InfoQ Homepage Leadership Content on InfoQ
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InfoQ Opens Enrollment for New AI-Assisted Engineering Online Certification Program
InfoQ has opened enrollment for the InfoQ Certified AI-Assisted Engineering Program, a five-week online certification program for senior engineers and architects who already run a coding agent against production code daily, where the open questions have moved past prompting into what the agent is allowed to touch and what catches its mistakes before a human does.
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From Projects to Products: Turning Platforms into Products People Use
Having a platform is not enough; the real challenge is ensuring that it is understandable, usable, and actually adopted by its users. A capability is done when it can be reliably used by others. To evaluate progress, you can ask yourself “Is this being used?” and “Does it reduce friction for users?” This can help align development work with actual user value rather than delivery.
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Three InfoQ Certification Cohorts Start This August: Meet the Facilitators
InfoQ has opened enrollment for three five-week online certification cohorts starting in August, each led by a senior practitioner applying QCon talk frameworks to participants' own work: architecture with Luca Mezzalira, engineering leadership with Michelle Brush, and AI security and privacy with Katharine Jarmul.
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Scaling Social Systems in Software Organizations
Fast-scaling teams must rebuild trust and psychological safety as their social systems expand. Intentional, redundant communication across multiple formats can keep everyone aligned. Cross-team rituals, buddy systems, and rotating facilitators can reduce silos by building bridges between teams. Leaders accelerate this by modeling the vulnerability they want to see.
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Developing Your Leadership Skills toward Principal Engineering
Work isn’t the only place where you can develop valuable leadership skills, Sophie Weston mentioned in the video The Principal Engineer’s Path from her QCon London talk. She suggested thinking about the things you do outside of your job where you can learn and practice useful leadership skills, and bringing your full skill set - your whole self - to work.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.