LeadDev is an event series designed to bring together engineering leaders at all levels to share best practices and ideas through talks and activities. It focuses on the human aspects of engineering leadership, offering talks and workshops on topics such as team management, scaling teams, career development, and effective communication. If there is a LeadDev event happening near you, I strongly encourage attending!

LDX3 is a new "festival of engineering leadership" by LeadDev, happening this year in London to celebrate 10 years of LeadDev. LDX3 essentially combines and expands upon previous LeadDev events like LeadDev, StaffPlus, and LeadingEng under, pulling them together in one space.

Community Representation Group

In 2024 LeadDev London introduced community representation groups, and I was invited to co-host the Leaders with Disabilities session. Following on from that success, and that of similar sessions at other events, I was invited back to LDX3.

The idea is to create time for listening and sharing for engineers in minority or underrepresented groups, and to create a safe space for people to talk about issues and concerns they have as a member of those communities in the tech industry. As such, I wasn’t taking notes, and won’t share any of the specific comments that did come up. However, these are a few examples of the conversation topics that came up:

• How do you decide whether to share or not? And when?
• What do you wish everyone would consider around disability?
• What attracts you to companies/employers?
• How do you work out what accommodations you might need?
• How do different global cultures impact your experience?
• Do you consider disability to be part of your (workplace) identity?
• How has your disability impacted your career?
• How do your workplace processes support (or not) people with disabilities?

Conference sessions

Outside of co-hosting the Leaders with Disabilities community group, I was also able to attend some of the conference sessions. I’ve called out a few that I found particularly useful or interesting below (in no particular order), but all of the sessions are available to watch here should you want to; you’ll need a LeadDev account, but it’s otherwise free.

Global teams, seamless success

Managing global engineering teams can present several challenges. Time zone differences, cultural diversity, communication breakdowns, and unclear responsibilities often hinder smooth collaboration and timely project delivery.

We were promised a lot with distributed teams, but they can also be painful if we’re not careful; we immediately lose a lot of visibility, and communication can quickly falter. Distributed teams can deliver magic ✨, but only when we are intentional.

Communication is our greatest risk, and our greatest superpower. We have to be clear and explicit, recognising nuance, without relying on cultural norms and individual expectations.

We have to explicitly build psychological safety, so that everybody feels safe in their communication; we can never truly resolve issues or make improvements when people hold back.

Similarly, we have to hold each other accountable, but without blame; when errors occur, it’s almost always a system failure, not an individual problem. Identify friction, and turn it into action; breakdowns within organisations and across teams are usually the result of ambiguity, not ego.

When there is reduced proximity, we have to put more effort into connection. Sharing the big picture will encourage greater commitment; treat everyone as partners. When your colleagues understand the what, why, and how, they will be more engaged, more motivated, and more loyal.

And finally, we have to actively designing our shared culture; it is not a 'nice to have', it is the glue that holds us together.

Lost and alone over the Pacific

On December 22, 1978, veteran US Navy pilot Jay Prochnow found himself lost over the Pacific after a navigation failure during a solo ferry flight. With no land in sight and nightfall approaching, he had to find a way to survive. This is the story of how he navigated out of the crisis – and what we can learn from his experience.

Nick Means is incredibly good at building stories into narratives, picking out the core ideas and reflecting on how they can be applied by us as engineers. I can never take notes during Nick’s talks, as they are just too engaging!

The key takeaway for me though was how important it is to ask for help as soon as possible. When we’re stuck, it so often feels like we have to keep going on our own, to push through until we find the solution, because we tell ourselves that that’s the sign of a good engineer. But the more we keep at it, the bigger the hole we find ourselves in, and the harder it is to get out of it.

Equally, we have a collective responsibility to create great products that work for all of our customers; we should share in our successes and our struggles equally. There should be no shame in saying “I don’t know where to go from here”, and we should be creating environments where it is encouraged, not castigated.

The sprinter’s leadership mindset

Sprinting the 100m at an international level taught me more than just how to run – it taught me how to lead. Exploding out of the blocks, maintaining focus through the drive phase, and pushing through fatigue while preserving technique are lessons that have shaped my approach to engineering leadership and project delivery.

This was a short lightning talk, about the lessons we can learn from sprinting, and how we can apply to both our team and individual focus. We often talk about software development as a marathon, not a sprint, so it was interesting to see it framed differently like this.

