Adel Smee
Engineering Director at Ferocia
Adel Smee
Engineering Director at Ferocia
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. Adel 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.
Upcoming conference sessions featuring Adel Smee
Scaling Up Engineering Management
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.
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