Chris Ward
Head of Mobile Development - Personal Content
Chris started coding life as a full-stack developer and moved between all sorts of weird and wonderful disciplines and industries before he settled on Android. In more recent years he moved into management, as both an EM and head of engineering for mobile teams. In addition to coding life, he's been an elected official in the UK, had a key role in legalising same-sex marriage in the UK through his LobbyALord app, and addressed the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on atrocities against LGBT+ people abroad. He writes and speaks about his experience of being diagnosed with ADHD late in life and how he deals with the unique challenges neurodivergency brings to an individual working in tech. He lives in Berlin with his cat and his husband and has a mid-life-crisis friendship with crows.
How to do AI when your team hates AI
The hardest part of AI adoption isn’t the tooling, or the cost, or even the legal bits. It’s the same thing it’s always been: people. And it’s hardly surprising that a number of engineers are so reluctant to innovate with the tool they’re constantly told will take their jobs.
In this talk we'll go through our learnings and successes as engineering managers navigating the hopes and fears of our team members in this strange and uncertain new world.
Some areas we’ll cover include:
- How nurturing a safe space that respects boundaries whilst encouraging people to leave their comfort zones turbocharged AI learning and usage.
- How having senior developers as advocates can alleviate fears and skepticism far better than AI-enthusiastic managers ever can.
- How to respond when a team member is steadfastly against using AI at all.
This is a talk for leaders who know engineers do their best work when leadership is driven by understanding, not fear.