LeadDev London 2022
Yay, finally we can attend events again! I was so happy to be able to travel for my first big event since 2019. First of all: props to all the organizers, Meri for MCing the whole thing and Barbican for great venue
Leaddev promised these key takeaways — Understanding Metrics, Nurturing team culture, Creating growth strategies, Building effective teams.
And they delivered — far and beyond. I’ve always wanted to go and eventhough my expectations were pretty high, I’m more than happy with what I’m taking back in my notebook.
Below you can find my notes. Be advised this doesn’t cover everything that happened and some talks are even omitted, but I still hope someone might find this valuable. You can also refer to Heidi’s twitter thread covering pretty much everything that happened
Vitor Reis — Navigating the Chaos of scaling
Lessons learned when scaling team and growing yourself depicted on fictional story of a manager asked to become a tech lead and their journey.
Key takeaways
Chaos is part of the journey. Chaos is the constant element in a scaling company. Though things may feel disorganized, it’s normal. Take advantage of the chaos, use it
- #1 “Be self aware” — use judgement and be aware of what great looks like
- #2 “Be replaceable” — if you wan’t to grow you have to give away your job over and over again, so you can move to the next thing.
- #3 “Focus on communication” — Writing is thinking
When you have the feeling that you are over-communicating you are probably just scraping to communicate enough”
- #4 “Be efficient with time” — What’s the worst that would happen if you don’t do x? If you don’t have anything to delegate, then your problem is that you aren’t being replaceable. Work on that and train people up
Library
- 📚The Making of manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You (Julie Zhuo)
- 📚How to Be a Great Boss (Gino Wickman)
- 📚‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups (Molly Graham)
Raul Chedrese — Keeping your codebase fun at scale
Focused on effectivity of development, identifying and resolving pain points while keeping the work fun. The three steps to fun:
- Understand the developer experience — ask your devs, get feedback, know what the pain points are — How do you rate your devex? What’d make it better? What is preventing you from…?
- Now you’ve got a list of problems but know it’s not only about solving it.
Form a vision — how would ideal, fun code base look like? Use your list to create the vision, what matters to your devs? - Iterate towards the vision — Align priority, focus on single solution and finish it before moving on to reduce risk of never ending. Break down the vision into small, well-defined tasks
Gabby Llanillo — Outputs vs Outcomes: Driving and defining quality in software development
Gabby unfortunately fell down with covid just prior to the conference and couldn’t attend. But here again the team comes to the rescue — the talk was prerecorded and executed perfectly. Gabby focused on practical steps she and her team tackled while testing Last of Us II.
- If you keep someone in the same area too long it can result in tunnel vision, !but! switching too often feels disruptive. Docs are key.
Quality is not just QA, it is the entire team. To deliver the best content, we should embody the experience of the end user.
Laveena Ramchandani — How to bring accessibility into your teams
On how accessibility can help your audience as well as you. Great points with practical tools and approaches to use.
For individuals without disability, technology makes things easier.
For individuals with disability, technology makes things possible.
Plugins you can download
- ARC toolkit
- AXE
- Wave
- Lighthouse
- Screen readers
- Remove styling
Phil Bennett — CSS: Cascading Support Systems
Read the title again this has nothing to do with Cascading style sheets :)
The talk was focused on importance of being empathetic leader and how this is not as much recognized in today workplace. Something which really resonates with me.
The journey for Phil started when his team went from 2 to 25 people and he struggled with managing and trying to deal with emotional challenges of all these people. Seeked therapist who noted that 25 people is maximum number of clients she can have which triggered him to look more into the topic and started using solution focused technique.
- What’s up? — question I like to open all 1:1s which helps open up the conversation and often times helps people open
- Miracle question — if you woke up tomorrow and your problem was gone, how would that look like?
- Connecting & context — try to play it back to emphasize and connect with the person
- Work out solutions — define a path to get better
- Check in — put a point in calendar to check on improvements
- Cascade the approach — If this works ask them to take the same approach to people they’re dealing with
Laura Tacho — What Dashboards Don’t Tell You
Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Measuring your team’s performance should focus on both velocity and quality metrics. Self perception metrics are key and shouldn’t be overlooked. Dashboards don’t tell you about how people feel about what they’re doing.
Library
- 📚The SPACE of Developer Productivity — There’s more to it than you think. (Nicole Forsgren, GitHub; Margaret-Anne Storey, University of Victoria ; Chandra Maddila, Thomas Zimmermann, Brian Houck, and Jenna Butler, Microsoft Research)
- 📚Mind the Gap: On the Relationship Between Automatically Measured and Self-Reported Productivity (Moritz Beller — Facebook; Vince Orgovan, Spencer Buja — Microsoft; Thomas Zimmermann — Microsoft Research
- 🎥How to Misuse and Abuse DORA Metrics (Bryan Finster)
- ℹ️Laura’s workshop on measuring team metrics
- ℹ️DX — The only tool designed to measure self-perceptive metrics for engineering teams.
