“That’s not good enough”

That was Larene’s response to when Damian told her “you’re doing a great job, keep doing what you’re doing”.

This talk is about the journey of a grizzled industry veteran and a young ambitious engineer thrown together in a small startup environment.

Forced to establish fast feedback cycle, not just iterating on the product we were developing, but also how we worked on it together. We were both pushed out of our comfort zones to create a productive collaboration.

We’ve distilled some of our lessons from this process into a handful of tools you can apply straight away, whether you’re seeking mentoring, or are in a tech leadership/manager position.

We’ll share how we give and receive feedback, how mentors can grow the technical skills of more junior people, how men can mentor women more effectively, and how even the most hardened “seen it all” of us can grow individually.

By now most of us have heard of unconscious bias, the hidden assumptions and associations that hinder our best intentions when it comes to inclusion and diversity. But how do we even begin to manage mental processes which by their very definition, are outside of our awareness?

January 2017 I became the Chief Technology Officer of an online media and travel company and was immediately confronted by an impossible situation. The product team was being bombarded with initiatives to deliver, all of which needed to be delivered immediately. A team ten times the size could not have done it. The required set of initiatives changed on a weekly basis, compounding the problem. Before I started the product team had been doing their best to meet the demands of the organisation, thus they had accumulated a portfolio of poorly thought out, half-executed solutions.

This presentation is about how I helped the company to create a strategy, map the strategy to execution, and release three successful products in two years. It includes topics such as: how we managed our technical debt, how we rebuilt the product team, how to work with a CEO to define a product strategy and prioritize initiatives and how to manage a product delivery team to focus on creating value over being busy.

Distribution is hard. Building engineering teams is hard. And building distributed engineering teams presents unique challenges, especially under hyper growth.

Cash App is one of the fastest growing financial products in the US & UK. We have tens of millions of users & move hundreds of millions of dollars a day. We have product engineering teams in several cities in the US, Canada, Sweden and Australia. Our product velocity & commercial growth is constrained by the number of engineers on our teams, and utilising a distributed team is one way to sustain this growth.

In this talk, we’ll speak about the challenges growing a small engineering team in a single location into a large team spread across many locations & multiple timezones. We’ll outline some of the things we’ve learnt, and present some rules of thumb that we use when making decisions about distributed teams.

As a senior technical leader, it’s often viewed as a temping trap to get down into nitty-gritty details of software engineering or product development. As a CTO, Head of Engineering or equivalent, we’re supposed to play at the strategic level and leave the details to our engineering leads, aren’t we?

Well… yes. And no. Sometimes, creating a strategy and leaving it for our teams to figure out ignores the fact that our organisation constrains our teams in ways that we don’t expect. Sometimes it’s actually necessary to venture down into the weeds and see what the teams are doing - and what we’re doing that actively harms their efforts despite our intentions to the contrary.

In this talk we’ll look at some ways to map strategy to execution by setting “unreasonable” goals - and then working out how to get organisational constraints - and ourselves - out of the way.

Many companies struggle to truly innovate after they become larger and more established. Typically they develop risk averse environments that hinder the very entrepreneurial thinking and action required for radical change. One strategy to address this is for the enterprise to found a separate startup business.

A large Australian retailer pursued this strategy. As an original member of that startup I will describe our experiences with the inherent cultural and technological differences between the two businesses. An enterprise startup can provide the benefits of business agility, moving faster and exploring different directions. However the benefits come with many challenges so I will conclude with major lessons learnt.

Neurodivergence is at the core of creativity. Striving to be popular is incompatible with being creative. This is either the truth… or it is a case of autistic black and white thinking.

The neurodiversity movement asserts that neurological differences should be recognized and respected as a social category on a par with gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or disability status. It frames autism, bipolar disorder and other neurotypes as a natural human variation rather than a pathology or disorder, and its advocates believe them to be authentic forms of human diversity and valuable sources of human talents and innovative potential. The session provides an introduction to the topic of neurodiversity based on current scientific evidence and first-hand experience from an autistic perspective. The audience is welcome to ask questions and offer further experiences.

