Resources to uplevel your leadership philosophy & practice

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A black and white photo of Lena sitting at a table, looking away thoughtfully. She has short wavy hair and is wearing a light-colored blouse. An open book is in front of her, and she appears to be in a contemplative mood.

Engineering productivity & Metrics

What engineering metrics should I use as a leader?

Swarmia CTO Rebecca Murphy and I talk about my leadership experiences, and how they’ve shaped my perspective of engineering management and managing with metrics:

  • (05:10) Maintaining situational awareness as a leader of a large engineering organization & the two purposes of engineering metrics

  • (12:20) How I help engineering organizations drive visibility & leading indicators to a visibility problem

  • (21:23) Introducing engineering metrics in a low-trust environment

  • (27:25) How (not) to roll out a metrics program

  • (30:37) My biggest learnings in rolling out metrics in engineering organizations

Measuring and Improving Engineering Productivity, and Taking Your Teams Along

  • Beyond buzzwords: What do productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness mean?

  • Beyond “implementing DORA metrics,” How can you understand and improve your team's productivity as a technical or people leader?

  • Beyond your team: How can you manage up effectively to keep your bosses informed and ensure alignment with organizational goals?

Having led dozens of teams through times of high change, I know that leading during a tech downturn presents unique challenges. You will take away actionable steps to help you improve on your team, and lead successfully through uncertain times.

Managing up: Tools to help you work better with your boss

Getting the respect your work deserves

The last thing anyone who does great work should be doing is having to take time out from doing great work to promote it to their higher-ups. Unfortunately, until the person you report to achieves omnipotence, you’re going to have to make sure their perception of your work lines up with the quality.

Designed as a real-time workshop where you should be thinking about the questions and answering them yourself, this was a game-changing conversation for the Dev Interrupted team, and hopefully a game-changing way for your work to get the respect it deserves.

Managing your boss: Debugging the most critical relationship in your work life

As much as many bosses try their best, they may not always be the stellar leaders and managers that we all wish we had: Hyper-busy, not great at communicating changes, having trouble sharing their expectations or articulating strategy, oscillating between micromanaging and being very hands-off or even absent, or overloading their reports, many of them struggle to grow their own role as the organization changes.

You’ll learn how to reverse engineer the way your boss works and walk away with a practical framework and tools that you can start using immediately and that will improve how you manage up, including:

💎 Signs that you need to invest more in how you manage up, common pitfalls, and how to address them

💎 “Is it me?”: How to assess what you can change and what to ask your boss for

💎 How to get your boss out of your business: Tools to drive alignment and clarity between you and your boss, and manage their perception of your and your team’s work

As a bonus, you’ll get tips that you can share with your own direct reports or teammates to help them develop this critical skill, too. This talk is for anyone who has a manager, No matter if you’re a senior engineer transitioning to leadership, a technical lead or engineering manager looking to scale your impact, or a senior leader aiming to improve how you lead, this talk will provide you with practical approaches to transform your relationship with your manager and accelerate your career growth.

Communication Tools for Leaders

We all know communication is a critical skill for leaders, and vital to running effective teams—but in practice, it’s often much harder than books make it sound. These guides are here to help you up your communication skills to increase your impact.

More Communication Guides are here!

Hybrid & Remote Leadership

Staying connected & working together effectively when you’re far apart

Building high-performing teams, one pixel at a time

Psychological safety is one of the leading indicators of a high performing team. Yet, forging deep human relationships and building trust can be difficult when your team is distributed or largely interacts on screens. Beyond the practical considerations of time zones, remote isolation, cultural differences, and “can you hear me now?” connection issues, there are added, real barriers in our psychology and biology that make building strong teams over distances and screens harder than for teams all in one place.

Yet, with the right conditions, distributed teams can be stronger, more deliberate, and produce better results than ones where everyone shares the same lunch table. In this talk, I will share what I learned on how to hone connection, communication, and collaboration on distributed teams. We will dive into how you can utilize these three aspects to help your engineers shape their day-to-day interactions for relationship building, design processes for creating trust and fostering an inclusive culture.

Successful Leadership in Hybrid Environments: Powerful Principles, Practical Steps, and Poignant Examples - Lena Reinhard at QCon

Successful Leadership in Hybrid Environments: Powerful Principles, Practical Steps, and Poignant Examples

Essential Leadership Skills

Find more in my guides for leaders and my playbook for middle managers.

How to become the strategic leader you need to be

You may have heard your boss say it: "You need to be more strategic!". Maybe it came up in your latest performance review. Or you just want to work more strategically in order to fill all parts of your role as a leader. Or maybe your team/organisation needs more strategic support to help them succeed. But now you're wondering:

  • What does it actually mean to really think and act strategically?

  • What actions can you take to become more strategic every day?

  • How can you improve your strategic leadership skills? And how can you create space for strategy in your busy schedule?

You're not alone with these questions! Many leaders want to (or even need to!) create space for more strategic work, but it can be really hard to do so.

You'll walk away with practical tips that you can start implementing tomorrow to help you become a more strategic leader and, consequently, more effective and successful in your role.

What engineering managers should do (and why we don’t)

Technical leadership. Hands-on coding. Process management. Project management. Delivery. People management. Architecture decisions. Product oversight. Hiring.— With so many things on an engineering manager’s plate, is it any wonder that many great engineers flounder as engineering managers?

In this talk, I will explain how our organizations currently set engineering managers up to fail and what we need to change to help them and their teams succeed.

You will leave with a clearer understanding of what progressive, people-centric engineering management should look like, how to establish it in your organization, and how rethinking your approach to engineering management will help your engineering teams thrive.

