The Way of the Tech Lead

You're expected to lead, but also to do. To delegate, but stay in the details. To have answers, but create space for others to find them. Nobody hands you a manual. Most of us figure it out by getting it wrong first.

The Tao Te Ching points to something useful. About knowing when to act, how to act, and when stillness is the more powerful choice. Finding the grain and the shape, and working with it rather than against it.

That's easier said than done when you're new to leadership, or when you're in it and still finding your feet.

This talk shares six lessons gathered from many years leading tech teams and mentoring tech leads through the same hard moments you're navigating now. Real stories. Hard-won thinking. Nothing theoretical.

You won't leave with a manual. But you might leave with a better map.

Being Secure By Design: Engineer Led Security

Secure-enough software is a must-have, but there are never enough experts to work with every team, and solve every problem.

A solution is centralised control and managed releases that push product engineers out of ownership of both their product's security and their software operation. Other orgs risk the land-of-do-as-you-please, hoping their engineers make good enough choices with what they know to keep the business safe. Trust, enablement, and partnerships are rarely on the menu.

In the early 2020s, I had the opportunity to solve this problem. Valuing autonomy and flow in software delivery as much as solid security, I took a different approach: treating security as a platform, to support and enable engineers and the company.
This talk will demonstrate how a small team of engineers had a big impact on security across a set of engineering teams. And how Product Squads can grow to co-own security with an organisation’s IT stakeholders, so that teams can keep shipping features, whilst becoming more secure.

This talk will present how you can build a developer enablement platform formed of security knowledge and tools. How providing Paved Paths can engage with your engineering teams to guide them to own product security, and empowering them to make timely, educated, and informed decisions. This talk provides a map of the journey we took, the values we lived and what we learnt on the way.

It will help you build places in your culture where security can blossom, and you can deliver more safety.

Build 10x Teams not 10x Engineers

There’s a strong desire in the industry to seek out the semi-mythical '10x Engineer', whose productivity is maximal and can surpass whole teams. These individuals are rare, unique to context and impossible to generate on demand. Worse, they can cause as many long-term problems as they might solve in the short.

If we instead look to multiply team effectiveness and build 10x Teams, we can get many of the advantages with few of the dangers. We can gain productivity, adaptivity, and resilience that scales.

This talk will discuss our desire for increased positive productivity. It will bring you 4 team multipliers and walk through how you can use them to make your teams more effective.

I'll will share stories to demonstrate that both Managers and Individual Contributors can intentionally build super-powered effectiveness in their teams.

Foundations, Walls, and Towers: Growing Engineers at Every Stage

Engineers want career progression, and when they don't get it they leave, or worse, they stay, stay unhappy, and stagnate.

Companies that truly invest in employee development see a massive uptick in retention and productivity. Yet most development frameworks are simple, and treat all engineers the same, regardless of career stage.

This talk introduces a practical model: foundations, walls, and towers, that gives managers and coaches a clear way to support engineers differently at each stage: from building solid fundamentals, through broadening skills, to deep mastery and beyond.

Grounded in real stories and backed by retention research, you'll leave with tools you can use in your next one-to-ones.

Delivered at Agile Cambridge and Agile on the Beach