Neurodivergent people and teams:

• Adhere to idiosyncratic moral value systems rather than social norms
• Are okay with exploring ideas that upset the “social order”
• Spend much more time experimenting and implementing ideas that others would consider crazy or a waste of time
• Have untypical life goals: new forms of understanding, making a positive impact, translating ideas into artistic expression
• Autists in particular have unusually developed pattern recognition abilities and an unusual ability to persevere

In the Asch conformity test for example, autistic people were found to resist changing their spontaneous judgement to an array of graphic lines despite social pressure to change by conforming to the erroneous judgement of an authoritative confederate.

• What should you think about, with respect to the org design before you break a piece of functionality from the monolith into its own service?
• Why is a deployment pipeline a must have for any and every service?
• What tasks should be automated?
• Is there such a thing as too much automation?
• What types of testing are needed in a microservices architecture?
• What about monitoring and scaling? Why is this harder with a microservices architecture when compared with a monolithic architecture?

High performing teams are at the core of every great organisation. Reaching that level of team performance is easier said than done.
How can companies unleash such teams by driving ambition, empowering decisions making and encouraging self-evolution so that such teams can continuously produce high value work?
In this Talk Minna and Vered will share their experience from software delivery and military background to inspire you to explore new ways of building high performing teams.

"History doesn't always repeat, but it does rhyme"

Having coached hundreds of Executives over the last 5 years as part of organisational transformations, Tony has observed patterns and practices that the most successful ones have in common.

In this session, he shares those practical tips.

As 2014 was coming to a close, I sat thinking about my station in life:

• Married

• 2 sons (at that time)

• 1 fur child

• Educated (BInfTech, MInfTech)

• Secure Housing

• Secure Six Figure Employment

At that point I had already spent the better part of 15 years in industry as a Software Engineer. I had lived and worked in multiple countries, on projects large and small; Benefited from a “Startup” exit or two.

For most: This is the definition of success.

Generally I was happy, but felt I was no longer growing professionally. I had to ask the question: What's next?

That question has taken me down the path towards “Professional Leadership”. One which ultimately ends with the goal of a paid role on a “Board of Management”.

That leads to the next question: How do I get there?

Giving an engineering team full ownership of the application or service they are building, operating and supporting is the most powerful and direct way to reduce incidents and service outages - increasing the stability and quality of services provided.

At MessageMedia, as our development team grew, we decided to restructure from a team dedicated to new features, a team supporting existing service and an infrastructure team to cross functional engineering teams that build, deploy and support the services they own. One of the biggest benefits of moving to this model has been a 4x reduction in the number of incidents and service outages we have seen across our platform. This talk will discuss the cultural and structural changes we made that allowed us to achieve this and our next evolution of this structure.

"To the Cloud!"the world yells. Meanwhile, there are pretty good reasons for keeping some workloads on-premises, even if you are comfortable with the public Cloud.

In this session, you'll learn why a Hybrid approach is valid and the benefits and challenges that brings. Can you manage both and still retain your sanity?

Businesses need systems and platforms to operate effectively. Whether it's an internally facing employee portal, a publicly facing website, or a B2B ecommerce platform, each component plays an important role in the smooth operation of your company.

A lot of resources are used in creating and maintaining security measures to protect access to these systems. You might be employing (or paying an IT provider) for developers, operations, and support staff to work on the login mechanism, handle forgotten passwords, maintain systems, and keep up to date on the latest news in security vulnerabilities.

If these staff could be reassigned to adding direct value to your line of business software products, how much time would that save you? How much faster would your business grow?

This talk will examine the pros and cons of outsourcing the non-business-specific portions of your software systems, in order to maximise your return on investment, reduce overheads, and most critically, decrease your risk profile.