Technical debt is something that software companies continuously have to address. Since technical debt is hard to quantify and there is often lack of alignment and ownership around it, organizations struggle with accumulating large amounts of debt and analysis paralysis around how to deal with it. Typically, the more an organization or system scales, the greater the risk of growing technical debt.
In Yvette's role at Meetup, she's worked with the engineering and product teams to address 14 years of technical debt by facilitating long-term cultural change of including Continuous Product Health into every team's sprints. By flipping debt on its head and focusing instead on health, and applying successful agile methodologies to make continuous progress towards decreasing debt, teams are empowered to tackle debt in a measurable, iterative, and aligned way.
This talk focuses on how to empower cross-functional product engineering teams and facilitate cultural change by integrating Continuous Product Health into every team's sprints, using agile methodologies and tools to bring transparency and alignment across all teams, and optimizing for growing organizations and systems at scale.
The takeaways from this talk will be practical and widely applicable to people in most engineering and product roles at software companies.
Yvette Pasqua is the CTO of Meetup, the world’s largest network of local communities, where she leads the engineering team with a focus on continuous learning, invention, and launching quality software and systems. Her team’s work enables 25+ million members in 182 countries to organize, build community, and meet up around the world. Those members have created 230,000 Meetup groups, including 30,000 dedicated to technology—one step in Meetup’s mission to have a “Meetup Everywhere about Most Everything.” Prior to joining Meetup, Yvette’s career included leadership roles at startups and product development firms, most notably as the general manager at Schematic/Possible and director of technology at AKQA. Yvette was responsible for leading the team who built Grindr during the early days of Grindr’s most rapid growth.
