Speaker: Nick Tune

It's easy to achieve fast flow at the start of a new project, especially with a fresh new codebase. But why does flow always seem to get slower and slower over time? Business stakeholders are asking for two new text boxes to be added to a web page, and they are gobsmacked when the developers say it will take 3 months.

On the contrary, high-performing teams are able to sustain fast flow for years, delivering new product enhancements to production multiple times per-day. A combination of factors including architecture, domain ownership, and manageable cognitive load is key, creating the conditions for purpose, autonomy, and mastery which incentivise and facilitate sustainable flow.

This talk will share principles and practices from the fields of Domain-Driven Design and Team Topologies that leaders can apply to address the social and technical aspects necessary for creating the conditions for high-performing teams and sustainable flow throughout their organisation.

How do we join the dots between optimising for fast flow and a good engineering culture? How does a good engineering culture help organisations to sense and adapt? What technical and social practices does a good engineering culture need? What do we even mean by ‘a good engineering culture’? Why is this culture stuff always so hard?

Join the ‘Optimising for Speed and Fast Flow’ panellists - Emily Webber, Nick Tune, Richard James, and Victoria Morgan-Smith - for a lively discussion on how practices such as internal tech conferences, Communities of Practice, and a focus on psychological safety can help to foster a good engineering culture, enable diffuse learning, and begin to create learning organisations that are better able to sense and adapt to change.