Jenny Sivaralan — Scale, Scale, Scale! (Lessons from an engineering recruitment drive)
Set of actionable items to start hiring effectively — Jenny describes their road in AccuRx when midst-pandemic they really needed to grow team quickly and effectively. Define hiring goals, see what is the composition of your pipeline. Their tips on how to grow the pipeline:
- Use external recruiters
- Grow the talent team
- Sourcing candidates (hard, unglamorous, essential)
- Use referrals
- Tell people who you are
Alex Cannesa — Sustainable means performant
“If the Internet was a country, it would be the 7th largest polluter”
- Build pages and refresh the cache on change instead of doing SSR on demand
- ℹ️Sustainable Web Manifesto
- Look into sustainability of your datacenter. Refer to datacenter’s PUE — Power Usage Effectiveness
- ℹ️Interesting look into how Microsoft works with PUE when designing Azure DCs
Sadhana Gopal — How to build trust as a new manager in a fully remote team
How to tackle your first 90 days (And I think these don’t nescessarily apply only to managing fully remote teams
- Be intentional about building relationships
- Assume positive intent while trust takes root
- You are represented by your active voice
- #1 30 days — Know “the building”. Go wide&deep on schema. Cross-organizational pairing + 1:1s across teams. Build relationships. Learn to use the right tools. Dive into documentation
- #2 60 days — Async to increase productivity; Sync to build engagement. Team bonding activities — lunch&learn, gaming, mix of fun&retrospective Meet IRL once per quarter
- #3 90 days — Don’t be always on. Acknowledge loneliness & FOMO (& design accordingly. Find a kindred spirit! Collect feedback and learn to trust the process! Make mistakes, learn and iterate. Be patient and enjoy!
Daniel Burke — People Building: Career planning for your direct reports
A recent survey found that 7 of 10 people are considering quitting their job in 2022. 4 of 10 say they will likely quit due to the lack of career progression.
As a leader, your reputation around helping people grow their careers and their capabilities is an advantage in hiring. You should know motivation of your people — is it money? Mission? Progression? Something else?
To help your people grow talk to them on this — know the motivation, their heading, path/plan towards it, help them define SMART goals, personal growth metrics.
Design work that is valuable, impactful, and increases competency. Hold your people accountable in a way which works for them and maintains alignment. Reward them per they motivation.
When my reports punch above their weight and take on and succeed at reach goals, it empowers ME, it frees me up to work on something else, because they’ve got it.
While doing that think about your own motivation — do it with the intent to help them in their role overall. If you can find their succession in your company even better. You build them because you care about them as a person, if you can keep them at the company as long as you can and as long as they grow even better. But people leave, and that’s ok.
Neil Kimmett — Scaling your mobile app release process
- Define versioning strategy, some companies do semver, some do it by year — see airbnb version history
- Define branching strategy — gitflow/trunk
- Automate — Fastlane, Firebase, …
- Keep logs of versions & dates of publications
- Utilize feature flags — Optimizely, Launchdarkly
- Look into server driven UI — Airbnb
- Use tooling to help you — https://www.runway.team
- Use debug menu but make sure it’s not published into production build
Anna Granta — Seven surprisingly simple ways to stem burnout.
What is burnout? When your body is trying to stop you from harming yourself because of prolonged stress.
Nick Means — Taking the 737 to the MAX!
If you haven’t seen any talks by Nick go watch this one right away.
Nick has a great gift to present a tremendously prepared speech where only at the very end you realize why he’s talking about a planes crashing at a developer conference and how the approaches can be applied anyway.
Also it was such great talk I have zero notes because I was just enjoying it and quite frankly I don’t think I’d be even able to reproduce it in text anyway. I’ll link the video as soon as it’s up.
Following picture sums it up nicely though
Library
📚Thinking in systems (Donella H. Meadows)
Day 2
Jasmine James — Constructing a framework for a differentiated customer experience
Concept of DUCC — Discoverability, Usability, Capability, Credibility
- Map your site journey
- Define persona mapped capabilities
- Use real-time feedback tool
Library
📚Developer Relations: How to Build and Grow a Successful Developer Program (Caroline Lewko)
Andrew Harmel-Law — A Commune in the Ivory Tower? — A new approach to architecture decisions
Interesting talk on how to switch from traditional idea of “Architects” while bringing the practice of “Architecture” to the fore. In other words — how everyone can become an architect, without things reducing to chaos.
How to fail:
- “Bad” decisions — let them happen, let them be learning opportunity
- Old guard == New guard — Adopting new process but having still same people doing decisions
- Off-the-grid decisions— people aren’t following the process of writing ADR, but are making decisions. Figure out why they are going around the process and remove that friction.
- No trust — Only works if people have trust towards each other + are able to be honest about their need for advice.
Jemma Bolland — Sorry… you go ahead. The art of making space and claiming space in meetings
Running an inclusive meeting
- Make sure everyone knows how you’d like them to contribute
- Outline protocols at the start, suggesting how to indicate you’d like to speak
- Solicit a range of views, ask if anyone has any different views to the one just put forward
- Leave space before moving onto the next point
- Be an ally. Use your voice to make space for others
Making yourself heard
- Before the meeting, find out if there are any specific areas your opinion would be useful on
- Don’t be be afraid to circle back, even if the conversation has moved on.
- Signal your desire to speak
- If you’re comfortable to, call it out if you’re spoken over
Unfortunately at this point I had to leave to catch a flight back, once the talks are up, I’ll summarize the rest also
Closing notes
Once again I’d like to thank all the speakers, the team behind Leaddev as well as all the other attendees. I had a blast!
How to share event experience with your team?
I also wanted to share how we are trying to approach events/conferences now and why this blog post is vital part of it — we’ve agreed to bring back to the team our knowledge gained at events, summarize and try to follow up on the main takeaways — see below.
I also tend to bring some swag/goodies whenever traveling for the team
My key takeaways
- Be empathetic leader — something I’ve always felt is important and it was great to hear view of others on the topic
- Productivity and dashboards — include self perception
- Focus on accessibility as part of design process not addition on top of existing project
- Be more transparent to the public — I plan to do a series on our hiring and onboarding process here
- Keeping fun codebase — We are currently looking into creation of Enablement/Devex team
Some more photos
Thanks LeadDev, see you next year!
