How internal technology conferences can grow your organization’s engineering community

Digital transformation has become the new business norm. Technology is now widely recognized as a “front of the house [and everywhere in between]” capability and gone are the days when IT was seen as a “back of the house” function. For established companies—like where I work at Northwestern Mutual (NM)—seeing technology as a key driver has also impacted the way we work. With more pressure on engineers to continuously deliver product innovation and digital solutions, many tech employees are at risk of spending too much time “heads down” and not enough on building relationships or cultivating a shared sense of community with others across the enterprise.

Our CTO, Emilia Sherifova, took notice and took action. Her goal? Bring NM technologists together across functions and campuses to strengthen culture and grow our engineering mindset.

To help turn her vision into reality, Emilia asked me to rally a small group of fellow engineers, developers and technologists to create a day-long engineering conference open to the thousands of tech employees at NM. Emilia felt strongly that if we were going to make this event value-added for engineers, it must be created by engineers (like this blog!)