We are delighted to bring you an event as part of Manchester Tech Week (https://www.dtxevents.io/manchester-tech-week) on Thursday 30th April at 6pm.
Event name: The Human API: Debug Your Team's Communication
Speaker: Steve Wade, our Kubernetes Ambassador and good friend of the community. Steve is the founder of Platform Fix, a Kubernetes Ambassador for the DevOps Society, CNCF Flux maintainer, and a self-described recovering awkward person.
He has rescued 50+ platforms, saved organisations over £100M in complexity costs, and trained 6,000+ engineers across Europe. He has spoken at KubeCon, DevOpsCon, and DevOps Pro Europe, and won the Talk of the Conference award at DevFest Prague with a 90% audience engagement rate.
He also holds the record for the world's first known GitOps use at a wedding. The bride has recovered.
Event description:
Your CI/CD pipeline is fast. Your Terraform is clean. Your monitoring catches problems in seconds.
And your team is still losing a full working day every week.
Not to bad tooling. Not to technical debt. To communication failures.
The research is brutal: engineers lose 7.47 hours per week to miscommunication. That is nearly a full day. For a team of 100 engineers, that is $3.9 million a year in lost productivity, and that is before you count project failures, attrition, and incidents that happen because someone didn't speak up.
56% of project failures worldwide trace back to communication, not code.
DORA, the group that measures your deployment frequency and change failure rate, found that psychological safety is one of the strongest predictors of all four software delivery metrics. Not your tools. Not your pipeline. How your team talk to each other.
This is not a soft skills evening. This is a performance evening.
WHAT HAPPENS ON THE NIGHT
Steve Wade is taking over the entire evening. No panel. No multi-speaker lineup. One person, two hours, completely interactive.
ACT 1: The Talk (40 minutes)
"The Human API" is Steve's interactive talk on why engineers who can talk to computers in six languages can't talk to the person sitting next to them. You will stand up. You will sit down. You will practise conversations with strangers and realise that the gap between your technical brilliance and how others perceive it is wider than you thought.
You'll leave with frameworks you can use to communicate technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders, give feedback that doesn't start a war, and ask one question that will change every professional relationship you have.
ACT 2: The Workshop (60 minutes)
The talk shows you the problem. The workshop gives you the fix.
Four hands-on communication protocols, practised in small groups on real engineering scenarios. These techniques come from an FBI hostage negotiator (Chris Voss), Harvard's most-cited organisational psychologist (Amy Edmondson), and the largest study of software team performance ever conducted (Google's Project Aristotle: 180 teams, 35 statistical models, one finding that explained 43% of the variance in team performance).
The four protocols:
- The Signal/Noise Separator: Stop your code reviews from starting fights. Learn to separate observation from judgement in under 60 seconds.
- The Mirroring Protocol: An FBI-developed technique that gets three times more information from the other person without asking a single question.
- The Postmortem Reframe: Turn your incident reviews from blame sessions into the highest-trust meetings your team has all sprint.
- The Stakeholder Update Protocol: Deliver honest status updates that build trust rather than destroy it. Stop saying "on track" when you're not.
No role-play. No cringe. Just structured protocols that feel like debugging, not therapy.
WHAT YOU WALK AWAY WITH
- 4 communication protocols you can use Monday morning (your next code review, your next 1:1, your next incident)
- A personal diagnostic of where your team's communication is actually costing you (most people have never measured this)
- The one question that will change every professional conversation you have (Steve's tested this with 6,000+ engineers, it works every time)
- A free playbook with all four protocols plus bonus material (delivered during the session)
- An evening with 80 DevOps engineers who are all practising the same techniques (the networking alone is worth showing up for)
WHO THIS IS FOR
DevOps engineers, SREs, platform engineers, cloud engineers, engineering managers, and anyone who has ever:
- Sent a Slack message that was completely misconstrued
- Watched a less technical person get promoted over them
- Had a brilliant architecture rejected because they couldn't explain it
- Sat through a postmortem that was really a blame session
- Found it easier to write a Kubernetes operator than ask for a pay rise
THE DETAILS
Time: 6pm - 9pm
Location: 76 King St, Manchester M2 4NH
Register now to secure your spot - this is not a talk you sit through. This is a session you participate in. Come ready to stand up, talk to strangers, and leave with skills you'll use for the rest of your career!
