SRECon EU 2025 - The Executive Signal

"SREcon25 Europe/Middle East/Africa is a gathering of engineers who care deeply about site reliability, systems engineering, and working with complex distributed systems at scale. SREcon strives to challenge both those new to the profession as well as those who have been involved in it for decades. The conference has a culture of critical thought, deep technical insights, continuous improvement, and innovation."

This is SRECon25 EU and with it being in Dublin from 7-9 Oct this year, I couldn't resist submitting a few of my cloud native observability ideas. They had the entire spectrum of session types, including lightning talks, so I pushed in a few for each category.

The final selection was a few weeks back and for the second time, they seem keen to see one of my lightning talks. Let's see what they found to be the most interesting idea I pushed in for their call for papers.

First off, the lightning talks are going to be held on Wednesday, 8 Oct from 17:40-18:40 local Dublin time. Last time they were in a really fun format of just 4 minutes where you get 16 slides that auto advance every 15s. They didn't mention it this time, but assuming that's the deal I will prepare accordingly.

As for my lightning talk, I'm going to share the following:

The Executive Signal: How to Cut Through the Noise and Drive Change

Cloud native teams often live closest to the problems—but their voices are the last to be heard. Despite offering real solutions, many engineers find their concerns ignored by executive decision-makers. The result? Ongoing firefighting, chronic on-call stress, and ultimately, burnout. With developers spending more than 10 hours a week reacting to incidents, faster and smarter executive action isn’t optional—it’s essential.

In this lightning talk, you’ll learn how to bridge the communication gap between technical teams and leadership. We’ll cover three actionable techniques you can start using today to make your message resonate—turning engineering pain into executive priority. If you want to stop spinning in operational chaos and start getting leadership buy-in, this talk will give you the tools to drive real change—without waiting for burnout to make the case for you.

One core topic: This talk will show 3 simple tricks on how to engage effectively with leadership to invoke change. 

Join us on stage Wed, 8 October at 17:40 for a fun time and power learning with this lighting talk in Dublin at SRECon EU.