InfoQ Homepage Leadership Content on InfoQ
-
How to Shape the Engineering Culture in Software Companies
You can find your way through an organization by figuring out what artifacts people leave behind, David Grizzanti mentioned at InfoQ Dev Summit Boston. He compared culture to anthropology, suggested studying behaviors, power dynamics, and decisions first, and then patiently model and reward new norms, build allies, and use influence and leading by example, to shift engineering culture over time.
-
Lessons from Growing a Software Leadership Team
Thiago Ghisi explained how he guided managers and senior ICs to build a resilient leadership group beneath him in his talk Lessons from Growing Engineering Organizations at QCon London. Regular syncs, expectation calibration, and alignment on broader goals made leaders multipliers of culture and performance. Culture is what you do, not what you say.
-
Building Software Organisations Where People Can Thrive
Continuous learning, adaptability, and strong support networks are the foundations for thriving teams, Matthew Card mentioned. Trust is built through consistent, fair leadership and addressing toxic behaviour, bias, and microaggressions early. By fostering growth, psychological safety, and accountability, people-first leadership drives resilience, collaboration, and performance.
-
Taking the Technical Leadership Path
Technical leaders face challenges beyond individual contributor work: aligning with business on investments, managing systemic aspects, mentoring, and keeping up with a changing codebase. We need technical alignment—shared codestyle, implementation patterns, and standards—to avoid accidental complexity. Leadership grows through practicing skills, improving team issues, and acting as a role model.
-
Learnings from Cultivating Machine Learning Engineers as a Team Manager
As an AI team manager, Vivek Gupta stays broadly informed to guide AI experts effectively and drive the team. Engineers need feedback on both technical and interpersonal skills, Gupta mentioned at Dev Summit Boston. He stresses learning time, asking for help, and cross-team collaboration. Mentorship, data handling, and human-in-the-loop validation are key to success for machine learning engineers.
-
Creating Impactful Software Teams That Continuously Improve
Culture shapes how we feel, work, and succeed, says Natan Žabkar Nordberg. People thrive in different environments—some need autonomy, others structure. Trust must be given first, not earned. Leaders should guide, not control, fostering autonomy and safety.
-
QConSF 2025: Humans in the Loop: Engineering Leadership in a Chaotic Industry
At QCon SF 2025, Michelle Brush of Google explored the evolving landscape of software engineering in her keynote “Humans in the Loop: Engineering Leadership in a Chaotic Industry.” She highlighted the complexities engineers face amid automation and AI, stressing the importance of conscious competence, higher-level problem-solving, and effective leadership in navigating today's challenges.
-
The Decisions You Don't Know You're Making: QCon Keynote Explores Hidden Choices in Engineering
Engineering teams make their most consequential decisions not in architecture reviews or sprint planning, but through invisible choices embedded in metrics, defaults, and everyday behaviors. In their QCon San Francisco 2025 keynote, Shawna Martell and Dan Fike challenged the industry's focus on documented decision-making while the decisions that truly shape systems and culture go unrecognized.
-
Testing Organizations' Widespread Adoption of Agentic AI, but Leadership Lags in Understanding
Nearly all software testing teams are either using or plan to use agentic AI, but many leaders admit they lack a clear grasp of testing realities, according to a recent survey of 400 testing executives and engineering leaders.
-
How Software Engineers Can Grow into Staff Plus Roles
Software engineers can boost their impact by helping other teams, focusing on business-driven work, and building strong relationships, David Grizzanti mentioned at InfoQ Dev Summit Boston. Growth can come from mentoring, setting cultural norms, thinking strategically, and designing a career path based on what motivates you.
-
Levelling Yourself up as a Software Engineer While Climbing through the Ranks
As software engineers grow into senior, Staff+, or principal roles, they take on greater responsibility, complex projects, and influence beyond code, Suhail Patel explained in his talk about growing oneself as a software engineer at QCon London. Growth isn’t linear; it requires mastering communication, strategy, and soft influence. Writing, speaking, and 1:1s can help to expand impact.
-
How Inclusive Leadership Can Drive Lasting Success in Tech Organizations
Inclusion isn’t something you do once; it should be woven into everything, from how you make decisions to how you structure teams and run meetings.. When people feel seen and heard, they contribute more fully and meaningfully, which sustains long-term success. Matthew Card gave a presentation about leading with an inclusive-first mindset at Qcon London.
-
DevSummit Boston: Humans in the Loop: Engineering Leadership in a Chaotic Industry
At the InfoQ Dev Summit, Google’s Engineering Director Michelle Brush addressed software leaders, emphasizing the evolving landscape of software engineering amidst rising automation. She championed a shift toward higher-level cognitive skills, systems thinking, and foundational knowledge, urging engineers to embrace complexity for enhanced resilience and decision-making in their work.
-
Applying Observability to Leadership to Understand and Explain your Way of Working
Leadership observability means observing yourself as you lead, treating yourself as the system that is under observation. Alex Schladebeck shared how narrating thoughts, using mind maps, asking questions, and identifying patterns helped her as a leader to explain decisions, check bias, support others, and understand her actions and challenges.
-
Lessons Learned from Growing an Engineering Organization
As their organization grew, Thiago Ghisi's work as director of engineering shifted from being hands-on in emergencies to designing frameworks and delegating decisions. He suggested treating changes as experiments, documenting reorganizations, and using a wave-based communication approach to gather feedback, ensuring people feel heard and invested.