Adel Smee Head of Engineering, Ferocia
About Adel Smee
Adel Smee is Head of Engineering at Ferocia, trying to make banking more human. She was previously an Engineering Manager at Zendesk where she led innovation projects across a variety of technologies and grown a number of high performing teams. Her career in tech started with teaching people to code, before she decided to break out and get paid to do it commercially at a startup, then at Lonely Planet, and then at Zendesk. Along the way she realised that her main implicit motivator is delight in the success of others, which turns out to be a really useful quality in a manager. She is obsessed with what makes people (and herself) tick and loves to hear how she is getting it wrong so she can do better. Adel is an incurable optimist who believes that one day we’ll live in a world where everybody likes their job as much as she does, but isn’t naive enough to think that day is coming any time soon.
Session Scaling Up engineering management
When your company goes from 50 to 200 people, your tools, teams, and processes don’t always scale with you. In this talk, Adel Smee will share how Ferocia is navigating the chaos with a dynamic team of empathetic, empowered Engineering Managers.
In this talk, you’ll learn:
- Why middle management matters (and gets a bad rap)
- How to build an effective layer of leadership
- What breaks as you scale—and how to fix it
- How persistent funding & smart structures unlock team potential
If you’re scaling fast or planning to, this is the blueprint you’ve been waiting for.