Agenda | CTO Craft Con: London

Pre-Conference – AI Leadership Lab – 9th March

13:00-18:00

AI Leadership Lab

AI is no longer a passing trend – it’s shaping the future of technology and leadership. Whether you’re sceptical of the hype or convinced it’s essential to your strategy, one thing is clear: avoiding the conversation isn’t an option.

This half-day, highly interactive add-on will create space for the conversations engineering leaders must be having about AI today.

18:00

AI Leadership Dinner: Continuing the Conversation

Join Plandek for this private dinner, bringing together senior technology leaders for open, thoughtful discussion on where GenAI is genuinely improving delivery, where impact has been harder to achieve, and how underlying system constraints continue to shape outcomes.

For those joining from AI Leadership Lab, it continues the conversation; for others, it’s an opportunity to step into it in an intimate, candid setting, offering a relaxed setting for experienced leaders to compare perspectives over a carefully curated menu.

18:00

18:30

CTO Craft Netwalk led by Cloudflare

Start the conference on the move. Join a guided walk with fellow attendees – a chance to stretch your legs, enjoy the city, and connect in a relaxed, informal setting before things get underway.

Pre-Event Mixer

We understand that walking into a conference can be daunting, so our pre-event mixer is designed to help you make connections ahead of the event.

Hosted by Cloudflare at County Hall in Southbank, join us for a drink, meet your peers, and build your network before the conference even begins.

Main Conference – Day 1 – 10th March

07:45-08:30

Morning Gentle Flow Yoga

Start the day with a short, gentle flow yoga session designed to loosen up the body and settle the mind. This optional session is open to all levels and offers a calm way to ease into a full day of conversations and networking. A chance to arrive feeling a bit more grounded before the conference gets going.

08:00-09:10

Registration & Coffee

08:15-09:10

Women in Tech Breakfast

Start your day with great coffee and even better company. This breakfast gathering is a relaxed space for women in tech leadership to connect, share experiences, and build relationships before the day kicks off. Enjoy some real conversation and facilitated discussions with brilliant people who get it. Open to all who identify as women or non-binary.

Sponsored by:

Victoria McCormack, Director, JVM Consultancy

Natalie McCormack, Learning and Development Lead, JVM Consultancy

09:10-09:15

CTO Craft Welcomes You!

Andy Skipper, Founder, CTO Craft

09:15-09:20

Chair’s Opening Remarks

Neeha Curtis, Chief of Corporate Affairs, Lyric

Neeha works at the intersection of technology, strategy, and communication. She brings deep experience helping organisations explain the value of their technology decisions and align them with real business outcomes.

Previously, Neeha was VP of Engineering Strategy at Encora, partnering with technology leaders on value narratives and scenario planning to support better investment decisions. She has also served as Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Jugo, where she led strategic positioning and category creation for an immersive communications platform. Alongside her industry work, Neeha teaches Mass Communications at Syracuse University’s graduate school, with a focus on AI ethics, media economics, and data privacy.

As conference chair, Neeha brings a thoughtful perspective that helps keep conversations grounded and connected to the wider context CTOs are operating in.

09:20-09:50

Keynote – AI as a Thinking Partner: Leading with Clarity and Confidence

Beyond faster coding, AI can act as a writing partner, coach, and sounding board, helping leaders sharpen their thinking and test assumptions.
Using AI for prompts, deep research, and contrarian views expands perspective and reduces the isolation of senior decision-making.
Context windows allow leaders to see reasoning play out step by step, creating transparency and clarity in choices.
Find out how treating AI as a cognitive partner helps leaders make stronger decisions, communicate better, and lead with confidence.

