Xin Yao is an independent consultant, trainer, and sociotechnical architect based in Copenhagen. She supports organizations across Europe in navigating complex design, architecture and modernization challenges. Her work blends Domain-Driven Design, collaborative modeling, sociotechnical thinking, psychological safety, and conversational leadership.
Drawing on her background as a chief architect and years of facilitating large-scale change, Xin brings a structured yet deeply human approach to connecting business, technology, and teams.
She helps organizations integrate relational and conversational practices into architecture, strategy, product design, and cross-team collaboration—enabling better decisions, clearer models, and more joyful teamwork.
Xin regularly teaches and speaks at events such as GOTO, DDD Europe, KanDDDinsky, Explore DDD, OOP, JAX, Øredev, CoMoCamp, FlowCon, and Craft.
We talk a lot about technical debt — postponed refactorings, shortcuts to clean up later. But what if some of our hardest problems aren’t caused by code at all? What if our biggest technical debt is social in nature? Unspoken tensions, misaligned conversations, and collaboration rituals that look healthy on the surface can reinforce power imbalances and leave people unseen or unheard. Social debt ...