Panel: Day to Day TL Practices

We each get through our everyday TL lives with our own bag of best practices, life hacks and mindful habits. We’ve collected those from books, blogs, mentors, and our own hard-earned experience.

Now it’s time to share!

We’ve gathered a small panel of folks with team lead experience to share some of the strategies they use to do their very best TLing.

Topics for the panel

• How do you give positive feedback?

• How do you give negative feedback?

• How do you deal with inter-team conflict?

• How do you run your one-on-ones?

• How do you deal with a frustrated person who reports to you?

• How do you deal with complaints from people who report to you about your superiors/the company?

• How do you deal with complaints about people who report to you from others in the company?

• How do you help your reports plan their career growth?

• How do you manage high performers vs low performers?

• How do you onboard new employees?

•

Our panel

Ash Christopher - Director of Engineering, Wave HQ

Ash Christopher is the Senior Director of Engineering at Wave, leading a team of over 40 world class engineers on a quest to build Wave’s next generation of financial services products. He has spent his years at Wave focused on problems of scale and sees technology as the means to increase developer productivity and efficiency.

In past careers, Ash rebuilt G Adventures eCommerce website, and developed monitoring, communications and safety systems for oil rigs at Pason.

In addition to new challenges at Wave, he recently entered a whole new adventure as a new father.

Ania Halliop - Development Manager, Freshbooks

Ania Halliop is a software development manager at FreshBooks and co-founder of local meetup ExploreTech Toronto. Ania has been developing software for more than 15 years, and has been involved growing high-performing teams and leading organizational change for more than 10 years. She is a certified PMP and a CTI co-active coach in training.

Ofer Guttman - Director of Software Engineering, Points

Been leading engineers for many years. Experienced in leading technical teams of all shapes and sizes across different technology fields. Lead teams on all phases, from forming a team to improve long running successful teams. Strong believer that the ratio between the importance of the art of leading to the time spent on learning it is far from where it needs to be.

Will Harford - Integrations Architect, Unata

Will has 15 years of development and ops experience leading teams on B2B SaaS products, software and hardware integrations, as well as full stack development. Currently with Unata, a Toronto-based startup specializing in 1-to-1 digital platforms for grocers, Will leads the DevOps, Activation and Retention teams. Prior to Unata, Will was the software development manager of a geographically diverse team of developers that created and supported Enterprise rent-a-car's carshare application. Overseeing architectural vision, goals, and engineering support, Will is driven by a strong belief in enabling teams to achieve greatness.

Luke Reeves - Developer Lead, Shopify

Luke has been bouncing back and forth between individual contributor and leadership in technology for close to twenty years now, and is currently a lead at Shopify for the Platform team.

About this meetup

Leading & managing teams of software engineers can be challenging. This meetup is for technical leaders of all experience levels to connect, share stories and learn from each other. Topics include all of the typical Team Lead duties such as recruiting talent, team building, coaching, delegating, scaling technical groups, managing projects, etc.

Meetups are catered, start with a presentation from a domain expert and continue with lots of interesting conversations with your peers.