James Stanier, CTO, Veterinary, Nordhealth

09:50-10:20

From Rollout to Results: Why AI Coding Tools Alone Won’t Transform Your Engineering Organisation

Early studies promised 20-55% productivity gains from AI coding assistants, yet recent research reveals developers feel 20% faster while actually taking 19% longer, and Google’s DORA 2025 report found organizational delivery metrics declining even as AI adoption increased.
Hear about the RACER framework, a proven approach to move from AI tool rollout to measurable business results by systematically identifying and eliminating the constraints that absorb individual productivity gains.
Learn why top performers achieve 10x ROI by treating AI as a systems transformation rather than just a tool rollout, and discover practical next steps to bridge the gap between individual speed and organisational value.

Will Lytle, COO, Plandek

10:20-10:45

Owning the Stack: A CTO’s Guide to Building In-House Systems

A first-hand account of leading Holland & Barrett’s tech transformation since 2020, moving away from legacy systems toward building in-house platforms.
Lessons on balancing speed, scale, and resilience while shifting to proprietary systems, and how this shaped engineering culture and delivery.

Sathya Nandakumar, CTO, Holland & Barrett

10:45-11:15

Coffee & Recharge Break

T5’s coffee carts with be doling out fresh espresso all day! There will also be tea, soft drinks and snacks available to fuel your day.

11:15-11:40

11:40-12:25

Engineering 2028: Leading Human + AI Teams Responsibly

AI is transforming software delivery faster than leadership models, governance, and culture can adapt. Productivity gains are uneven, and traditional roles and structures are being outpaced by automation.
Responsible engineering leaders have a duty of care — to prepare and steer their teams toward a future where intelligent, autonomous systems are co-workers, not just tools.
Drawing on a global survey of engineering leaders, this session explores how high-performing organisations are re-imagining delivery, governance, and team design — assuming that multi-agent platforms will become the integral to how software is delivered and what is produced.
Practical insights into how to evolve your teams, culture, and leadership approach to thrive in an era of agentic, human-centred engineering.

Panel – Risk, Revenue, Reputation: The True Cost of Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is often treated like an insurance policy… until the bill comes due.
Break down how to quantify the ROI of security investments, compare the cost of prevention vs. the cost of a breach, and build a budget case that resonates with finance and leadership.
Cut through the vendor noise to discuss which tools and capabilities actually matter, and how to prioritise them for maximum impact.

Roundtable

11:15-12:15

Building Skills Pathways for Fast Flow

We will explore how to design joined-up skills pathways that cut across the business, avoiding duplicated efforts, siloed initiatives, and misaligned team development
Hear how senior tech leaders are aligning capability-building with autonomy and fast flow, ensuring upskilling actually supports delivery rather than slowing it down
Discuss how to respond to GenAI’s influence on skills strategy, like what to invest in, what to ignore, and how to keep teams adaptable without chasing hype
Walk away with peer-tested ideas for making upskilling a shared, strategic effort that supports long-term team effectiveness through change and growth

Roundtable

11:15-12:15

When Always-On Isn’t Optional: Engineering Resilience at Global Scale

When downtime impacts revenue, reputation, and customer trust, technology leaders must rethink how systems are designed to withstand disruption, scale globally, and support increasingly data-intensive workloads.
Strategies for resilience and availability: How to deliver uninterrupted service, even during outages or traffic spikes.
Data as the foundation: Why modern data strategies underpin scale, compliance, and AI readiness.
Designing for scale: Practical patterns to extend applications globally without unnecessary engineering overhead.
Real-world architecture insights: Lessons learned from organizations that have modernized business-critical applications.

12:25-12:35

Beyond the Benchmark: Making Confident Compensation and Career Choices for You and Your Teams.

Discover key findings from the 4th annual CTO Craft and Albany Partners Compensation Survey and how to interpret market data with clarity and confidence.
Explore how funding stage, location, and equity terms shape what competitive pay really looks like, and how to move beyond simple benchmarks when making decisions.
Learn practical ways to turn the survey insights into clear strategies for hiring, retention, and planning team progression.
Find out how to use this data to guide your own career choices and understand future salary expectations.

