Increasing Your Happiness in Meetings
Engineers moving into leadership sometimes have a hard time navigating the increased demands for meetings. And when meetings waste your time, or go off the rails, it hurts your team’s productivity and even affect their ability to work together. How can you make meetings better? In her talk, “Three Ways to Grow Your Happiness in Meetings,” Marcy Swenson offers great strategies for making meetings vital and worthwhile.
Michael Ruggiero Director of Engineering, Exchange
Embracing Inconsistency
Humans are inconsistent and unpredictable by nature. This can come in the form of conflicting requests from upper management or from engineers who want to change teams only to want to quickly change again. Our job as leaders is to accept that fact and deal with the consequences.
Peter Kinmond Engineering Team Lead, Client
What Do 1-on-1s Really Mean?
“If someone tells you that you are an irritating boss, that is a huge gift they are giving you…”
As a leader, you have the responsibility to develop individuals on your team. One of the ways to move an employee forward is to gain insight on their thoughts about their place on the team. But how do you gain this insight?
Suzanne Kimm Manager, Ad Operations
The Leadership Machine
We have seen progress, but still have a long way to go before we reach gender parity in leadership. There is a constant stream of new content reminding us that this is a problem, but rarely do we see comprehensive research and actionable advice.
Kelley Robinson Engineering Team Lead, Optimization
Say It Right
Giving feedback is easy. Giving constructive, actionable feedback is not. In this talk, Tasneem Minadakis, Head of Rider Growth at Uber, draws upon her 12+ years in the industry to teach you how to do just that, laying out a framework you can use to provide more valuable feedback.
Adam Coulter Senior Software Engineer
What Should I Be Doing Right Now?
As a manager, how do you decide what to spend your time on each day?
Cynthia Maxwell, Director of iOS Engineering at Slack provides a framework for how managers should focus their time. As a mom, maintaining a healthy work-life balance is important to her, and the framework she’s developed aims to do just that.
Chris Metcalfe Engineering Team Lead, SFP
Accelerating Impact
“It’s a lot easier to loosen up some of the structure over time than it is to later go back and inject it.”
Engineering onboarding has become more important as many companies rapidly scale their engineering teams. Companies are starting to realize how much they are missing out by not having their new engineers be productive as soon as possible, instead of relying on ad-hoc methods to bring people up to speed.
Peter Kinmond Engineering Team Lead, Client
Developing Your Team
“People don’t get opportunities to grow in accordance with their potential, they get it in accordance to where they happen to be standing.”
Everyone has heard about, in some form or another, the model of growth where you alternate between your comfort zone and stress zone and eventually attain a zig zag path of upward growth. But what actually helps people grow?
Danica Shei Senior Software Engineer
The Impossible Job
Being a great leader is a difficult job. While not impossible, it certainly feels that way at times. Many leaders have received little to no formal management training and getting started can seem overwhelming. Michael Lopp, VP of Engineering at Slack, lays out a set of sixteen hacks you can use to make the job a little bit easier.
Aaron Baker Senior Software Engineer
Welcome to Calibrate 2016
We are so pleased to share with everyone the talks from the 2016 Calibrate conference for engineering managers. Those who attended Calibrate this year had the benefit of asking questions, talking with each other, and chatting with speakers throughout the day. What we’re bringing to you now is the content from that day; something we’d like to share with all new engineering managers, everywhere.
Sonya Green Calibrate 2016 Program Director
