Hadi Hariri
Never believed in elevator pitches
Actions
Hadi Hariri has spent over 35 years in software, as a developer, consultant, and leader.
He started out building custom software for businesses ranging from real estate firms to large print companies, automating how they worked and learning that most problems are business problems first. He later spent over a decade at tooling companies and software consultancies before joining JetBrains, where he stayed for nearly 17 years.
At JetBrains he started as a Developer Advocate, working with the .NET, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin communities. He built and led the developer advocacy team, created KotlinConf, helped grow the Kotlin community, and served as President of the Kotlin Foundation. Over time his work moved behind the scenes, into communications, crisis response, privacy, governance, cross-department programmes and, finally, operations as SVP.
He has been speaking for more than two decades, at events from Google I/O and Devoxx to Gartner and Microsoft conferences. He has created courses, hosted a podcast, and wrote Public Speaking Tips. He lives in Spain.
Area of Expertise
Why Are We Building This? A Developer's Guide to How the Business Thinks
"Why are we building this?" "Who decided that?" "Why does management keep changing priorities?"
Most developers have asked these questions. Many of the frustrations in engineering teams come from the distance between the people writing the code and the reasons the code is being written.
I started my career building custom software for all kinds of businesses, and learned early that most technical problems are business problems first. Later, moving from developer advocacy into communications, governance and operations, I saw the same gap from the other side.
This talk is about closing that gap. How businesses actually make decisions. Why priorities shift. What managers and executives are really worried about. And why developers who understand this make better technical decisions, have more influence, and are far more likely to work on things that matter. No MBA required.
Why AI Won't Fix What's Actually Broken
Can't agree on priorities? Add a tool. Communication problems? Add another tool to the ten you already have.
For decades our industry has believed that the right tool will fix problems that are really about people, decisions and accountability. AI has made that belief stronger than ever. We can now produce plans, strategies and code faster than ever before. But faster output isn't the same as value, and a 16-page strategy document isn't the same as a decision.
In this talk I'll look at why we keep reaching for tools when the real problem is human: unclear priorities, avoided decisions, missing ownership, poor communication. I'll look at what AI changes and what it doesn't, and why the hardest parts of building software were never the typing. Judgment, trade-offs, owning a hard call. None of that goes away because a model can write the first draft.
It's Not Complicated. You're Just Not Deciding.
We often say things are complicated. Usually they're not. There's a hard decision on the table, and nobody is ready to make it.
So we wait. Projects keep running long after they should have stopped. Milestones become suggestions. People who aren't delivering stay where they are. Data gets questioned when it hurts and accepted when it helps. And everyone watching learns what success in the organisation really looks like.
The cost of indecision rarely shows up on a dashboard. It shows up as lost momentum, lost trust, and good people quietly giving up.
Let's look at why leaders avoid hard decisions, how accountability erodes without anyone noticing, and the practical mechanisms that make decisions easier to take.
Goals and Strategies - Big words thrown around
What is your goal? What is your strategy? How many times have you heard your team lead or someone else ask you this? How many times have you thrown these words around? Asking someone what their goals and strategies are can make you feel smart and empowered. It can also make others feel less. But let's be honest. Do we even know what we're asking or what we're presenting when we throw these words around?
In this talk, let's face some of the real challenges when it comes to setting goals and the strategies required to reach our objectives. Let's define what these mean and where and how they can actually be used in order to be effective. Not intimidating.
Faster at What? The AI Value Problem
AI adoption has become a metric in itself. Usage dashboards. Token consumption leaderboards. Mandates to "use AI" in performance reviews. Reports of hours saved per employee, per week, per team.
None of it answers the only question that matters: what value did it produce?
Time saved is not value if the time goes into more of the same. More output is not value if nobody needed it. A 16-page strategy document generated in ten minutes is not progress if nobody reads it, and worse if someone acts on it without understanding it. When we reward consumption, we get consumption. Teams learn to look busy with AI rather than to be better with it.
In this talk I'll look at the mistakes organisations are making as they roll out AI: maximising usage instead of outcomes, automating work that shouldn't exist, measuring activity because value is harder to measure, and confusing speed with progress. Then we'll look at what to do instead. How to start from the problem rather than the tool, how to define value before you deploy, and how to measure whether AI is changing anything that matters, accounting for what is possible today.
Communities Aren't Marketing Channels
Lots of companies want a community. Few understand what that actually means. Too often it becomes a Slack workspace, a newsletter and a set of engagement metrics, managed like any other marketing channel.
Communities don't work like that. They're built on trust, on giving before asking, and on people feeling they own something, not that they're being targeted.
I've spent much of my career on both sides: as a developer in communities, and helping build them from scratch, from user groups and online spaces to conferences. In this talk I'll share what it actually takes. Why developer advocacy has to be grounded in being useful and honest, how to align community work with company strategy without killing it, how to measure what matters without turning people into numbers, and the mistakes that keep repeating across the industry.
Nobody Reads the Handbook: Writing Rules That People and AI Agents Can Actually Follow
Every organisation has rules. Policies, processes, guidelines, handbooks. In many organisations they're scattered across wikis, nobody knows who owns them, and half are out of date. People get by anyway, by asking around and relying on tribal knowledge.
AI agents can't do that. They'll follow whatever they find, outdated or not, and they'll do it at scale. Suddenly the state of your documentation stops being a minor annoyance and becomes a real risk.
In this talk I'll share what it takes to build a system for official documents: clear ownership, status, review cadence and a structure that both people and machines can navigate. We'll also look at the bigger lesson. If a process needs a manual to be followed by a person, the process is probably the problem. Good systems guide behaviour by design, and documentation should exist for governance, not as a crutch for broken processes.
When Things Go Wrong: What Crisis Communication Teaches You About Leadership
Nobody plans for the bad day. An outage, a public mistake, a decision that backfires. And yet how an organisation handles that day says more about its leadership than any number of good quarters.
The patterns are remarkably consistent. The instinct to wait until you have all the facts. The temptation to soften the message. Too many people deciding, or nobody deciding at all. And the slow realisation that trust is either built before the crisis or not at all.
In this talk I'll look at what crises reveal about how organisations really work, why candour and speed beat polish, how to set up the process before you need it, and how those same lessons apply to the everyday, less dramatic moments where leaders choose between being clear and being comfortable.
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top