Henry Draper, Managing Director, Albany Partners

12:35-13:45

Lunch

Lunch & Learn Roundtable with Architus – Building Engineering Teams Across Borders

As companies scale, finding and retaining top engineering talent often means looking beyond your home market. But distributed teams fail more often than they succeed.
Join us for a lunch conversation grounded in real experience – the wins, the mistakes, and the lessons learned.
We’ll tackle questions like: When does “your team” actually feel like your team? How do you find the right markets and navigate compliance? What does genuine cultural alignment look like across time zones? And how should your model evolve as teams mature?
Bring your own experiences and leave with practical frameworks for making cross-border teams work.

Arunas Kareckas, Head of Engineering, Tide

Ross Jardine, CEO, Architus

13:45-14:10

Sustainable Digital Future – The CTO Challenge

Financial institutions have spent decades building layer upon layer of data and information exchange, creating hidden complexity that business users and customers never see.
Look at the waves of transformation shaping the industry, from digital and cloud adoption to big data and AI, and how these themes drive new expectations for data and technology leaders.
Explore the skills decision-makers now need, including how to visualise internal data supply chains, reduce complexity to manage risks and regulatory pressure, and factor data proliferation into investment decisions.
Address the challenge of decommissioning and reusing technology faster than new systems are built, and make a call for chartered IT professionals as natural resource demands become the new frontier in systems architecture.

14:10-14:35

14:35-15:00

15:00-15:25

Fireside Chat – Moneybox: Scaling a Fintech Without Scaling our Infrastructure Team

Find out how the team at Moneybox offloaded operational complexity and freed up engineering resources to focus on product innovation
Discuss strategies for maintaining strict fintech regulatory compliance while supporting application deployments
Discover how automation and PaaS helps save valuable engineering time and budget

Size 42 Isn’t Enough: How Diverse Views Build Better Products

Stories from fashion tech and leadership coaching show how something as simple as bra sizing can reveal blind spots in product development and AI design.
Discover how our personal backgrounds, body types, and shopping habits influence how we interpret data, and teams lacking diversity miss both the pitfalls and the opportunities this creates.
Using real examples such as a memorable encounter with an AI image generator, we will explore how bias shows up in unexpected ways.
You’ll leave with real insight for building more diverse teams and a renewed sense of why diversity drives better decisions and outcomes.

Unautomatable You: Your Value in the Age of AI

The one thing AI will never replace, that might soon become your entire job. Know where to draw the line between what can and what should be automated.
Hear about practical tactics to strengthen the ‘unautomatable’ part of your role.
Even if you’ve seen Hywel’s talks before, this session reveals an entirely new framework for thinking about the future of work.

Roundtable

14:10-15:10

Cybersecurity in the Age of AI Tooling

AI tools and coding agents are helping teams move faster, but this roundtable will explore how speed without the right checks, balances, and culture can increase risk and create more vulnerable software.
Discuss the new attack surfaces introduced by LLMs, from prompt injection and over-trust in automated decisions to the risk of agents being connected to bad actors.
Share how your team and others are trying to create a security-first culture where security is part of everyday engineering decisions, even under pressure to deliver more with fewer resources.
Exchange examples of how processes and practices are evolving, including how AI can be used to raise the baseline through automated reviews, vulnerability scanning, and support for threat modelling.

Roundtable

14:10-15:10

The Leadership You Don’t See

In this interactive roundtable, you will assess whether your organisation empowers people to step up safely, learn from peers and real-world examples, and leave with practical strategies to create a culture where leadership happens at every level.
Learn how to structure your organisation so initiative and leadership flourish everywhere.
Unlock the hidden leadership potential within your teams.

15:25-15:55

Coffee & Recharge Break

15:55-16:20

16:20-17:00

Fireside chat – The Trust Stack: How to Build Products That Match User Needs

We spoke to 200+ people before writing meaningful code. Learn about how that changed our product, our roadmap, and our speed.
Learn why we pivoted from sustainability experts to resource-stretched non-experts, and what that taught us about where AI creates the most value.
See how prototypes became a shared language to build trust early, align on workflows, and move from conversations to paying customers.
Take away practical patterns for trustworthy AI: traceability, feedback loops, and how to iterate weekly without breaking confidence.

