Bredemeyer Consulting

Technical Leadership
Masterclass

Course Overview

Technical leaders are looked to for direction setting and guidance, and decisions are of great consequence both to the business and for development teams. Before we can lead others, we first need to have self-awareness, confidence and humility. The emphasis of this masterclass is on technical leadership in the context of complex socio-technical systems. We assume that we all bring experience to the masterclass, and we're building on that. We embed discussion and practice elements focused on the how of being a more effective leader, within a framework (OODA, or sense/make sense/respond) for navigating both day-to-day and more strategically focused work. The topics cover a range:

Leadership and what it means to be an effective leader in various settings
Building relationships, trust and safety
Working across organizations to bridge strategy and business outcomes and technical decisions and practices
Building judgment and decision making skills and repertoire
What it means to work across technical teams, and what we can bring to that
Developing professional curiosity, observation, opportunity discovery, problem solving
Dealing with organizational dynamics (politics); magnifying your ability to get things done working with and through people

2026 Open Enrollment Schedule

Remote

Technical Leadership Masterclass: Remote: Nov 3 and 10, 2026, 12pm - 3pm, Eastern Time [$600; early bird or group discount]
Instructor: Ruth Malan and Dana Bredemeyer

Please email training@bredemeyer.com for more information.

Drawing on the walls

Course Outline

This masterclass provides an opportunity to consider the challenges leaders face in technical settings, and how to address them. Modules include Systems, Leadership Skills, Sense Making and Diagnostics, Technical Decisions, and Learning and Feedback. In the course of these the lecture, discussion and exercises in these modules, we address topics in Organizational Effectiveness and Personal Effectiveness.

Organizational Effectiveness

Work that impacts many people and multiple teams, raises challenges of leadership through transitions, participation and consensus-building, communicating, and more. This focal area addresses those challenges:

Considerations for leading successful teams
Leadership styles; fractal and participatory leadership and design
Building relationships, trust and safety
Collaboration, and fostering the best work in others
Working across the organization, bridging strategic/business, and development/technical; as well as working across technical teams with differing charters and priorities
Decision making, judgment, effects of groups, confidence,
Communication, listening, storytelling, interviewing
Organizational dynamics or politics, and magnifying the ability to get things done, working with and through people; architectrure transitions
Persuasion and Influence; Negotiation, Disagreement and conflict;
Culture; Nudges, enabling constraints
Coaching and facilitating, feedback
Ethics
Introduction to a broad landscape of related topics, writers and works, including Russ Ackoff, Chris Argyris, Brené Brown, Mel Conway, Peter Drucker, Mary Parker Follet, Eb Ikonne, Alicia Juarrero, David Marquet, Donella Meadows, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Edgar Schein, Michael Useem, Norbert Wiener.

Personal Effectiveness

Technical leaders are looked to for direction setting and guidance, and decisions are of great consequence both for the business and for development teams. Before we can lead others, we first need to have self-awareness, confidence and humility. Here we consider core personal effectiveness topics and strategies:

Self-awareness, self-management
Empathy, compassion, humility
Cognition (embodied, enacted, extended, embedded), cognitive amplifiers, fallibilities, (logical) fallacies and biases
Curiosity, observation, opportunity discovery, problem solving, and problem understanding and (re)framing, finding and exploring alternatives
Introduction to a broad landscape of related topics (perception and meaning making, ...) and writers/works, including William James; Daniel Kahneman, Indi Young, Edwin Hutchins.

Workshop Format

Exercises form a large component of this 1-day workshop, which is oriented toward building skills rather than simply exposing participants to new concepts. Also, case studies and stories from our experience are used to integrate real-world lessons into the workshop.

Audience

Anyone in technical leadership, including architects, product owners and product managers, senior UX designers,and senior developers. CTOs and CIOs may be interested, as it creates a common basis of understanding with other technical leaders on their teams.

Technical Leadership Masterclass Feedback

"one of the engineers on my team brought back awesomely useful knowledge from this technical leadership class by @ruthmalan !" -- @natasha

"I’ll be back! I enjoyed every minute and the materials are fantastic" -- Paula Paul

"@ruthmalan and @DanaBredemeyer ’s technical leadership masterclass has meaningful material delivered with context that’s both relevant and thought provoking for rising leaders. Their sage wisdom with references has altered my professional reading list for several months to come." -- Michael Wojciechowski

"the class, format, and the materials were fantastic. I learned immensely and also validated some previous thoughts. Already using the learning and the materials for a Tech Lead group I run at work. Looking into the architecture class in Chicago in October." -- Martin Bertolino

"I’ve attended a fantastic workshop today on how to be a better technical leader from @ruthmalan ! It is applicable for folks on all levels of the technical leadership journey. Highly recommend and thank you, Ruth!" -- Ksenia

"Yesterday was finally there, a technical leadership masterclass with @ruthmalan @DanaBredemeyer ! So much vast amount of wisdom we are just catching up with them. And so many people I follow on Twitter joined as well sharing knowledge, such a pleasure to just be in that zoom alone" -- Kenny Baas-Schwegler

Pricing

In-house: Pricing depends on number of students taking the class. Please contact us for details.

US Open Enrollment: The fee for an in-person 1-day workshop is US$750.00 per student.

Europe Open Enrollment: The fee for an in-person 1-day workshop is US$1,000.00 per student. This fee takes into account the higher cost structure when we run classes in Europe.

Note: We only accept a maximum of 16 participants, so register early to avoid disappointment. Workshop participants are responsible for their own accommodations.

On-site:

Most of our workshops are run on-site with clients, helping to ramp up an architecture focus, providing training for architects, running new product incubators with a core group of product owner/architects/developers, and so forth.

If 6 or more people from your company would like to attend this class, you may find it more cost effective (taking travel costs into account) to hold the class at your company site.

Suggest a venue: If there is a location and timing that you are particularly interested in, please let us know.