Circle

The three pillars provide a framework for measuring and improving engineering effectiveness across three interlinked perspectives: business outcomes, developer productivity, and developer experience.

Otto Hilska is the founder and CEO of Swarmia. He is an experienced software engineering leader and SaaS entrepreneur. Before Swarmia, Otto co-founded Flowdock (acquired by Rally Software) and scaled Smartly.io from 30 to 350 employees as the Chief Product Officer.

We tend to think of ways of working as a boring process question. In this talk, John will challenge that belief by offering an alternative perspective grounded in service design, behavior design, platform thinking, and more.

John Cutler is an experienced product development leader who currently works as the Head of Product at Dotwork. Having previously worked at companies like Toast, Amplitude, and Zendesk, John loves wrangling complex problems and answering the why with a mix of qualitative and quantitative data. John is the author of the hugely popular product development Substack, The Beautiful Mess.

DORA has spent over a decade uncovering the secrets of high-performing tech teams. Their latest research reveals the impact of AI on software development, showing a clear link between AI adoption and productivity, code quality, and developer happiness. But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows — AI also presents challenges that teams need to navigate carefully. In this session, Nathen will share actionable insights and proven strategies for measuring and improving your team’s performance.

Nathen Harvey is DORA Lead and Developer Advocate at Google Cloud. DORA enables teams and organizations to thrive by making industry-shaping research accessible and actionable. Nathen has learned and shared lessons from some incredible organizations, teams, and open source communities. He is a co-author of multiple DORA reports on software delivery performance and was a contributor and editor for 97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know, published by O’Reilly in 2020.

What does it take to grow fast AND retain the bits of your culture as a team or organization that made you great to begin with? How do you know when to change how you do things, without just cargo culting? Having scaled a number of teams at different speeds, Meri will talk through some of the inflection points you’ll experience, how to navigate them, and reflect on all the things they wish they’d known just a little bit earlier.

Meri Williams is an experienced CTO and leader of technology organizations, currently leading the technology team at Pleo. They have led teams ranging in size from 30 to 300, in a range of organizations from Procter & Gamble, to the Government Digital Service, award-winning online print company MOO, mobile-first challenger bank Monzo and patient-inspired AI-driven rare disease treatment discovery company Healx, amongst others. A published author and international speaker, they are the chair of the LeadDev conference, and a tech advisor for Kindred Capital. Together with their wife, they run micro-charity One Goes Up to help young women & enby folks pursue STEM education & careers.

In this session, Rebecca Murphey, Field CTO at Swarmia, will talk with seasoned engineering leaders to get their take on goal-setting around business outcomes, developer productivity, and developer experience.

The panel will be joined by Emily Nakashima, VP of Engineering at Honeycomb and Alex Plugaru, Co-Founder & CTO at Gorgias.