Tech Leadership Meetup with James Samuel (Engineering Manager at Reddit)

Join us at our next online Tech Leadership meetup.

The agenda for the evening will be as follows:
18:00 - 18:05 - Introduction and house rules.
18:05 - 19:00 - Main speaker - James Samuel
19:00 - 19:10 - Closing thoughts and details about next meetup.

Topic of Main Talk - Framework for leading with visibility

The further you go up from a development team, the more you’re removed from the team’s day-to-day challenges, activities, and flow. But to steer your teams in the right direction, guard culture, and improve team health and engagement, you need visibility (observability). You need to be able to infer the state of your teams from the outside and be able to understand the state of things by looking at data.

The holy grail of leading with visibility is to be able to answer yes to all of the questions below:

1. Can you understand how stuff is being built?
2. Can you understand how stuff gets built on time and within budget?
3. Will the stuff built continue to run?
4. Are the people building the stuff engaged and happy to take part in building the stuff being built?
5. Are your users getting value and satisfaction from what is being built?
6. In this talk, we’ll ground discussion on obtaining and measuring data that matters to give you visibility into your teams.

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James Samuel is an Engineering Manager at Reddit. James specializes in scaling software teams and software architectures. Before joining Reddit, he had worked in Fintech, EdTech, Mobility and PropTech sectors. He’s also a co-organizer of the @AWS UserGroup Berlin Meetup. James is passionate about empowering engineers through his blog, presentations, and monthly newsletter.

Twitter - https://twitter.com/samueljabiodun
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/abiodunjames/

Thank you to our sponsors Peach Payments and OfferZen!

Peach Payments (https://www.peachpayments.com/) make online commerce and digital payment acceptance easier and more accessible across all Africa. We believe in the potential of Africa and aim to grow into more countries. Based in Cape Town, South Africa, we work with small and large merchants in South Africa, Kenya and Mauritius to provide a complete toolkit to accept, manage and disburse payments through web and mobile. Our merchant partners include your favourite food delivery services, whether you are ordering in or using a meal kit, travel services that can help you book your next getaway adventure and even your neighbour’s side-hustle e-commerce store. For these partners and their customers, we aim to provide brilliant experiences that make it as easy as possible to facilitate online payments.

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OfferZen (https://www.offerzen.com/) is an online job marketplace by developers for developers. Our mission is to help people unlock their potential by helping them build awesome software. That’s why we are connecting actively looking developers with exciting job opportunities from over 1000 companies in South Africa and the Netherlands. We flip the normal recruitment process on its head – companies reach out to candidates with upfront salary information.