Conference: March 5-7, 2018

Workshops: March 8-9, 2018

Track:

Building Great Engineering Cultures & Organizations

Location: Whittle, 3rd flr.

Day of week: Tuesday

Whether you’re in a startup trying to create the conditions for technolgy innovation and scalable growth, or a mature ‘corporate’ trying to establish the environment that sustains digital transformation, it is arguably ‘culture’ that trumps all in the pursuit of success. Technology has never been more ‘throwaway’ (the tools we use replenishing now annually), while the business graveyards are full of those that led with ‘process improvement’ alone. In this track we’ll hear from the practitioners representing digital leaders of the Consumer Internet as well as transformational corporates from ‘traditional’ sectors to understand how they establish and scale engineering cultures that keep their organisations ahead of the rest (spoiler alert: it’s nothing to do with pizzas, beanbags or foosball).

Track Host:
Finbarr Joy
Group CTO @Superbet

Finbarr is Group CTO for Superbet, a new entrant into the online gaming industry. Previous to this he was Group CTO for Lebara, responsible for Product & Technology strategy, development and operations for Platform, Network, Technology Innovation & IT, across global Mobile, OTT Video, Financial Services, and IP voice/ messaging propositions.

With over 15 years’ leadership experience of technology ‘at the leading edge’, Finbarr is dedicated to helping organizations develop breakthrough business models powered by tech. His prior roles have included stints driving technology transformation at global operators such as BT, William Hill and Lebara, and he also co-founded and ran a UK-wide e-commerce software development company through the 2000’s.

Finbarr’s early experiences included two years with Netscape, as a member of the team that brought the Internet to the world, and established the enduring model for digital innovation.

10:35am - 11:25am

by Kevin Goldsmith
CTO @Avvo, former Spotify, Adobe, Microsoft
Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Avvo created tools to encourage data-driven thinking, autonomy and a spirit of continuous improvement. This talk describes those tools, their implementation and the issues and challenges encountered when doing large-scale culture change in a ten-year-old company. Continuous improvement is the goal for agile teams. We strive for it. What does it look like when we create a continuous improvement beyond our agile teams and bring it to the larger organization: the company level? Kevin Goldsmith...

11:50am - 12:40pm

by Andy Walker
Engineering Manager @Google

by Vlad Galu
VP Engineering @GlobalSign

by Finbarr Joy
Group CTO @Superbet

by Sally Goble
Senior Engineering Manager @Deliveroo

by Tom Clark
Head of Common Platform @ITV

by Amanda Bellwood
People Operations Manager @skybet
Building Great Engineering Cultures Panel

This panel session will create a unique opportunity to hear from some of the foremost practitioners of Engineering leadership. The group will discuss topics relating to the challenges of engineering culture development, but also take questions from the floor to provide guidance to those who are starting out/ establishing teams for the first time, or who have particular ‘transformation’ challenges with existing teams. Our line up includes Sally Goble, (Senior Engineering Manager, Deliveroo)...

1:40pm - 2:30pm

by Andy Walker
Engineering Manager @Google

It's People, Stupid (People Are Stupid?)

Andy’s proposition is that the reason things fail is usually people, not technology. Human beings are operating a 'broken machine'. There is a way forward, however: learning how to get more deterministic outcomes with meat puppets is a worthwhile investment of time- especially to understand the conditions that make engineering thrive. Based on Andy's experiences coaching Google teams, this varied and provocative discussion includes themes on ‘the broken human machine’, the ‘authority...

2:55pm - 3:45pm

by Amanda Bellwood
People Operations Manager @skybet
An Engineering-Led Culture at Scale

This talk presents Sky Betting and Gaming’s journey from establishment of a core ‘engineering-driven’ people and culture model, to replication throughout the UK team and now internationally across the group. How to create a learning environment, and encouraging meaningful growth by empowering teams and individuals to drive their own progress. The implications for classic HR-driven ‘performance management’ of embracing an engineering culture. For learning and...

4:10pm - 5:00pm

by Vlad Galu
VP Engineering @GlobalSign
Building and Growing Sustainable Teams

Globalsign is one of the organisations at the heart of the internet identity / security maelstrom- tackling cloud, IoT and the provision of millions of digital identities; As such they’ve had to move quickly in establishing their next generation platform, coordinating engineering efforts across Europe, US and Asia. In this session, Vlad outlines how they’ve evolved their engineering culture to sustain this, incorporating considerations such as ‘perfect’ VS ‘good...

5:25pm - 6:15pm

by Finbarr Joy
Group CTO @Superbet
Engineering Culture Revived

Waves of technology innovations are sweeping through all industries now, and software development teams are finding themselves on the receiving end of exponential demands: cloud, big data, machine learning, voice- activated, IoT, yada yada! For many organisations, the fear of being left behind results in the formation of a ‘transformation project’ and before you know it the software development team is tasked with swathes of ‘new’ process techniques that '...

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