Thanks for considering to the LeadDev Call for Proposals.
Our open CFPs can be found below with more details of the process, the support we provide and what topics we look for.
Hello friends
In celebration of LeadDev's 10th anniversary, we’re launching a brand new event, and it's going to be a big one!
About London 2025 - June 16-17, 2025
The event is aimed specifically at the challenges faced by engineering leaders and explores all the ways that you can boost the effectiveness of your software delivery ecosystem: your team, working methods, and technology.
We understand that optimizing software delivery is both a technical and social challenge and no matter your place in the engineering org, there are ways you can impact change. So, if you are an Engineering Manager, a Senior Individual Contributor, an Engineering Director, or a touch more senior than that - then this is the place for you.
We’ve never been under more pressure to deliver results with fewer resources and tighter timelines. So what experience or stories do you have that could help other engineering leaders?
What topics are we interested in?
The conference will be spread across three stages, focussing on Organisational Leadership, Ways of Working, and Technical Strategy and Decision Making. We’ve detailed a bit about them below and remember, you can submit more than one idea.
- Organisational Leadership - Our organisational leadership stage covers anything related to leadership, personal development, and things that happen within the unit of your teams.
Think about: the skills that you need to be an effective leader; skills for growing people; creating inclusive and diverse environments; hiring and retention; resourcing and structuring your teams; performance, progression, compensation; understanding commerciality, context, and cost management.
- Ways of Working - Our ways of working stage covers anything related to how your teams get work done.
Think about process, workflows, methodologies; frameworks for meetings like code reviews and 1:1s, on-call; monitoring and observability; knowledge-sharing, documentation, design; metrics, KPIs, developer experience; software quality, experimentation, and training.
- Technical Strategy and decision making - Our technical strategy stage covers anything you need to run an effective technical team in 2025.
We love hearing case studies for our tech talks - real stories about what went right and wrong (which is always more interesting!). Think about new languages, frameworks, technologies; decision-making, trade-offs, benefits analysis; strategy, planning and future-proofing; legacy, tech debt, code smells; architectures, microservices, platform engineering; cloud, orchestration, cost management; migrations, re-writes, sunsetting.
The speaker experience
Working with speakers is one of our favourite things. We love to giving you the opportunity to share your stories and knowledge with our audience - and we put a lot of work in to helping your content shine. Throughout the process, you’ll have the opportunity to work with our editor on your talk descriptions, a professional coach who’ll help you hone your presentation delivery if you want it, and our content team who’ll review your talk and help you sharpen it for our audience.
As a speaker for the event, we'd also offer you:
- A free ticket to the conference
- A complimentary ticket to a LeadDev conference in 2026
- Up to 2 nights' accommodation at the conference hotel
- Economy travel expenses if you need them
- Professional speaker coaching if requested
- Dedicated support from our team at all stages of your participation in the conference
Good luck
We hope that's given you all the information you need to submit a great proposal. We can't wait to read them!
Who will you be writing for or speaking to?
Our audience consists of all senior engineering folk, from tech leads to VPs and senior ICs. They are consistently technical (across a very broad range of technologies and industries) with many line managing people in their organisations. It’s also important to note that some attendees have just been promoted, or are trying to figure out what skills they need to progress into a more technical role.
What does LeadDev offer?
If we choose your article for publication, we’ll offer all the support we can in the creation of your article. After a first draft has been handed in, it will be passed to our in-house editor who will work with you to ensure that your article is the best that it can be.
We also pay an honorarium of $250 to everyone who writes an article for our site.
What subject should you focus on?
- Team (anything related to people management, inclusive & diverse environments, hiring & retention, challenging issues etc.)
- Tech (anything related to new languages, frameworks & technologies, trends & changes, scaling, architecture etc.)
- Process (anything related to the way your team works, Agile & other delivery methods, maintaining a high-performing team etc.)
- Personal Development (anything related to improving leadership skills, maintaining your mental health, adapting to a new role etc.)
- StaffPlus (anything on big picture thinking, making the right technical decisions, or influencing at scale)
How our article review process works
We review all of the article proposals on a monthly basis. Article proposals will be reviewed the month after they have been submitted. Article proposals are reviewed during the first week of the month, and you’ll hear from the team during the second week of the month.
For example, if you submit an article proposal in February, we’ll review your submission during the first week of March. You’ll then find out if your proposal has been selected for publication during the second week of March.
If you haven’t heard back from us, please give us some time before reaching out to enquire about the status of your article proposal - we might just be running a little late! If it has been 4 or more weeks, feel free to get in touch with a member of the team to enquire about the status of your submission :)
If your article has been selected, we’ll be in touch with the next steps and the timeline for you to write your article within (this tends to be 3-4 weeks).
If you have any questions about the article submission process, you can contact a member of the team at hello@leaddev.com