Leadership Stand-Ups

Standups are standard practice among developers, but when you move into the realm of leadership they stop. If you’re a team leader then you will probably join your team’s stand-up meeting, but often you only contribute a brief update, if anything at all. Mostly you just listen and perhaps facilitate discussion on other people’s updates.

In Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni (affiliate link included) the CEO in the story asks her executives to consider that group as their primary team. I’ve been asked to do the same too, but really, if you only meet once a week or perhaps even less frequently, how can you do that? If a group is your primary team then you should know (at a high level) what everyone is working on, and what their main problems are. A leadership team where you only discuss what people decide to bring to the table will not function as well as a group that can benefit from collective wisdom being brought to bear on problems.

When you start a leadership position your calendar suddenly fills up with meetings, so the idea of adding a daily meeting might seem crazy, and it probably is. However leadership is a different role to a developer, and you can use different processes to achieve the same goals.

LeadDev London 2023 (Day 2)

This is a follow-up to my first post about day 1 of the LeadDev London 2023 conference. That post covers my notes on talks from day 1, as well as my thoughts on the overall conference.

Here are my notes on talks from day 2…

LeadDev London 2023 (Day 1)

Recently I was lucky enough to attend Lead Dev London for a second time (see my review of 2022 day 1 and day 2). As with last year, this is a one-track conference focused on leadership and engineering management. Unlike last year LeadDev was also running a separate one-track conference at the same time, StaffPlus, focused on Staff+ engineers. As I didn’t have a ticket to that, I didn’t attend any of those talks but it was great to see LeadDev expanding and I’ll be considering StaffPlus next year.

LeadDev London 2022 Day 2

Recently I was lucky enough to go to LeadDev London. You can read about my general thoughts, and the first day of talks, here. This post covers the second day.

The following is a summary of my notes from each talk. Any mistakes, errors or things that don’t make sense are entirely my fault. Hopefully, this will provide a flavour of each talk and inspire you to watch the ones that interest you the most to get the full story.

LeadDev London 2022 (Day 1)

Last week I was lucky enough to spend a couple of days at the LeadDev London 2022 conference. This is a series of conferences aimed at senior engineers and engineering managers, although for obvious reasons it’s been a few years since it was last held.

The conference itself was held in the Barbican Hall, which in general is a lovely venue. The seats in the hall were comfortable, and spending two days sitting there was not as unpleasant as I had feared. The Barbican itself was built in the early 1980s, and a few areas, in particular, looked like they needed some refurbishment - particularly the downstairs men’s toilets.