Keynote speaker, panelist, moderator.
4 conferences, 6 panels, 6 podcasts a year on engineering leadership.

Most engineers still price themselves like employees. Hours in, title up, raise once a year. That broke the moment one person with AI started delivering what a team used to. So run yourself like a portfolio. Funds: your core craft, say senior backend. ETFs: the supporting skills, product sense, decision-making, communication, network. Crypto: the virtual layer, agentic coding, AI code reviews, AI planning. We sort which of your holdings AI just made cheap, and where to rebalance.

You walk out with the 8-step market-value playbook and the Developer Value Calculator, so you can score your own position before the next salary conversation.

Your market value is not your salary. It is what the market would pay you tomorrow, and most engineers have never tested it. Twelve steps in three phases: know what you actually offer, build the network that hears about it, then negotiate. First delivered at ELC meetup #37, built on 3,400+ mentoring sessions, and the outcome is binary: hired, or boosted where you are.

You walk out with all twelve steps named in the order they have to go in, plus the Developer Value Calculator, so you know your number before anyone else names it.

It is 8am, the coffee is brewing, and three agentic teams have been shipping since you went to bed. You have not written a line of code. This one is hands-on: you build and direct agentic product teams with Claude Code in the room. Never opened a terminal? You will here, for the first time, and it will not be scary.

You leave with a working setup on your own machine, the free AI toolkit wired into it, and a morning routine that starts with triage instead of standup prep.

Coursera licences nobody opens. A training budget that expires in December. Learning culture is not a benefits line, it is what happens in the twenty minutes after something breaks. Eleven concrete steps, the order they have to go in, and the two that fail if you skip the first one.

You leave with the 11-step guide and the Team Lead Readiness Test, so the people you are growing can see their own gaps instead of waiting for you to name them.

Three years in the Bay Area as Principal Software Architect at Databricks. Then building engineering through Mews Series C, eight teams to eighty, while the roadmap kept shipping. Then walking away from a $350k role and carrying $75k of debt to start something of my own. The parts that do not make the LinkedIn version.

You leave with the mentor versus coach versus advisor self-test, so you work out which of the three your next step actually needs instead of collecting all of them.

Teams underperform for human reasons. Dropping agents into a team that is unclear about its purpose just produces confusion faster. Ninety days, three phases: clarity about which calls the agents are allowed to make, then who signs off on their output and what happens when it is wrong, then the review habits that hold once the novelty wears off.

You leave with the free AI toolkit for engineering leaders, nine tools plus the Claude skills behind them, so the diagnostic runs on your team's numbers rather than mine.

DORA four keys, deploy frequency, lead time. You instrumented all of it and the team still feels slow. Thirty-plus implementations later the pattern is consistent: the metrics measure the pipeline, not the decisions. We go through what actually moved, and what I got wrong the first ten times.

You leave with the Engineering Leadership Benchmarks dataset, first-party numbers from 3,400+ sessions under CC BY 4.0, so you compare your team against something real instead of a vendor blog post.

You took the lead role and kept the keyboard. Two years on, the codebase moved without you, the team routes around you on technical calls, and you are the bottleneck on both sides. The trap is not staying technical. It is never deciding which technical.

You leave with the Team Lead Readiness Test: seventeen questions, six dimensions, a straight verdict and your top two gaps. Three minutes, and it will tell you things your manager has not.

The coaching market rewards feeling better, not being better. Both leave the session energised. Only one changes what the team does on Monday. We go through the questions that separate them, and the answers that should end the call.

You leave with the mentor versus coach versus advisor self-test, three questions, so you buy the one you need rather than the one with the best landing page.

Status update, awkward silence, or the recurring slot you both quietly want cancelled. The format is not the problem, the habits around it are. We diagnose what is broken in the 1:1s you run now and rebuild those thirty minutes into the most useful block on your calendar.

You leave with the 1:1 Playbook, situation-specific scripts for the conversations you keep postponing, and a question set you can run in tomorrow's 1:1.