Schedule

Andy Skipper, Founder of CTO Craft, introduces the next four days of leadership talks, networking and the CTO Craft community.

Our MC for the day, Zoe Cunningham, introduces the sessions and speakers.

The type of society we will inhabit decades from now will be determined by today's initiatives to create fair and equitable access to opportunity. As leaders, it is incumbent upon us to understand what it means to create fairness in how we hire and compensate our people. In this keynote, we'll deconstruct the many things we mean when we say something feels "fair" to build a vocabulary around fairness. We'll leverage games to build a deeper conceptual understanding, and dive deep into the hiring process to find specific points of leverage.

Nik Silver will be discussing the following with Hung Lee: Nik will look back at hiring into digital businesses over the span of more than twenty years. In particular he'll be talking about some of the hiring decisions that didn't turn out well, what he's learned from those, and some of the ways he's changed his approach over the years.

Marcelo Lebre, COO and co-founder of Remote and former VP of Engineering at Unbabel, understands better than anyone the challenges of scaling an international workforce. In this talk, Marcelo will discuss how to adopt a remote-first mindset and how to scale a distributed team while retaining your culture.

Cal Henderson will be discussing the following with Emma Hopkinson-Spark: Slack is one of the fastest growing B2B applications of all-time. From the very beginning, co-founder and CTO, Cal Henderson, has had to constantly create an engineering team that could support the business not just where it was today, but where it was headed. In this fireside chat, Cal will share his insights and tips for effective hiring and the inside track on lessons and learnings from Slack's extraordinary journey.

Grab a tasty beverage and check your emails - we'll be back shortly!

Don Neufeld, James Goodrich, Rob Zuber and Sergey Soloviov will be discussing the following with April Williams:

Join us for a deep dive into all things hiring. Want to know the best interviewing practices? Need to refine your screening process? Debating whether to tech test or not tech test? Our panellists have you covered. In this discussion, you’ll also have the opportunity to learn more about diversity, mitigating conscious and unconscious bias and seeking culture fits or culture adds. It's rounded off with a look at how to test soft skills and nailing communication with your teams, peers and stakeholders.

There’s a lot to balance when you’re scaling a technical organization to keep up with business growth. It seems impossible to interview and hire at high volumes while shipping product, in a way that’s efficient, equitable, and effective. In this session, Shannon Hogue, Karat’s Global Head of Solutions Engineering, shares learnings and best practices from her career in technical hiring and people leadership. She’ll explore how leading companies can hire software engineers with a data-driven, competency-based approach, while minimizing bias through the process to achieve diversity and inclusion goals. And she’ll share actionable insights you can immediately apply to keep your candidates engaged at every step.

Zoe Cunningham will thank the speakers and give updates on tomorrow's sessions.

Our MC for the day, Joel Chippindale, introduces the sessions and speakers.

Do all mentors have the same seat at the table? Mentees? When you are looking for growth and you look around, what do you see, do you know what you need?

Some research says that 25% of employees who enrolled in a mentoring program had a salary-grade change, compared to only 5% of workers who did not participate. Mentees are promoted 5 times more often than those without mentors. And mentors themselves are 6 times more likely to be promoted.

Guy Podjarny will be discussing the following with Aubrey Stearn: Ensuring software and infra are secure is increasingly the responsibility of the engineering org, but engineering organizations aren’t always ready. Most engineering groups and their leaders know how to build high quality software and architecture. Many know how to make such software run in a resilient fashion. But how many of those groups know what good looks like when it comes to security? How often do the teams have the skills needed to do it well? How many engineering leaders know how to measure and optimize their handling of security? In this fireside chat, we’ll discuss why this shift in security responsibility is critical, and how we can better prepare ourselves and our teams to take it on.

Far too often, training initiatives fail. Why? In this talk, Hywel will introduce a model for categorising learning into knowledge, skills and wisdom. Through that lens, he'll demonstrate how to map learning to outcomes, and how to use the right approach to get the change you want.

Marek Gajda will be discussing the following with Zoe Cunningham: When you know “too much”, basic information seems boring or obvious. But what seems trivial for developers and other tech specialists is a foundation of knowledge transfer inside the company. We don’t use a full potential (or at all) of onboarding new people, or documenting software projects. Is IT industry doomed from the start? How can we put up a fight against the curse of knowledge?

Grab a tasty beverage and check your emails - we'll be back shortly!

Glyn Roberts, Joshua Wöhle, Katherine Spice and Laura Baldwin will be discussing the following with Lauren Mason:

Hear the latest on professional development and learning as our panellists share their insights on turning individual contributors into leaders, the varying career ladders to leadership and addressing forks in the road so they become helpful pivot points rather than obstacles.

Our panel will also discuss how to spot leadership potential, and mentoring and coaching new leaders so they feel confident, happy and ready for success.

