Prathusha
Prakash
Engineering Manager at TikTok
"The Leadership Shift: Coaching Engineering Teams for Change Fitness in the AI Era"
"The Leadership Shift: Coaching Engineering Teams for Change Fitness in the AI Era"
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Session: The Leadership Shift: Coaching Engineering Teams for Change Fitness in the AI Era
As we enter 2026, the primary challenge for engineering leaders has shifted from managing "Technical Debt" to managing "Adaptability Debt." With over 40% of software tasks now augmented or handled by autonomous agents, the traditional engineering management playbook is obsolete. To survive this transition, leaders must move their teams from a state of resilience to Change Fitness—the proactive ability to continuously evolve alongside non-deterministic technologies.In this session, I will share a leadership blueprint for scaling high-performing engineering teams in a silicon-augmented environment. We will dive into:
The 2026 Leadership Competency: Defining "Change Fitness" and why it has replaced "Agility" as the critical metric for organizational success in the AI era.
Redefining the Engineering Persona: How to coach teams through the identity shift from "Code Authors" to "System Architects" and "AI Orchestrators."
Managing Cognitive Load: Strategic frameworks for protecting team mental health and performance as AI accelerates the pace of technical obsolescence.
The ROI of Upskilling: Proven methods for quantifying the business impact of a "Change Fit" culture, including 2026 data on faster deployment and reduced team attrition.
Key Takeaways
- A Change Fitness Assessment: A diagnostic tool to measure your team’s readiness for rapid AI integration.
- The "Orchestrator" Roadmap: Tactics for transitioning mid-to-senior engineers into leadership roles that oversee multi-agent systems.
- Measurable Leadership Metrics: New KPIs for 2026 that track team adaptability, innovation velocity, and AI-literacy growth.
Bio
Engineering Manager & AI Leadership StrategistI am a distinguished Engineering Manager and strategic leader at the forefront of the 2026 autonomous AI revolution. With over a decade of experience in scaling high-performance technical organizations,I specialize in bridging the gap between complex machine learning architectures and enterprise-level business transformation.
Currently serving as an Engineering Manager at TikTok, I lead the integration of agentic AI workflows or the modernization of legacy engineering systems. I am the pioneer of the "Change Fitness" leadership framework—a proprietary methodology designed to help engineering teams move beyond traditional agility to thrive in an era of non-deterministic, AI-augmented software development.
A recognized authority in AI Governance and Engineering Leadership, her work focuses on the technical orchestration of multi-agent systems and the operationalization of responsible AI guardrails. As a prominent woman in technology leadership, I am dedicated to redefining the engineering persona and architecting the future of human-AI collaboration.My insights drive the conversation on how global enterprises can achieve measurable ROI while maintaining technical resilience and ethical standards.
