About Young Leaders in Tech
What is Young Leaders in Tech?
Young Leaders in Tech is a community, publication and toolkit for emerging and current tech leaders, founded by John Conneely, a Principal Product Manager for GTM Fintech at Toast based in Dublin.
It started as a meetup series in Dublin, with panel discussions between tech leaders in person and online, and the podcast followed, with guest conversations on leadership, changing careers, no-code, cybersecurity and design.
Today it also includes a Substack on product, UX and AI, a gallery of free tool prototypes, a public marketplace of Claude Code plugins, and mentoring. It’s for people moving into product, stepping up into leadership or leading a digital transformation for the first time, and for current tech leaders who want to keep learning and growing in their careers.
What can I read or use here?
The blog: everything on Young Leaders in Tech, including the meetup panels and podcast episodes, is in the archive
Tools: the tools gallery is a set of shareable HTML tool prototypes you can open in your browser and use straight away, filtered by role, skill level and goal
AI and product: what works when you build with Claude Code every day, including memory, agents and plugins. Start with How I Finally Sorted My Claude Code Memory or Before AI Can Help, UX Leaders Must Solve Operational Tech Debt
Product and UX leadership templates: frameworks you can pick up and adapt, starting with How to Become a Product Manager
Career and storytelling tools: including the Career Storytelling Expert GPT
Practical process guides: step-by-step ones, like the Daily TIE Score for deciding what deserves your time
Claude Code plugins: the Young Leaders Tech marketplace, below
Mentoring: one-to-one career and product mentoring through ADPList
What is the Young Leaders Tech marketplace?
The Young Leaders Tech marketplace is a public, open-source Claude Code plugin marketplace on GitHub, maintained by John Conneely. It works with both Claude Code and OpenCode. Repository: github.com/YoungLeadersDotTech/young-leaders-tech-marketplace
To add it in Claude Code:
/plugin marketplace add git@github.com:YoungLeadersDotTech/young-leaders-tech-marketplace.gitThen install any plugin by name, for example /plugin install skills-toolkit@young-leaders-tech-marketplace.
skills-toolkit: Authors and validates Claude Code skills and agents using a script-backed check, not a self-scored rubric
prompt-auditor: Offline auditor for skills, agents and prompt files, reporting findings by severity
update-readme: Detects the type of repo and generates a matching README preview before writing
terminal-setup-macos: One-command macOS terminal setup: Ghostty, Oh My Zsh, Powerlevel10k, Glow and a Nerd Font
opencode-sync: Keeps one agent ecosystem working across Claude Code and OpenCode
enablement-html-renderer: Packages finished material into one HTML file where the reader chooses the format
diy-build-companion: Plans and runs DIY builds with energy-aware work blocks and a child-safety check
Who writes Young Leaders in Tech?
I’m John Conneely, a Principal Product Manager for GTM Fintech at Toast, based in Dublin. I joined Toast in March 2024 and lead product work on the internal platforms powering Toast’s fintech, capital and international initiatives across pricing, fraud and onboarding.
Before Toast I was a Product Manager at Personio on the data platform team, where I delivered a greenfield audit log platform for internal and external customers, along with key infrastructure used in trial account creation. Before that I spent six years at Mastercard Ireland on Simplify Commerce, its e-commerce payments gateway.
I joined in operations and support, moved through engineering and release management, and became Product Manager for Payment Gateway Services in 2019. In that role I took the bank partner base from 7 to more than 40, delivered 250-plus features, all while being the only PM in my final year of tenure. Before joining Mastercard I spent four years in customer service.
I founded Young Leaders in Tech and have hosted its meetup panels and podcast. I’ve spoken at UXDX, DEFUSE, Design Brew and the Naptha AI Agents in Product masterclass, and appeared as a guest on the Product Pulse podcast. Talks you can find on the site include Beyond the Interface, my UXDX talk on UX being everywhere, a lightning talk at SISTEM, and a panel I moderated at Dublin Tech Summit. I mentor through ADPList and inside Toast.
Outside the day job I build with Claude Code: dozens of plugins, hundreds of skills, well over a hundred agents, and AIOS, my Agent Installer Orchestration System, where plug-and-play agents sit behind a Slack bot.
Can John Conneely speak, run AI workshops or build AI solutions for my company?
Yes, in two ways. I speak and run hands-on AI workshops for companies and communities, showing product, operations and leadership teams how to use tools like Claude on their own day-to-day work, with live demos that each end on how you would run it yourself.
I also build custom solutions for companies and individuals, and every build starts with a scoping conversation, because most of the value is in choosing the right thing to build. I bring the discovery methods from my product work throughout the years, plus agent tooling I publish openly, many of which you can try at the tools gallery and in the plugin marketplace above. I do this alongside my day job. Email john@youngleaders.tech with one sentence on the session you have in mind or the task that eats your week.
🔒 Disclaimer
All content here reflects my personal views and experiences, not those of my current or former employers - unless explicitly stated otherwise. When I speak or write in my official capacity at Toast, I will note that clearly
Continue the conversation elsewhere
Feel free to reach out directly on any of the below if you would like to get in touch.
