Speak

What have you discovered? Want to share it?!

What have you learned the hard way in the last couple of years that you wish you’d been told by someone who’d tried it before?

Engineering leadership is an evolving art. Sure, there are plenty of established “good practices”, but to build the teams that are creating the future, we often have to come up with thoughtful solutions to tough problems.

We're looking for experienced engineering leaders willing to share their experiences of building and managing high performance engineering teams in a fast-paced 20 minute format. Topics can include hiring, scaling, architecture, culture, process, and anything else that has helped you to build and scale an amazing engineering organization! If you want to get a sense, here are some recent presentations from another summit

A great talk is:

Novel - We’ve read the books and most of the blog posts. We get the benefits of Kanban, know the basics of orchestrating Docker using Kubernetes and understand the importance of building an engineering brand. Tell us a story that will provide new information to experienced engineering leaders who have the basics down cold.
Anecdotal - If you’re got data, that’s even better, but the best talks are based on hard won experience building and managing your own engineering team. If you can abstract a theoretical framework to make sense of your experience that’s great, but we’re looking for stories based on experience, not untested theories.
Relevant - Is this relevant to or at least interesting to most engineering leaders? We love monads, but a talk on Haskell probably won’t be broadly appealing enough (unless it’s showing how to take the principles behind QuickCheck and apply them to other types of languages!)
Actionable - What will the attendees be able to do better by the end of the talk? There should be specific, actionable takeaways to help the attendees better build and run their teams.
Concise - Twenty minutes - back to back, including setup, tear down, and any Q&A. It’s a tight format but one that the attendees love as you have to get straight to the meat of the content.
Diverse - We’re committed to continuing to improve the diversity of our presenters and attendees. At our last summit over 40% of the selected speakers didn’t identify as male and 20% identified with ethnicities that are traditionally underrepresented in technology in the US.

We are committed to a speaker lineup representing the diversity of gender, race, experience and thought that we should expect in our community and are doing our very best to improve the diversity of our attendees as well. If you know anyone who might make a good speaker and would bring valuable diversity to the event, please feel free to email peter@pbell.com. I’m happy to connect personally and help them to plan and submit a presentation.