What we’re about
Tech Leading Ladies aims to bridge the gender gap in technical leadership teams across Australia and New Zealand.
This group is for aspiring and current technical leaders who identify as women or non-binary. We believe you can't have a great tech culture without diversity in leadership, and our goal is to ensure women in tech are supported in achieving their full potential.
Our topics focus on either managing your career, or teaching skills to be an awesome leader. We coach and support each other through our obstacles and challenges leading development teams. No matter what stage of your software development career you are in, come and join us, to be empowered or empower others.
Upcoming events (1)
See all- Scaling Up Engineering ManagementFerocia, Melbourne
At Ferocia, makers of Up, we are attempting to go beyond being good at just one thing by taking ownership of the suite of the Bendigo & Adelaide Bank Group’s customer facing software. Leading a growing business, while the problem we probably all want to have, comes with its own challenges both predictable and completely unknown. Technology, teams, processes, people, products and strategies that worked a treat at 50 people suddenly start to show the strain at 200. Some of them will flat out break at greater scale while others will start to perform the opposite function previously excelled at. E.g. The CI setup that enabled multiple deploys a day with a team of a dozen developers will cause all kinds of headaches and start actively preventing deploys. Continuing to evolve while staying good at the thing that allowed the growth is a constant journey of creative problem solving, thinking in new ways, and from new perspectives.
We are facing this challenge by growing a team of capable, empathetic and engaged Engineering Managers to create a dynamic superstructure of decision makers and technologists that will allow the company to mutate into something bigger, different and hopefully even better. In this talk I will describe the specific methods and mechanisms we have used to create a strong and effective team of managers. I’ll go through the levels of growth you can unlock with such a team. And also touch on the environmental elements (like persistent funding for teams) that enable those managers to be effective. Middle management has gotten a bit of a bad rap in the tech industry recently, but I think that’s wrong and will tell you why.
Agenda (time in Melbourne/AEST)
- 5:00pm Networking
- 5:30pm Welcome
- 5:35pm Presentation & Q&A
- 6:30pm Networking
- 7:00pm Close
This will be a HYBRID event.
Zoom link - To be posted 1hr before event starts.
In person attendees - Head for the lifts near Australia Post and someone will be downstairs to let you up to the meetup floor.
Contact organisers on Meetup or the community Slack (preferred) if you need access to the venue after the event starts. Note that the building doors lock at 6pm.Our Speaker
Adel Smee - Solving problems at the intersection of people, technology and value.
Adel is the Director of Engineering at Ferocia, trying to make banking more human. Before that Adel was at Zendesk where, for six years, she led innovation projects across a variety of technologies. Her career in tech started with teaching people to code, before she decided to break out and get paid to do it commercially at a startup, then Lonely Planet, Zendesk and now Ferocia.
Along the way she realised that her main implicit motivator is delight in the success of others, which turns out to be a really useful quality in a manager. She is obsessed with what makes people (and herself) tick and loves to hear how she's getting it wrong so she can do better. Adel is an incurable optimist who believes that one day we’ll live in a world where everybody likes their job as much as she does, but is not naïve enough to think that day is coming any time soon.
