Ever wonder what it’s really like to go from being a hands-on UX designer to leading a team in Big Tech? Or maybe you’re experiencing that “fear of missing out” when you see others chasing the “dream” design job?

In this talk, Tsvetelina will share an honest look at her journey from an Individual Contributor to a Design Manager, highlighting both the positives and the tougher parts you don’t always hear about.

We’ll explore:

The realities of climbing the UX career ladder and transitioning into management.

How FOMO shapes our perceptions of success - and what’s the reality of being part of Big Tech

Honest comparisons of the UX work in startups, agencies, and Big Tech, so you can figure out which path might fit you best.

Come away with practical guidance, honest reflections, and actionable strategies—minus the industry hype. Whether you’re weighing your next career move or simply curious about what it means to lead in the ever-evolving UX field, this session will help you gain clarity on how to forge your own path to success.

Writing a strategy document can drive a plethora of initiatives on the right direction, it's a very powerful tool. But what is an engineering strategy, and how do you write one that works? In this talk, we will explore the definition, structure, and process of creating an engineering strategy, based on my own and other executive's experiences.

Some of the finest leaders are the ones who remember what it was like to work their way up from the bottom or who can foresee themselves in other positions.

As corporations are being taken over, we have seen a shift in how companies function on a human level. In this session, you’ll learn how to use empathy driven development as your superpower to become a better engineer.

The talk would start by demystifying the myths, followed by how to embed empathy in your engineering practices. We'll focus on how developer empathy plays a major role in every stage of your career, be that as a mentee or a mentor, a junior or a senior engineer, etc.

This talk is going to be beneficial for everyone, no matter the experience level. From junior engineers to seniors, community members, managers, etc. This talk is suited for all the technology teams, enterprise leadership, or open source communities as they will learn how to elevate their work with developer empathy, in every field.

Empathy is the root of open source and communities. It's what makes us human and builds a thriving culture. This talk will benefit the ecosystem as we'll learn how to implement the highly overlooked developer empathy practices in our day to day lives along with some of the mistakes to avoid.

How can we expect LLM products to impact software engineering?

Join Chelsea Troy for an examination of how LLM products are built. She'll walk through the domain: what data LLMs are trained on and how they're trained, and spell out how those factors impact what LLMs tend to do well with and where they tend to struggle.

Then, we'll talk about how that affects the design of the products built around LLMs, like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, or Devon.

Finally, take a tour with Chelsea through current research elucidating the impact of LLM product use on developer workflows, and dig into what that means for us as practitioners in an LLM-enabled world.