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! 

Hello friends! 

LDX3 is coming to New York in 2026, bringing together what was previously LeadDev, StaffPlus, and LeadingEng into one expanded event. There’s even more to explore this year — two main stages, a Director+ track, a workshop track, two demo stages, and a lively hallway track packed with activities and conversations.

About LDX3 New York 2026 - September 15–16, 2026 

LDX3 is designed for engineering leaders who want to improve how software gets delivered — from culture and collaboration to architecture and automation. We know that optimizing delivery is both a technical and a social challenge, so whether you’re an Engineering Manager, Senior IC, Director, or more senior, this is a space to share what you’ve learned along the way.

What topics are we interested in? 

We’re looking for 25-minute, practical case studies and experience-led stories that will help other engineering leaders learn, reflect, and grow. Your talk might explore one of the areas below — or something adjacent that you think our audience needs to hear.

Leading your organization - Frameworks, practices, and tools for leading high-performing teams

• Leading humans: management, sustainable leadership, growth
• How to structure and operate teams
• Hiring and retaining talent, skills development
• Culture, diversity, and inclusion
• Strategy, planning, and future-proofing, impact
• Communication and influence

Making technical choices - Case studies and insights for making technical decisions and running high-performing systems

• Reliability, quality, security, and production readiness
• Evolving and scaling systems
• Developer productivity
• AI/LLMs
• Planning and technical roadmaps
• Legacy, tech debt
• Architectures, microservices, platform engineering
• Decision-making, trade-offs, benefits analysis

If your idea doesn’t quite fit into one of these categories, that’s okay — if it’s practical, thoughtful, and grounded in real experience, we want to hear it.

The speaker experience

Working with speakers to help ideas shine on stage is one of our favourite things. We’ll support you throughout the process, from crafting your talk to preparing for the day itself.

As a speaker for the event, we'd also offer you:

• A free ticket to the conference
• A free +1 ticket for the event
• A complimentary ticket to a LeadDev conference in 2027
• 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

A couple of notes on the above offering 

At LeadDev, we aim to cover travel and accommodation for speakers wherever possible, to make speaking at our events as inclusive and accessible as we can. As a small business, this is a significant cost for us, so if you work for a larger organisation and are able to have these expenses covered by your employer, we’d be very grateful if you could explore that option — it helps us support more speakers overall. 

Visas are the responsibility of the speaker, but LeadDev can issue a letter of invitation to support an application if required.

As an extra help, you might be interested in reading a recent article on LeadDev.com by Jonathan Fielding on Crafting a LeadDev talk submission.

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.)
• Tools (anything related to the systems that you use to design, build, test, deploy, and maintain software more efficiently and reliably etc.)
• Process  (anything related to the way your team works, Agile & other delivery methods, maintaining a high-performing team etc.)
• Personal Development/Career 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 article proposals monthly. Submissions are reviewed in the first week of the month and you'll typically hear from us that same week. 

Due to an increase in submissions, it can take us 8-10 weeks to review your submission. 

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 this window has passed and you haven't heard back from us, feel free to get in touch with a member of the team to enquire about the status of your submission :)

If your proposal is selected, we'll contact you with the next steps and a writing timeline (usually 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