Two days, built for engineers.

Why Your Best Engineer Makes Your Worst First-Time Manager?

Aleksandra Lemańska

Somewhere in every tech organization, there's a leader who used to be the best in the room: the one who delivered on time, at the highest quality, every single time. Then they got promoted. And the thing they were best at - being precise, being independent, doing the work themselves - stopped being the job. Nobody trains for this shift. Most first-time tech leaders get handed a team and a "good luck." So they lead the only way they know how: like an engineer. Logical. Direct. Assuming that if something's obvious to them, it should be obvious to everyone else. And when it isn't, they don't see a communication gap - they see a team that isn't performing. In this talk, Aleksandra Lemańska - creator of the CQ Leadership Method and author of From Code to People - breaks down why the exact instincts that build great engineers actively work against great leadership, and what to do instead. Drawing on 10+ years and 4,500+ leaders trained across the tech industry, she'll show audiences how to decode communication the same precise way they'd debug a system. So leading a team stops feeling like the one problem they can't solve.