Kate Wardin

Adaptive Technical Leadership

9:00 AM MDT

Our software engineering teams are facing new challenges every day that come with the rapidly changing industry and recent events.

People don't seem to be motivated by the same things that they previously found compelling. Organizations are giving up glamorous office spaces and pivoting to remote teams. These changes require us to quickly pivot as leaders to learn new skills, frameworks, and techniques to continue supporting our teams while maintaining our own sanity.

In this workshop, you will learn and practice key skills to help your team propel through today's modern challenges and setbacks. The topics will be relevant to all Software Engineering leaders who wish to find ways to motivate and inspire their teams - regardless of their organization's existing circumstances.

Specific topics will include:

• Tips and tricks for leading remote teams - striking the right balance between productivity and flexibility
• Understanding unique motivational styles - catering your leadership style to maximize employee engagement
• Advanced communication techniques - communicating authentically, consistently, and purposefully to provide reassurance and clarity to your team

8 ways to build a sustainable engineering culture

8:30 AM MDT

Contrary to popular belief, software engineering culture is not about the free food, open office spaces, and ping pong tables.

You can sense a great team culture when you observe it, and unfortunately you've probably experienced (or are currently experiencing) elements of a bad team culture. Not to worry - it's never too late to grab the reins and make small changes to steer your team in the right direction!

In this talk, Kate will highlight 8 tactical tips that attendees can implement on their teams immediately to help shape their team's culture!

Giving Effective Feedback

10:30 AM MDT

Delivering feedback is arguably the hardest part of being a leader. Eventually, the time will come when someone on your team isn’t meeting expectations, and you will be faced with a choice. You can choose to ignore the situation, hope it improves organically, and accept the toll it takes on the broader team, or you can choose to have the tough conversation.

In this interactive session, you will learn more about your communication style, a simple framework to provide actionable feedback, common red flags to watch out for, and advice on how to quickly course correct on a dev team. You’ll leave with a template for giving feedback that you can tie directly to a situation you’re currently facing as well as plenty of examples that you can leverage in the future.

5 Reasons your best Engineers are leaving

1:00 PM MDT

Engineering Leaders across industries and timezones are struggling to retain technical talent even after offering the shiniest of benefits and perks. Why is that?

This one hour session will uncover key factors that lead to highly engaged teams followed by 5 common reasons Engineers choose to leave an organization and changes we can make to proactively avoid these departures.

Time is on my side!

7:30 PM MDT

Time management + prioritization - everyone needs it! We all seem to face a never-ending list of demands coupled with a finite amount of time to get it all done.

You will leave this 60 minute session armed with new tips and tools to effectively balance your time between meetings, writing code, putting out fires, and clarifying your role to ensure you are spending time on the things that actually matter!