feel confusing or vague. How do you motivate people on your team? How do you move projects forward? At Co Leadership, our vision is to bridge the gap between where engineers are and the lives and careers they dream of. What would it look like to replace your limiting beliefs with empowering leadership mindsets? What more could you accomplish?

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Speaker: Hera Li (Engineering Manager, Slack)

Bio: Hera is an Engineering Manager at Slack in New York City where she is focused on engineering products that help slack users to better search and discover information and data on Slack. She is also passionate about startup angel investing, dogs, diversity, cooking and interior design.

Talk: Driving team velocity and velocity antipatterns

Team velocity is one of the most abused and misunderstood concepts in software development. This talk will demystify team velocity and understand the various antipatterns of velocity through practical examples and how to leverage it to drive positive culture and delivery.

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Speaker: Randall Koutnik (Technical Debt Broker, Slack)

Bio: Randall’s career can be politely summed up as “interesting”. He’s worked at everything from tiny startups to Netflix to teaching introductory programming at a bootcamp. After all that, he currently works on internal tooling for Slack. He wrote a book on RxJS, which didn’t impress his cats much.

Talk: Rethinking the career development path

Our current methods for measuring a developer’s career progression are broken. At best, we count the number of days someone’s been paid to write code and massage that into a title. As a result, there’s no consensus as to what a given title means, leading to frustration for everyone.

Instead of judging a career via vague metrics like time, we’ll discuss focusing on a path centered around autonomy. Walk through the three stages of a developer’s life: The Implementer, who’s just learning the ropes and needs careful attention. The Solver, who tackles ever-bigger problems - and needs the responsibility to match. Finally, the Finder, who will revolutionise how you do work but only if you let them.

After this talk, you’ll have a new grasp on how to level up your team, no matter where they are in their careers.

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The Lead Developer is an international conference for technical leaders and engineering managers in London, Berlin, Austin and New York. Check out 100+ talk videos on imposter syndrome, leading and scaling technical teams, and lots more at theleaddeveloper.com.