Workshop submissions

Hello friends! 

At LeadDev, workshops are one of the most valued parts of our events — a place to slow down, think deeply, and work through real problems with your peers.

We’re now welcoming Workshop Proposals, year-round, for workshops that may be programmed across our LeadDev events (including LDX3 London, LDX3 New York, and LeadDev Berlin).

This CFP is not tied to a specific event or date, and you can submit a proposal whenever you’re ready — submissions will be reviewed monthly.

About LeadDev workshops

LeadDev events are for leaders who want to run more effective engineering organizations — covering leadership and collaboration, systems, strategy, and technical decision-making.

Our workshops are a core part of that experience. Attendees choose them because they want:

  • Depth over breadth
  • Active participation rather than passive learning
  • Space to reflect, discuss, and learn from others in similar roles  

Workshop format

Our workshops are 80-minute-long, interactive, facilitated sessions, and they are typically programmed twice at an event (once on Day 1 and again on Day 2).

What we’re looking for

We’re interested in workshops that help engineering leaders actively work through real challenges, rather than hear about them at a high level. We want to see sessions that:

Are genuinely interactive

  • Structured small-group discussions
  • Guided exercises or scenarios
  • Collaborative problem-solving
  • Role-play or facilitated peer feedback
  • Applying a framework to real-world examples

Go deep on a focused problem

  • Focus on a single, clearly defined challenge
  • Explore trade-offs and real constraints
  • Leave time for discussion and reflection

If your idea works best as a talk or a blog post, it may not yet be the right fit for a workshop.

Are actively facilitated

The facilitator’s role is to:

  • Set context clearly
  • Maintain energy and pacing
  • Encourage balanced participation
  • Create a psychologically safe space
  • Help participants learn from one another

Topics we’re interested in

We welcome proposals across the full LeadDev landscape, particularly workshops that explore:

Leading people & organisations

  • Managing managers and senior leaders
  • Handling conflict, underperformance, and tough conversations
  • Mentoring, coaching, and developing others
  • Inclusive leadership and culture
  • Leading through growth, change, or uncertainty

Building effective systems & teams

  • Team structures and ways of working
  • Incident management and learning from failure
  • Documentation, alignment, and decision-making
  • Measuring effectiveness and productivity
  • Balancing delivery, quality, and sustainability

Making technical and strategic choices

  • System design and architectural trade-offs
  • Platform engineering and enablement
  • Roadmapping and long-term planning
  • Legacy systems and technical debt
  • AI in practice: adoption, guardrails, productivity, and people impacts  

A note on AI workshops

AI is a huge topic, and we expect to receive a lot of submissions in this area. Our audiences are most excited by highly practical, experience-led sessions grounded in how their peers are actually using AI to drive impact — rather than broader, foundational sessions with less tangible takeaways.

Before you submit

Ask yourself:

  • What will participants do during the 80 minutes?
  • Who is this workshop for, and who is it not for?
  • How will you help participants engage with others in the room?
  • What will people leave with that they didn’t have before?  

We’re especially keen to hear from facilitators who:

  • Have lived experience of the problem they’re teaching
  • Are comfortable guiding discussion, not just presenting
  • Are open about what didn’t work as well as what did  

The facilitator experience

We love working closely with workshop facilitators and supporting them throughout the process.

As a LeadDev workshop facilitator, we'd offer:

  • A free ticket to the conference where your workshop runs
  • $500 USD per workshop session delivered
  • Dedicated support from the LeadDev team  

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! 

 

We use Submittable to accept and review our submissions.
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