Lightning Talks – Working at the Speed of Change: Safety, Trust, and Adaptation

Change in tech rarely comes at a gentle pace. Teams face restructures, acquisitions, shifting goals, and rising workloads, often all at once. Jenny, Matthew and Ceri will share how leaders keep people motivated and connected during constant change, while also protecting the trust and psychological safety that make experimentation possible. You will hear how to sustain focus, encourage open conversations about risks, and build habits that help teams adapt quickly without burning out.

What are Lightning Talks? They are a series of 10 minute presentations and an opportunity for senior tech leaders to tell their side of the story about leadership and psychological safety, followed by Q&A with the audience.

Roundtable

15:55-16:55

Conflict is a Feature, Not a Bug; Why Conflict Competence Is the Most Important (but Most Neglected) Leadership Superpower Today

Examine why many leaders feel under-trained in dealing with conflict and invite participants to share how avoidance shows up in their teams, especially in hybrid environments where misalignment and resentment can build quickly.
Discuss the research showing that constructive challenge can lift collaboration by more than twenty percent and consider what this means for their own teams.
Using ideas from coaching psychology, neuroscience, and Smart Conflict, explore together what separates constructive conflict from destructive conflict and how leaders can spot the difference in real situations.
Exchange mindsets, tools, and techniques you use in hard conversations and leave with practical ways to create environments where healthy conflict can grow.

Roundtable

15:55-16:55

Who do you listen to when everyone has strongly held opinions?

When it comes to technology, engineering leaders always have opinions, and as a CTO, how do you figure out who is worth listening to right now?
Where do differences of opinion come from? What are the motivations that drive those opinions? What haven’t they thought about? What will the impact be on those whose opinions aren’t followed?
What part of the problem does the technology adoption solve? What can we use to quickly validate ideas? Can AI help or hinder us? How do we know we’re ready to commit?
As a group, we’ll describe the problem, break into small teams to come up with some ideas and then come back together to refine these ideas into a workable framework we can use to move fast in discovery, keep everybody onboard and avoid the sunk cost fallacy, the highest paid opinion in the room scenario or other common anti-patterns that happen during crucial technology adoption phases.

17:00-17:25

AI in the Trenches: Real-World Wins Without Breaking Things

AI for Speed and Stability – How the region’s largest e-commerce company and its 2,000-engineer team used LLMs and automation (n8n, Cursor, A2A, MCPS, custom workflows) to raise delivery speed 30% without risking production.
Practical AI Integration – Automated tests, instant documentation, and rapid code reviews that keep quality high and developers happy.
Trust + Governance – A clear framework for selecting the right AI stack, measuring real impact, and keeping engineers confident in every release.
From Hype to Hard Truths – A battle-tested playbook on what truly worked and what flopped, so you can safely replicate the gains in your own organization.

17:25-17:30

Chair’s Closing Remarks

Neeha Curtis, Chief of Corporate Affairs, Lyric

17:30-21:00

After Party at Lane7

The conversations don’t stop when the conference ends. Join us at the After Party to keep the energy flowing with drinks, nibbles, and plenty of networking.

Hosted at Lane7, you’ll dive into a vibrant mix of bowling, arcade games, and social spaces – all designed to spark fun and friendly competition. It’s the ideal way to unwind, connect with fellow tech leaders, and celebrate two inspiring days of ideas and insights.

18:00-21:00

CTO Dinner: The Cognitive Impact of AI on Our Engineering Teams

An end-of-day dinner hosted by Infobip, bringing together a small group of CTOs and senior technology leaders. This invite-only evening is a chance to step away from the conference floor and continue networking in a relaxed, informal setting.