Main points for me were:

1. It’s really important to know at the start where we’re going, so we can begin with clarity.
2. We should recognise that we don’t start projects in the same way as we finish them, even when they don’t feel complex or drawn out; the explosive power we begin with is different to the more relaxed phase in the middle, where we have to be intentional in maintaining focus, which in turn is different to wrapping up when we’re dealing with greater fatigue as we watch the deadline quickly approach.

Neurodiversity: From struggles to solutions

Offering practical tips for leading neurodiverse teams. Whether you're neurodivergent or neurotypical – helping you to lead with confidence and support your colleagues to create a more inclusive environment.

Disability in the workplace is still not talked about enough, and it’s even less of a conversation regarding less visible disabilities, including different aspects of neurodivergence.

This was a really interesting talk, and as a member of the AuDHD community, one I appreciated seeing on stage at an event like this. If you don’t have time to watch the video, I suggest you at least review the slides.

My main thought coming out of this is how we often look at reasonable adjustments and workplace accommodations without truly understanding the problems. For (a metaphorical) example, we’re usually happy to build a ramp, so everyone can get to the top of the hill. But we then criticise those who use it because they didn’t get to the top as fast as those who took the stairs.

We have to have a wholistic perspective of how we set and engage in expectations, and what it means to be successful as individuals and as a group. We need to recognise that we don’t know where everyone is coming from, or how they got to where they are today, and we can’t know what they need to go further without entering into an open and honest conversation.

What’s my job again?

Discover how self-management helps you define your role, lead effectively, and manage energy as a leadership constraint. Self Management is understanding what it means for you to thrive in a leadership role, and it’s also something you will need to install in people who report to you, in order to help them scale their own responsibilities.

We need to understand four key points to create a workable strategy: Time, Context, Direction, and Expertise. Because a good strategy is only good in context. The more dynamic the situation, the poorer our foresight will be.

As teams and individuals, we need to understand impact. We might dismiss “politics”, but it’s just about getting things done; do you know what is important, and what is not?

We need to understand how to deliver, and how to validate. Because execution is when our strategy becomes real, and if we can’t deliver it, and don’t know how to validate it, then we can’t successfully execute it.

Scaling your impact

This was a workshop that I signed up for, so there is no video available.

This interactive workshop empowers staff+ engineers to amplify their influence and create adaptive, growth-oriented engineering environments. Participants will explore four thinking mindsets – Solutioning, Bridging, Resolving, and Learning – derived from diverse fields like software consulting and professional coaching. The workshop aims to equip engineers with practical strategies to improve leadership skills, drive initiatives, increase their influence and mentor effectively.

Our mindset is the lens through which we see the world; our internal operating system. It impacts not just how we perceive what’s happening around us, but the way in which we show up.

Understanding both how you work and how other people work is vital to our success. We need to learn to observe our own ways of thinking, increase our self-awareness, and proactively recognise our biases.

Understanding how other people think about something helps us know how to influence them and the situation. But we have to be open to being influenced ourselves, by being flexible and understanding our own thinking preferences. We can only influence others to the extent that we are open to being influenced.

There are four primary mindsets, that we must all employ at different times. Learning when and where to do so is the hard part!

• The expert: You know the solutions and can offer them, walking others through the pros and cons, making a recommendation or decision as appropriate.
• The teacher: You help others understand, elevating their knowledge, and enable them to make decisions in the future.
• The problem solver: You know how to figure out where an issue is coming from, can investigate problems, and test your hypotheses. You can take that step away, and look at the bigger picture.
• The catalyst: You support those around you in by learning and transforming the culture and environment. You use open questioning to bring out other people’s experiences, and combine them to create something bigger than the sum of its parts.

Hallway track

While I’m not one for a lot of small talk, as is often the case at conferences the best takeaways come from the conversations happening around the sessions.

The two big things that came up for me from talking to people were quite separate, but equally important.

Visibility and representation

A lot of what was covered at the conference related to understanding; understanding systems, understanding teams, understanding individuals. But when we are not aware of something, we will always struggle to properly understand it.

So when the environment around us does not truly represent the reality of the world, or at least the reality of our customers, how can we hope to create what they really need? Without greater diversity in our teams and workspaces, that properly reflects those who we deliver for, we will miss truly diverse perspectives, and fail to deliver truly impactful products.

Optimising for serendipity

This is a perennial problem for any organisation that has grown to a certain size; there will always be information we aren’t aware of, or knowledge we didn’t know existed. So how do we make sure that the right people are aware of the right thing at the right time? No solution was offered at the time, but it has had me thinking a lot!