Necessity is the mother of invention. It’s a well-known proverb and means that the primary driving force for most new inventions is a need. When it comes to product innovation, those needs or ‘pain points’ are most easily identified when people in different roles tell you about them. You then follow a well-defined product innovation and development roadmap to create a solution to the problem.

But how do you solve a problem users don’t know is there? Steve Jobs famously said “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them”. With the ever-increasing pace of tech innovation and its ability to continually disrupt established ways of working, his statement has never been more true. So what is the trigger? How can you identify a ‘problem’ by convincing users that there’s a better way to do something when the current way of doing it works just fine.

Join Sanjeev Mervana, Vice President of Product Management for Cisco’s Emerging Technologies & Incubation team, as he details how to identify, generate, screen, and manage new innovation and incubation ideas that ultimately fuel growth.

Policies, norms, and practices are an integral part of software development practices and undeniably important for delivering scalable and robust systems at high quality. Yet, they can simultaneously be a blocker to fast, iterative development processes which are vital to creating a culture of continuous innovation across the organization.
Even cloud developers who are striving to build bleeding-edge systems are often restricted in delivering value at their optimal personal speed. Handcuffs are being imposed on them by important, yet cumbersome cloud approval processes, as well as unnecessarily long wait times during deployment and testing stages within their cloud infrastructure.
In this talk we will shed some light on common inefficiencies and roadblocks that cloud developers face when developing against public clouds. We will discuss how to give back control and autonomy to developers over their own dev environments and tools with local and hybrid cloud development patterns, to foster innovation and fast feedback loops. Most importantly, we will highlight how the same concepts which give full autonomy to individual developers can also be leveraged to substantially improve team collaboration and feedback loops across team borders, for the best possible developer engagement across all stages of the CI/CD pipeline.
If you feel like you are not getting the full potential out of your cloud team, join me in this thought provoking session and let’s discuss strategies on how to free your development teams from their handcuffs - while embracing security, quality, and compliance. 

How do you launch a product with a bare-bones team working remotely in the middle of a pandemic?

In June 2020, I was tasked with taking an idea to launch in just eight weeks with nine engineers. I’d never met this team, and wouldn’t for almost two years: the pandemic had just locked everyone down.

But the investments had been made, and a date was set. I had to create a long-term vision with moments to spare and weeks to deliver.

There’s a saying: Take the leap, and build your wings on the way down. So that’s what we did.

But before you wonder how many 24-hour days the engineers put in? Not many. How frantically decisions were made? Not at all. How did the time crunch inform our tech stack? (Hint: we love Python, but Go was faster). And how does one cobble this all together, anyway?

The key to building and launching a product against outlandish technical constraints isn’t by grinding a small team into dust by making them row the boat until they can’t move. It’s by building that boat smartly, beginning with the end in mind, so you can build as you row with thoughtfully selected parts that move and scale with you from the get go.

The audience will learn:

How to replicate - or modify for themselves - my unique approach to tripling our remote team around the world in just two months

How to structure their organization for optimum collaboration, management, and conflict resolution during incredibly tight release schedules

Create 24/7 workflows without working your teams 24/7

How to choose the right tech stack for the project to get a massive project to market in a competitive timeline – without churning engineers or running into multiple dead-ends and refactors due to hasty decisions. 

Last year, CircleCI hit hyper-growth and needed to hire more engineers quickly. But the process was taking too long, so we had to figure out how to improve it.

We tried many things, including outsourcing technical interviews to a third party. When we still weren’t moving fast enough or finding the right talent, we iterated on our process again and again.

After conducting more than 6,000 engineering interviews in one year, Michael Stahnke, VP of Platform at CircleCI, shares what our engineering organization learned about how to scale the technical interview process and find top tech talent for growing startups. 

Over the last ten years the role of a software engineer has evolved drastically. Software continues to reach unprecedented scale and complexity. Organizations from all industries are now becoming software companies and with the pandemic everyone is feeling the effects of burnout. Creating an industry with healthy productivity is paramount but too much of a focus on “going faster,” without addressing burnout, is a recipe for failure. Engineering managers need to constantly balance both and as we move increasingly remote, these problems are even more acute. Ravs Kaur, CTO of Uplevel will share insights on how today’s engineering managers can ensure an efficient pipeline while making sure engineers are happy and healthy.