Andrea Goulet
Co-Founder, Heartware
Richmond, Virginia, United States
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Andrea Goulet is on a mission to operationalize technical empathy for software developers. She is a sought-after keynote speaker at software conferences worldwide who puts empathy in context and uses practical and concrete examples that are highly relevant to technologists’ daily work. Andrea makes empathy accessible to analytical skeptics.
Through her online courses, Andrea has taught over 50,000 students how skills like empathy can lead to better software teams, products, and codebases. Andrea is the author of the forthcoming book, Empathy-Driven Software Development, and a passionate community builder. Her ideas have been featured in prominent industry media, such as The First Round Review, InfoQ, Software Engineering Daily, and more.
Her work draws on decades of experience blending strategic communication and software system resiliency. In 2009, Andrea co-founded Corgibytes and spent over a decade helping clients modernize complex legacy software systems as its CEO. In 2015, she launched Legacy Code Rocks, an online community and podcast for people who find joy in software maintenance.
Andrea is currently the Co-Founder and Chief Solutions Officer at Heartware, where she focuses on helping tech teams bring empathy, compassion, and communication skills to their work. She is the founder of Empathy In Tech, an online community where people can level up their technical empathy skills in a supportive environment. You can recognize Andrea by the JavaScript tattoo on her wrist and learn more about her work at andreagoulet.com.
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Empathy-Driven Software Development
We don't code for the compiler. We code for people. When we anchor our software development on the perspectives of others, we realize tremendous benefits: cleaner code, lower technical debt, faster feature development, improved collaboration, increased morale, reduced bias and harm, less legacy code, and more nimble architecture, just to name a few. In this presentation, participants will explore ways to make empathy executable by learning to:
* Identify opportunities to apply empathy throughout daily development practices
* Use technical empathy skills to enhance code maintainability
* Collaborate with others and provide effective feedback
* Implement communication and empathy frameworks to reduce cognitive load
* Explore empathy concepts using software development metaphors
This talk can be adapted to be a keynote or workshop. It is geared towards people who spend most of their time writing code and is accessible to people who don't. Versions of this talk have been presented at Deliver: Agile, XP Agile, QCon, DDDEurope, Agile Greece, Agile Serbia, GLA Summit, CTO Summit, .NET Fringe, Ruby Nation, and more.
Becoming an Empathetic Leader
Over 90% of CEOs and employees think empathy is important for business, and research backs that up. When business leaders exhibit strong empathy skills, their teams report being significantly more innovative, motivated, and engaged. Empathetic leadership decreases burnout, increases well-being, and improves retention. It’s also a critical component to achieving your inclusion initiatives. No wonder empathy is consistently hailed as the skill of the future.
While empathy is a critical skill, many leaders struggle to integrate it into their working style. Nearly 7 out of 10 CEOs report that it’s hard for them to demonstrate empathy at work and worry they will be less respected if they show empathy in the workplace. In this presentation, participants will bolster their leadership capabilities by learning how to increase empathic capacity and confidence.
This talk can be adapted to be a keynote presentation or a workshop. It can be delivered to a general audience or adapted to provide specific examples for leaders in the software industry.
Beyond Binaries: Empathy for Engineers
Are you technical or non-technical? Good with people or good with machines? Do you have soft skills or hard skills? These binaries are everywhere, and they can limit our ability to collaborate effectively with people who don't think like we do.
In this presentation, we'll look at how the myth of empathy as intuition often gets in the way of healthy interdepartmental communication. People in marketing, recruiting, finance, and operations will learn to appreciate the detail-oriented, analytical, and often skeptical mindset many engineers bring to their work. Engineers and other deep-thinking specialists will learn specific research methods to understand business-minded people who tend to think more broadly. By looking at empathy as a system instead of a binary, participants will walk away with specific practices to help them:
* Build rapport and trust with colleagues from different departments
* Appreciate the value of different perspectives and skills
* Communicate domain expertise clearly without dumbing things down
* Reduce defensiveness, stereotyping, and backchanneling
* Use conflict to drive innovation instead of disconnection
This presentation can be adapted to be a keynote or a workshop.
Communication Strategies for Technical Content
As technologists, we often need to share important information with people whose expertise isn’t as deep as ours. Effective communication in these places can determine whether a project gets funded, who gets promoted, how much customers want to purchase products, and more. It even impacts our code. When we communicate with clarity and purpose, our codebases are easier to read, modify, and deploy.
In this presentation, you’ll learn specific and immediately actionable techniques for communicating highly technical information in plain language. Instead of “dumbing things down,” you’ll learn frameworks that will help you tailor your message for different audiences while still conveying concepts accurately.
This talk can be adapted to be a keynote or a workshop. It's more geared towards people who are deep-thinking, detail-oriented specialists but can be customized to fit a broader audience as well.
Andrea Goulet
Co-Founder, Heartware
Richmond, Virginia, United States
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