With fellow engineering leaders, discuss how it actually looks when AI and engineers collide. What works, what doesn’t, what is making it easier for us and what is truly frustrating. Expect a chance to connect with peers who are in the same position as you, over great food and even better conversation.

Hosted by Infobip’s Engineering Director for Data & AI, Petar Ducic and Director of DX, Ivan Brezak Brkan.

Day 2

07:45-08:30

Morning Gentle Flow Yoga

08:00-09:15

Registration & Coffee

08:15-09:15

CTO Breakfast

Join us for breakfast and start day 2 in the strongest possible way by tackling a real challenge facing you in your leadership role and supporting your fellow technology leaders with theirs.

CTOs and senior engineering leaders often face challenging roles where advice and support can be difficult to find.

In this interactive breakfast session, you’ll engage in a Troika Consulting exercise, sharing a real-world professional challenge with a small group. Peers will offer fresh perspectives, experiences, and advice, giving you a clear insight into the CTO Craft Circles experience and the benefits of support, new ideas, and increased resilience whilst meaningfully extending your network in the CTO Craft Community here at the Conference.

Joel Chippindale, CTO Coach, Monkey’s Thumb

09:15-09:20

Chair’s Opening Remarks

Neeha Curtis, Chief of Corporate Affairs, Lyric

As conference chair, Neeha brings a thoughtful perspective that helps keep conversations grounded and connected to the wider context CTOs are operating in.

09:20-09:50

Keynote – Leading at the Edge: Lessons from the World’s Highest Peaks

Engage in a story about climbing the Seven Summits and how it shows that leadership under pressure is about calm judgment and strategic choices, whether facing a storm on Everest or a crisis in business.
The strongest teams are diverse and built on trust, and this is equally true in tech where women and underrepresented groups often have to push harder to be heard.
Focus on how real resilience is not about pushing endlessly but about knowing when to pause, reset, and protect energy so leadership can continue the next day.
Strength in extreme environments comes from strategy, collaboration, and balance, lessons that guide both mountain expeditions and the challenges of modern leadership.

Dr. Ilknur Colak, CTO, Schneider Electric

09:50-10:15

Can LLMs generate Enterprise Quality Code?

We all know how fast it is to create an app with modern AI agents but how do we ensure the code is reliable, maintainable and secure enough to be used by enterprises?
Hear about a benchmark from Sonar’s testing of 27 (and growing) of the latest and highest performing large language models and how they compare not just on task completion but on the quality of the code they create.
Understand that models are not the same and that some produce more than 2x the issues of others.
Learn how you can integrate AI Agents with deterministic static analysis to ensure enterprise level quality without killing the AI Productivity gains.

Tom Howlett, Head of Product Management, Sonar

Prasenjit Sarkar, Solutions Marketing Manager, Sonar

10:15-10:40

From SaaS to Agentic Platforms: Reinventing Software for Goal-Driven Systems

The software industry is entering a new architectural era, moving beyond user-driven SaaS workflows toward agentic platforms that can understand goals, reason, and act across services.
Explore how leading SaaS organisations are evolving from transactional products to adaptive, goal-driven ecosystems.
Learn how architectures must shift from stateless APIs to orchestrated, stateful agents, and how pricing, SLAs, and user experience are being reimagined as software becomes autonomous.
You will learn what CTOs can do now to prepare their systems, governance, and strategy for the coming agentic age.

10:40-11:15

Coffee & Recharge Break

11:15-11:40

11:40-12:05

12:05-12:20

Side Quest Unlocked: Community Glue Work and the Future of Tech

Just like side quests in an RPG, the work that seems optional in tech — mentoring, documenting knowledge, or organising events — can unlock unexpected skills and opportunities.
The best engineers are not only strong coders, they also bring people together, strengthen teams, and help communities grow.
You do not need to take on every side quest, but building connections and sharing knowledge can be just as important for career growth as technical output.
This talk will show how community “glue” work builds leadership skills, why it should be recognised by companies, and how it shapes the future of engineering.