Measuring and Improving Engineering Productivity, and Taking Your Teams Along

After years of rapid growth, the winds have changed in many tech companies, with strategy changes, budget cuts, restructurings, and layoffs. Productivity and efficiency have become the business buzzwords of the season, and while pressure towards “more engineering productivity” is mounting in many organizations, it can be difficult to apply these abstract concepts to engineering teams and turn them into concrete actions that don’t alienate your team and lead to lasting impact that aligns with your stakeholders’ needs. I’m here to help. In this talk, we’ll go:

  • Beyond buzzwords: What do productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness mean?

  • Beyond “implementing DORA metrics,” How can you understand and improve your team's productivity as a technical or people leader?

  • Beyond your team: How can you manage up effectively to keep your bosses informed and ensure alignment with organizational goals?

Having led dozens of teams through times of high change, I know that leading during a tech downturn presents unique challenges. You will take away actionable steps to help you improve on your team, and lead successfully through uncertain times.

Human Factors in Software Engineering

90% of engineering organization’s challenges are about humans - and so is at least as much of the joy of leadership. These articles and talks dive into specific aspects of being human and managing humans.

Recognizing and preventing burnout in engineering teams

Burnout is all too common in software engineering. In this panel, I discuss with experienced technology leaders how we can prioritize developer well-being - focusing on identifying what burnout really looks like and how we can prevent it from happening.

Treating devs like human beings

Too often, developers are treated like robots - not the hardworking, motivated and creative human beings we know and love. This discussion centers on the whys and hows of empathetic leadership.

Hiring, growing, retaining talent, and managing performance in engineering organizations

All aspects of the employee lifecycle.

Hypergrowth in Engineering Organizations: How to Hire, Grow and Support the Atomic Unit of a Team

Maintaining a high-performance culture as organizations change is hard. Performance management is neglected, hiring standards decrease… In this episode of the Supermanagers podcast, I share my tips for setting and managing performance in organizations, and how to become a strategic leader. Chapters:

04:38 “You didn’t know what made you good”

12:05 Managing through hypergrowth

22:42 Setting and maintaining a high performance standard

32:46 Strategic work for leaders

35:27 Making strategic work a daily habit

42:38 Lena’s book recommendations

“Too many companies drastically underestimate the impact of culture. Culture is often looked as this sort of softie thing that you don’t really have to care about if you’re a “real leader”.

But culture is usually the biggest factor in whether teams and organizatons are effective or not.”
— Lena Reinhard

leaders’ role in shaping our industry

a talk about nothing

This talk was a finalist for "Conference Talk of the Year" in the .net awards 2015.

In this talk, we will explore nothing. And, yes, literally nothing. Together we’ll take a look behind the curtains of reality and explore some of the underlying rules that shape our existence. We will dig into ancient philosophy, the history and today's status physics and maths, look into the origins of computing, programming and analyse the way we develop software today. We’ll see how nothing influences us, how it shapes our behaviour every day and how nothing can help us grow – in our professions and, even more, as humans. “Nothing really matters,”, Freddie Mercury wrote in a song that was released 40 years ago. I want to show you how right he is.

Note: The better term for "transsexual" or "transgender" would have been "trans", "trans people" or "trans folks". I apologize for using inaccurate terminology and am grateful to the folks who gave me this feedback.

Works on my machine, or “problem is between keyboard and chair”: Debugging the tech industry

You've heard it before: "It works on my machine" and you know the punchline "so your problem isn't real". ” Sometimes a bug just won't appear on your system: computers are fickle beasts full of subtlety. Humans, too, but more so: we have habits, preferences, and biases, and our backgrounds and opportunities vary wildly. Even the technology industry itself is a perfect example of legacy spaghetti code (without unit tests), and this makes it very hard to debug for a better future.

In this talk, we will look at the many facets that affect our decision-making and interactions and work out how we can change for the better. Together, we will take a look at the effects that our software has on the daily lives of the thousands of people who are using it.

You’ll learn what you can do as an individual to support change in a positive direction and how you can help debug this system and make a difference in the tech industry. You’ll leave knowing about practical things you can do in your daily life to make the tech industry a better, more inclusive, and diverse environment that is a better place for everyone.

My leadership journey

Leadership is about being at least as much as it is about becoming: Growing, learning, expanding, not just in your work, but at least equally in who you are as a person.

This has been my journey.

Badasses in Tech:
Getting Un-Stuck

Published on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, March 2024

From Zero to CTO: Interview

Published in: CTO Craft, January 2021

My unplanned career shift into leadership by becoming a founder and CEO of an SaaS startup, and how my role evolved over time.

“Becoming a manager goes beyond managing your direct reports: You need to be much more deliberate about managing up, in how (and what) you communicate to your own manager, and how you handle disagreements with them.”
“My biggest failure in my first leadership role was that I didn’t have a good sense of what it would take for others to be effective in this role and work.”

Managers Club: Interview

Published in: Managers Club, September 2019

Read about the challenges of leading teams across different time zones and the importance of assessing real-life skills in hiring, as well as my advice for new managers, and the critical role that being a fast typer has played in my career 😃

Feeling a bit stuck lately? Not sure if you're heading in the right direction? Join me for this chat with Summer Mitchell about navigating career twists and turns.

In this episode, I share my journey of curiosity, growth, and making a difference, all while keeping it real. We talk about embracing every part of yourself, finding your people, and why sometimes, you just have to dive into the deep end to learn to swim.

All Articles, talks, and keynotes

2026

  • 🎤 We Were Meant To Be - Keynote, KotlinConf 2026

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