This Month's Speaker

Sara Owen (Engineering Manager at Electrum Software)

Topic of Main Talk - The Secret Sauce of High-Performing Teams

Shipping great products is not just about the tech stack. It is about the humans behind the keyboards. Join us as we explore the ingredients for building high-performing, high-velocity engineering teams.
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We will unpack what drives:
- Cohesion through role clarity and high trust.
- Innovation through psychological safety, where people can learn from mistakes and challenge ideas openly.
- Ownership through autonomy.

We will also share practical ways to make candid feedback a habit, and how to handle the ultimate leadership test: addressing low performance with compassion while remaining firm to protect your team and culture.

Sara Owen is an Engineering Manager at Electrum Software, responsible for creating and leading high-performing teams that build next-generation payments software. Working from a servant leadership approach, Sara believes that trust, collaboration, and ownership are the core principles in forming elite-level software development teams.

Sara completed her Honours in Computer Science at the University of Cape Town. In 2020, she joined Electrum’s Graduate Programme. Rising quickly through the ranks, Sara began her leadership journey as a Team Lead in 2022 and continued to advance, reaching her current position in 2025.