LeadDev Berlin 2022 Impressions

Earlier this November, I attended the LeadDev Berlin conference. This is a conference for engineering managers, team leaders, and persons in similar roles — or those who aspire to hold these positions — which provides practical advice and community networking with leaders from around the globe. The intended takeaways from this year’s conference are:

• Understanding metrics
• Nurturing team culture
• Creating growth strategies
• Building effective teams

Why I chose to attend

Photomath encourages personal development and continuous learning. These development activities should be tailored to the person and the skills needed for their role. Since I am an Engineering Manager, I was searching for a conference that could provide me with opportunities to learn something new, and have fun while doing it! I stumbled upon this conference and liked the agenda and the announced speakers.

My takeaways

Overall, the conference included a lot of quality lectures, great speakers, and interesting topics. The content, online support, and provided materials made it clear that the organisation operates at a high level. I also met a lot of new people and peers from different companies.

Here are a few personal takeaways that I brought with me back home:

We all struggle with similar challenges

At some point in our careers, we all struggle with similar challenges in our roles as leaders, regardless of how many years of experience we have or the vision and mission of our teams. The topic selection at the conference confirmed that. I didn’t hear anything revolutionary, but it’s calming to hear that even the greatest engineering leaders experienced similar challenges and managed to overcome them. It was also inspiring to hear their suggestions and lessons learned. Below are some details on a few of my favourites:

How can we effectively lead?

What should we focus on? James Samuel, Engineering Manager from Reddit, suggests leading with context and visibility. He named four pillars for leading with visibility:

• Process — understand how stuff gets built on time and on-budget
• Operation — understand if stuff built will continue to run
• People — understand if the folks building the stuff are engaged and happy to continue building the stuff
• Product — understand if users are happy and getting value from what is being built

How to be involved?

Answering the age-old question of how to be up-to-date about what is going on in your team, and beyond. Anita Singh, Director of engineering from Gorillas, shared these tips:

• Attend and watch demos
• Read RFCs
• Encourage knowledge-sharing spaces
• Have ”skip level” one-on-ones
• Prepare and send engagement surveys
• Participate in “all hands” meetings

Best practices for working in different time zones

Best practices for working in different time zones were shared by James Stainer, Director of Engineering at Shopify:

• Written project updates
• Video demos
• Written celebrations
• Social channels
• With leadership intentionally leaning in

Overcoming bugs?

Debugging, debugging, debugging… engineering challenges with debugging are the same everywhere: it takes the most development time, and engineers do not prefer this type of work over developing new features. Elinor Swery, Director from Rookout, showed us the results of a recent study that found that 75% of developers’ time is spent solving bugs. That indeed leaves little time to develop the new, meaningful features that engineers like to create. To overcome those challenges, she suggests that managers focus on:

• People — create an ownership mentality and establish trust with your team and stakeholders
• Tools — make sure that the right tools are integrated into the team’s daily workflow and that they know how to use them
• Processes — make sure everyone in the team and company is familiar with what you prioritise and why some decisions were made

Introversion in management

One lecture even discussed “Leading as an introvert,” which is similar to my own lecture that I held earlier this year (“Turning your inner introvert into an ally for the development of your engineering career”). If you are Croatian-speaking, you can find that recording on Youtube.

Resource recommendations

The speakers had many great resource recommendations. Here are a few that you might find useful:

Books:

• High output management by Andrew S. Grove
• Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan CainLeadDev
• Effective Remote Work: For Yourself, Your Team, and Your Company by James Stanier
• The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance — -What Women Should Know by Katty Kay

Other resources:

• All Remote GitLab — guide to remote work
• The Craft of Writing Effectively — Youtube video with helpful rules, skills, and resources that are available for further developing your writing style
• Article on the topic of remote onboarding — how to successfully onboard remote engineering staff in four weeks
• The Engineering Management — a collection of thoughts, stories, and resources on the subject of engineering management

Community on Slack

The LeadDev organisation has a global community of engineering leaders. One of the places where leaders can exchange experiences or knowledge is the LeadDev Workspace on Slack. You can find a lot of different channels on useful leadership topics like #agile-ways-of-working, #architecture, #effective-teams, #leadership, etc. It has also channels for regular LeadDev updates, like #leaddev-live. I like that the Workspace is quite active and that people share their own views and experiences.

The balance between short and long lectures

It was a creative choice to mix lectures that were half an hour long and lectures that were ten minutes long. For some topics, it was enough to blaze through key ideas that everyone can think about or talk about later. For other topics, a deeper dive was needed to grasp all the important information.

Networking

The networking area was a big circular space where attendees could mingle around sponsor booths, tables with food or refreshments, and chill spots. There was enough space for walking around without feeling too crowded. At the end of the first day, they even prepared drinks for relaxation and easier mingling with new people. 😀 There was also an after-party, but unfortunately, my introverted mode kicked in and I felt too tired to attend, so I went back to my hotel.

I had a chance to meet and chat with some of today’s most influential engineers — like Gergely Orosz, the author of the famous The Pragmatic Engineer blog.

Being alone at a conference

The biggest challenge for me was the fact that I went to the conference alone, without colleagues from my company. My first thoughts were that I am disappointed, and a bit frightened because I won’t have my peers with whom I can discuss lectures or stick during breaks. However, I discovered that’s not the case at all. Who would have thought that it’s that easy to meet new people at an event where one of the main purposes is to meet new people and share knowledge? Not me 😅

It was actually exciting to go outside of my comfort zone and say “Hi, I’m Nicolette from Photomath. How do you like the conference so far?” I have gained valuable connections, and it turns out that sharing my thoughts with complete strangers isn’t that bad. Same as writing a blog. 😉

Green dot

It was also much easier to meet new people with the little green dot that you could stick on your name tag to indicate that you’re open to someone approaching you and making a new contact.

Recommendations for improvement

Even though the organisers thought of almost everything, including all those little details that made the experience more enjoyable for everybody, I did see some room for improvement.

Panel discussions

What I am used to (and what I mostly look forward to) at conferences are panel discussions, where speakers from different companies come together to share their views on some topic. At the LeadDev conference, there were unfortunately no panel discussions. I think it would add a lot of value to get multiple perspectives in one session.

News and update sharing

As a newcomer to this conference, I had some struggles finding new and relevant information. I could read some of the important information on the official webpage for the event, but some of it I got familiar with late — at the opening presentation of the conference. It’s a good place to share, but it would have been useful to also post that information on the official conference page, or at least provide clear guidance on how and where to follow the updates before the conference starts. I opted in for LeadDev content and updates, and I still missed the notification to apply to speed coaching, which was shared before the conference started. Had I known, I definitely would have signed up for speed coaching!

Conclusion

I would definitely recommend this conference to anybody who is eager to hear about leadership challenges and problem-solving from some of the greatest engineering leaders in the world.

This is a network of really smart people in the palm of your hand, so even if you don’t have anyone to attend this with, don’t let that stop you! Meeting new people is easier than it feels.

And let’s not forget: Berlin is an interesting town to visit. It was my third time there, and I would still love to go again.

Feel free to contact me for travel stories, conference questions, or even recommendations for places to go in Berlin! Cheers to learning and growing on our career paths, one step at a time.

Like what you’ve read? Learn more about #LifeAtPhotomath and check out our job postings: https://careers.photomath.com/