One thing that makes people shy away from saying yes to opportunities, is they feel they need to be fully polished before actually SAYING YES. That couldn’t be further from the truth. No one is perfectly polished and no one knows how to do everything. The beauty of taking on new challenges is you are giving yourself that opportunity to learn something new and take charge of your own growth. Join Erica Lockheimer as she shares her career journey and founding Women In Tech (WIT) at LinkedIn - and encourages you all to say “yes” as opportunities arise.

Joel Chippindale will thank the speakers and give updates on tomorrow's sessions.

Our MC for the day, Dr Lee-Jon Ball, introduces the sessions and speakers.

In this session we examine the issue of situational awareness. Using examples from government and the commercial world, we explore how we can map our environment, identify opportunities to exploit, and learn to play the game.

Juan Pablo Buriticá will be discussing the following with Jean Hsu: In this fireside chat we'll discuss the practical application of software delivery metrics as a strategy to drive improve performance of engineering organizations.

As a new CIO I found it difficult to understand how to contribute to business success. How could I move from an order taker to a strategic role in the organization? In this short talk I will show you how I was able to glue IT strategic actions with business success with a little help from Roger Martin and Simon Wardley.

Nick Tune will be discussing the following with Emma Hopkinson-Spark: Every organisation grows expertise and develops capabilities in different conceptual areas, called domains. For example, Google might consider Search and Ads to be two of its domains. But not all domains are equally important in achieving business model success. In Domain-Driven Design terminology, Core Domains, are the most strategically important domains. In this sessions we'll touch on some of the interesting principles and patterns for isolating and exploiting core domains, and understanding how and why they evolve over time.

Grab a tasty beverage and check your emails - we'll be back shortly!

Aviv Ben-Yosef, Linda Davidson, Pooja Brown and Selena Deckelmann will be discussing the following with Glyn Roberts:

This panel discussion will contain everything you need to know about OKRs and KPIs for alignment, ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ engineering metrics and management by objectives.

Plus, our expert speakers will hone in on building commercial alignment and awareness in the engineering team to ensure consistently successful outcomes for the business as a whole.

When we get to senior management we're suddenly told to be more strategic, rather than operational. Yet no one seems to be able to tell us what being strategic actually is. This is too common - even CEOs struggle with strategy.
In this keynote, Lee-Jon uses real examples to show the common misconceptions in strategic thinking, their consequences and ways to handle the misconceptions in your organizations. Finishing on what a good strategy feels like.

Dr Lee-Jon Ball will thank the speakers and give updates on tomorrow's sessions.

Our MC for the day, Emma Hopkinson-Spark introduces the sessions and speakers.

How does it feel to be in your organisation? Energising and engaging? Or perhaps exhausting and disheartening? Studies tell us that an engaged employee is more productive and more likely to progress to leadership roles, but studies also show that ⅔ of the world’s workforce is disengaged. So what are we getting wrong?

In this session we look at what organisations can do (and perhaps stop doing) to create an environment that fosters engagement to create highly effective teams.

James Routledge will be discussing the following with Zoe Cunningham: 5 years of stories, learnings and insights from supporting 100s of businesses and thousands of employees with mental health at work.

Burnout isn't limited to the coronavirus epidemic, especially in the western world. It's more of an issue now than it's ever truly been. The causes have changed, and it's not always caused by excessive production or a lack of sense of purpose.

There are some measures we can all take individually to help lessen burnout. A vacation or mindfulness practice alone won't necessarily cure the dread, anxiety and effects of isolation. Employers concerned about their workers also have a role to play in helping their employees feel more valued.

That said, not everyone will partake in mental health care no matter how easily accessible it is. Learn how to identify the signs and adjust your perspective on how to come back to life from the midst of burnout.

Ellen Wong will be discussing the following with Jean Hsu: What are some common signs of burnout? How do you spot it in yourself or your team?

In this fireside chat, we will discuss some strategies to identify and manage burnout on your team.

What are some things we do for self-care as a leader and what have we tried to proactively avoid burnout on our team?

Grab a tasty beverage and check your emails - we'll be back shortly!

Jessica Gilbert, Jules Coleman, Madeleine Evans and Vicky Wills will be discussing the following with Ronnie Mitra:

What happens when your team feels too tired to function? Find out how to bring them back from the brink with our panellists’ tips on addressing their evolving needs as we continue to navigate the new normal, tools for supporting mental wellbeing and connection, and reducing isolation.

Learn how to mitigate stress caused by lack of direction or purpose, set clear expectations and confront conflict early on, to ensure your teams exist in an environment in which they thrive rather than just survive.

By far the most influential factor in burnout is the organisational culture in which a person works. Leaders have an important role in creating a psychologically safe working environment, by modelling healthy behaviours. Claire will reflect on her extensive leadership experience, lived experiences and professional role in workplace well-being to highlight some key elements in establishing anti-burnout culture, where the pursuit of good mental wellbeing (for all) is the norm.
Learn how to mitigate stress caused by lack of direction or purpose, set clear expectations and confront conflict early on, to ensure your teams exist in an environment in which they thrive rather than just survive.

Andy Skipper sees out the conference and thanks everyone for participating.