Speaker
Abstract
Navigating change and building resilient teams is a complex challenge that many organizations face. Times of change can lead to uncertainty, disagreement, and a breakdown in trust. These challenges can have a cumulative effect, creating a negative feedback loop that leads to a downward spiral in team performance making it difficult to recover and achieve desired outcomes.
In this talk, I will share my people-centric approach to navigating change and building teams that can overcome challenges and deliver value sustainably. I will provide practical advice based on my real-world experience on how to build and sustain high-performing teams by exploring strategies to:
Facilitate functional leadership
Maintain healthy conflict
Identify and measure meaningful metrics
Create an environment that engages, connects, and supports people
Interview
I lead a team within DevRel that sustains the platform that empowers the larger Google Cloud organization to build, run, distribute and support the open source sample code that helps Google Cloud developers succeed. We have many cross-functional stakeholders inside and outside the company.
The industry is undergoing momentous change, and a balance between supporting the individuals and achieving team cohesion is critical. Hopefully, I can provide some new insights and framing of the problems we face to spark some conversations on sustainable work practices.
This talk is mainly geared towards managers and technical leads looking to optimize and align their team efforts though it can be helpful to anyone who is trying to figure out how to recognize and navigate ambiguity in their environment.
The biggest lesson that I hope people are able to take away from this talk is that while there is no one path that leads to a high-performing team, there are different approaches to enhance team collaboration and enable a culture of continuous improvement. I hope we continue the conversations in the conference hallway track and through the DORA community.
Topics
QCon London 2024 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.
Part of the track
How Do Teams Really Work? Hosted by Sophie Weston Principal Engineer @ClearBank, Co-Organizer of DevOpsDays London & FastFlowConfFrom the same track
Tuesday 9 April
10:35 Whittle (3rd Fl.) Session organizing at scale Making Change Stick: Lessons Learned From Helping Teams Improve at the Co-Op Neil Vass Engineering Manager at Co-Op with 18+ Years in Tech, Previously Worked at BBC and Tessella The Co-op has a wide range of software teams, working closely with its variety of businesses (from food to funerals) to build and improve services for use by over 65,000 colleagues, 5 million members, and many more customers. 11:45 Whittle (3rd Fl.) Session organizational design The Journey of ClearBank From Start-Up To Scale-Up Michael Gray Principal Engineer @ClearBank Join me on the journey of ClearBank’s transition from a start-up to a scale-up, focusing on the impact on culture and decision-making, and how this affected our engineering teams. 13:35 Fleming (3rd Fl.) Session Being a Bad Influence – The Dangerous Dichotomies of People Management Hannah Foxwell Independent Consultant at the Intersection of Platform Engineering, Security, and AI, Founder of AI For the Rest of Us Humans are complicated unpredictable creatures. As managers and leaders we need to be consistent, yet flexible. Strong, yet vulnerable. Caring, yet authoritative. We need to be so many things that it's often hard to be ourselves - but don’t forget to also be authentic! 14:45 Fleming (3rd Fl.) Session SRE Bits, Bots, and Banter: A Deep Dive into How Tech Teams Work in a DevOps World Brittany Woods Senior Engineering Manager @ The LEGO Group Working in a DevOps world, we've all witnessed many recommendations for how teams work. We have books, blogs, tech trade articles, and even entire pieces of software dedicated to helping teams work together more effectively. We're expected to take a blue-sky approach with the given advice. 15:55 Whittle (3rd Fl.) Session Team Topologies A Tale of Team Topologies at m3ter Ricardo Nuno Almeida Senior Software Engineering Manager @m3ter The path to success is frequently a winding one, and as a series A tech startup, m3ter is no exception. 17:05 Mountbatten (6th Fl.) Session DevOps Thriving Through Change: Leading Through Uncertainty Jennifer Davis Engineering Manager @Google, Previously @Microsoft and @Chef, Author of "Effective DevOps" and "Modern System Administration" Navigating change and building resilient teams is a complex challenge that many organizations face. Times of change can lead to uncertainty, disagreement, and a breakdown in trust.