Sonalake at LeadDev 2024 Berlin

My name is Małgorzata Krzyżaniak and I've been in a management role for the last several years. While I've spent most of my time managing projects, I've also transitioned into leading a team of engineers. This has put a different perspective on my work practice and I’ve sought out ways to learn how to cope better with both project delivery and team dynamics. Sonalake provides training time for all of us each year, so, at the beginning of November, I travelled to Berlin to participate in the LeadDev Berlin 2024 conference.

While the conference theme was the introduction of AI to the many processes during the development lifecycle, and there were some insightful case studies on the successful delivery, what caught my attention was much more the human interaction aspects. No matter how aggressive the timeline is, how innovative the project is, or how catchy the company manifesto is, at the basic level, it's the people who matter most, the people who are doing the actual work. As well as making sure that AI wasn't hallucinating during the process!

Here are some highlights from the talks:

• The talk that moved me personally was "What we talk about when we talk about leadership" by Lena Reinhard, who shared a moving, personal view on the current leadership crisis with some insights on minorities. Should we keep pushing for innovation regardless of the actual cost, which may increase the carbon footprint? Should we keep pushing people to get more and more on their plates, which may result in burnout, or use layoffs as a new big thing in management? Should we encourage people to be "authentic" but only within some boundaries? Many thoughts, many questions in my head. A similar topic was tackled by Irina Stanescu, who shared some advice on leading the team through scarcity when there's no option to grow, but the growing workload needs to be unloaded.

• Aman Bakshi (Booking.com), Yamila Maio (Toptal), Renu Yadav (Grab) and Eugene Klyuchnikov (GetYourGuide at the time) shared different experiences on how to tackle a high-visibility and/or time-sensitive project across their organizations without losing their mind. The key words were: good communication, transparency and empathy. The notion of a "tiger team" was introduced with all concerns about how it affects the company and people. 

• Nickolas Means, in his brilliant presentation "Ice, confusion, and the 38,000ft crash" in an engaging way presented a case study of an air crash to share some insight on training and learning. If we take easy parts and automate them, the hard parts can be even more difficult to fix "by hand". At the same time, we won't have a safe training ground for newbies to learn, and as a result, we won't have skilled engineers who will be required to oversee the automation.

• Meri Williams in "Tackling Tech Debt" touched one of the most sore and, at the same time, often neglected areas on how to make sure that the code is up to date without losing the speed and making people insane.  

• My close-to-home talk was "On-call Revolution: Building a Culture of Ownership and Collaboration" by Ayelen Chavez which was a good summary of how a modern on-call should look like. Happy to share that in Sonalake we tick most of the boxes in this area: we create documentation and keep it up to date, escalation paths are known, we have a no-blame culture and lessons learnt are shared. 

• Finally, I find talks related to mental health and burnout very informative. I valued sessions covering authenticity, technical diplomacy, effective communication, mentoring and sponsorship, and embracing neurodiversity and feedback culture in multi-cultural teams.  I have two honourable mentions from these - the first one was Jakob Anders's "There and back again – A cautionary tale about entering middle management" which was hilarious and eye-opening. The second was from Denise Yu who explained how important it is to level up the whole team, not only the strongest Pokemon. 

When I returned I was able to share some of the things I’d learned with the team through some informal internal talks and also through some changes in my practice. We’re trying out some new things regularly!

I hope that the LeadDev conference will be as inspiring next year.