Why 20 Years of Experience Didn’t Prepare Me for This

After a couple of decades as a technology leader, I thought I knew the CTO playbook pretty well. Then came AI.
We will explore how we must dismantle our longest-held assumptions—from team topology to the economics of the SDLC—and rebuild the role of the technology leader for a AI-enabled future.

Beyond AI Pilots: Operationalising AI in Software Delivery

Most organisations start their AI journey with pilots and point solutions but struggle to turn those experiments into repeatable business value.
Hear how the team at Xceptor evolved from delivering targeted AI capabilities into designing and implementing an AI-augmented software delivery lifecycle.
Discover how AI can be operationalised across the SDLC to improve efficiency, raise quality earlier, reduce rework, and create real delivery leverage

Roundtable

11:15-12:15

Getting Comfortable with Risk and Governance in AI

Explore the key risks that come with adopting AI, focusing on which risks are most likely and which would have the biggest impact in your organisation.
You will discuss practical ways to mitigate these risks, looking at governance, controls, and decision-making approaches that work in the real world.
The session will bring the discussion together with clear themes and give you a set of next steps to help you move forward with AI responsibly.

Roundtable

11:15-12:15

EI in the Age of AI: How I Like to Work

AI is transforming how we work – but the leaders who will thrive in this next era won’t rely on technology alone. They’ll lean into human skills as a source of advantage in an increasingly complex and uncertain world.
In this interactive roundtable, explore why emotional intelligence is becoming even more critical in an AI-driven world and how it equips leaders to build trust, strengthen collaboration, and sustain performance through constant change.
Using my How I Like To Work framework, we’ll move beyond theory into a practical, reflective session that helps you
Build deeper self-awareness around your energy, triggers, strengths, and values
Understand how your leadership style is experienced by others – especially under pressure
Clarify how you work best with others, from communication and feedback to recognition and decision-making
Identify small shifts that can significantly improve trust, alignment, and collaboration in your teams

12:20-13:30

Lunch

Lunch & Learn Roundtable with Andersen Lab – From Efficiency to Intelligence: Working with AI as a Co-Decider

Explore how AI is evolving from copilots to co-decision-makers, and where we are already seeing AI influence business decisions rather than simply execution.
Discuss the rise of autonomous agents and redefine what efficiency truly means when software can act independently across systems.
Through group discussion and shared examples, we will examine what it looks like to treat AI as a strategic partner in judgment and business growth — not just a tool.
We will also explore how trust is built in practice, balancing automation with ethics, accountability, and human oversight.
As a thought-provoking closing question: If we have moved from decision support to co-decision-makers — what comes next? AI as the sole decision-maker? Do we hand over the keys… and head to the beach?

13:30-13:55

An Engineer and an LLM Log into a Tech Interview: Are They Cheating?

Traditional technical rounds are outdated in the age of AI, as tools can easily bypass take-home tests and DSA formats measure memorisation rather than real-world skills.
Hear how Anna redesigned the process around the “First Day of Work” concept, creating the McDougall Method to reflect actual engineering practice.
The framework includes practical guidelines for structuring repositories, creating meaningful test cases, and sharing them in a way that feels fair and realistic.
Understand the crucial part of the approach: training engineers to run interviews that give candidates a positive, authentic experience.

13:55-14:40

14:40-15:05

Panel – Engineering in Flux: Skills, Teams, and Tech

AI-enabled software development is shifting engineering focus away from repetitive coding tasks toward higher-level design, review, and architecture. Leaders need to rethink what skills matter most now.
As AI tools generate more code and suggestions, developers must double down on judgment, context, and code ownership rather than trusting outputs blindly.
Engineering teams must adapt onboarding, training, and review processes so they support human/AI collaboration rather than treating AI as a plug-in.
The panel will explore real-world examples of successful AI-enabled development, the pitfalls of overreliance, and how leaders balance speed, oversight, and human insight.

Building a High Performing Start-up Engineering Team at Warp Speed

Scaling five teams of engineers in nine months required building strong foundations from the start, with continuous delivery used as the backbone for rapid iteration without piling up technical debt.
Find out how hiring in the age of AI means designing assessments that cannot be gamed by tools and that bring real skills to the surface.
Look at the definition of what good looks like through lightweight processes such as code reviews, RFCs, and onboarding to help maintain consistency as teams grow quickly.
Culture fit should not mean culture clones. Assess for adaptability, ownership, and collaboration, and discover what to do differently after making tough trade-offs under pressure.

Roundtable

13:55-14:55

From Silos to Systems: How AI Agents Will Force a New Model of Enterprise Collaboration

This roundtable explores how the rise of AI agents is accelerating a fundamental shift — from siloed, function-based organisations to networked, system-level models of enterprise collaboration.
Discuss how AI agents transform silos from bottlenecks into orchestrated system capabilities, replacing linear handoffs with dynamic, networked collaboration.
From functions to value streams – Moving beyond isolated tasks toward cross-functional, goal-driven agentic teams operating seamlessly across domains.
Governance for hybrid actors – Rethinking traditional HR and SaaS governance models in favour of permission-based, adaptive oversight frameworks designed for AI agents.
Designing the 21st-century enterprise – Transitioning from hierarchical structures to intelligent networks — and preparing culturally, structurally, and technologically for system-level orchestration.

Roundtable

13:55-14:55

Credibility Under Pressure: How Engineering Leaders Maintain Trust When Plans Break

When things go well, credibility is invisible. It shows up when plans slip, risks appear late, or the business wants certainty that engineering can’t honestly give.
Discuss real situations where things went wrong, and what to do next.
Swap stories about how you’ve handled bad news, pressure from Product, security risks, and stressed teams.
We’ll discuss:
- What breaks trust when plans change
- How to explain risk and uncertainty to execs
- How to say “no” or “not yet” without burning trust
- How to talk about security as a business risk
- How to lead teams when pressure stays high

15:05-15:40

Coffee & Recharge Break

15:40-16:05

The Rise of the All-Rounder: Why Cricketers are Better than Footballers

Look at how to broaden the bar and develop T-shaped leaders who are more Ben Stokes than Harry Kane.
Explore how engineering and product can work together to improve alignment, value delivery, and speed to market, using clear examples of what this looks like in practice.
Hear lessons from scaling high-performing teams at LendInvest, drawing directly from the environments and behaviours that made those teams successful and how the same traits appear in the wider data on effective, high-performing teams.

16:05-16:30

The End of the Road in Performance Management: Why, When and How to let go of Poor Performers in Software Engineering Teams

Letting people go for poor performance is difficult for many managers and often avoided in company cultures that find the process uncomfortable.
Much of the advice on performance management comes from the US, but UK culture and employment law are very different, and there is no “at will” employment.
Explore when letting someone go is necessary, what steps to try before reaching that point, and how to handle the process with fairness.
Understand both positive and negative outcomes, and focus on how to make the process less damaging and more constructive for everyone involved.

16:30-16:55

The Human Load Balancer: Protecting Your Team Without Burning Out

Engineering leaders often take pride in shielding their teams from shifting demands, organisational dysfunction, and emotional strain, but this invisible work can quietly build up and take a toll.
In today’s climate of disruption and uncertainty, hear how the weight of this hidden labour is heavier than ever, making mental health and self-care a core part of sustainable leadership.
Drawing on real experience, this session will show you how to recognise when invisible work is leading toward burnout, how to reframe what it means to support a team, and what tools help you stay balanced.
You will learn how to spot signs of overload, set healthier boundaries without abandoning responsibilities, move away from the myth of the “hero leader,” and build practices that support long-term resilience.

16:55-17:00

Chair’s Closing Remarks

Neeha Curtis, Chief of Corporate Affairs, Lyric