Abstract
When you hear “governance,” you might think of red tape, bureaucracy, or someone telling you what you can’t do. But real governance is about alignment and reducing technical risk. And that matters more than ever.
In most cases, engineers aren’t deliberately making risky decisions—they just don’t have clear expectations. That’s where good governance comes in. It ensures everyone understands what “good” looks like, gives teams the autonomy to move fast while staying on course, and provides built-in mechanisms to self-correct before small missteps become big problems.
In this talk, I’ll break down how to implement governance that actually helps, not hinders, including:
- Understanding what’s in your software estate
- Making smart technology choices - and why “boring” is often best
- Turning policies into automated steps on the way to production
If you want to reduce risk, improve decision-making, and keep your organization running smoothly—without slowing your teams down—this session is for you.
Speaker
Sarah Wells
Independent Consultant and Author
Sarah is a technology leader, consultant and conference speaker with a focus on engineering effectiveness, microservices, incident management, platform engineering, optimising for flow and technical strategy. She has over 20 years’ experience as a developer, principal engineer and tech director across product, platform, SRE and DevOps teams.
She spent over a decade working at the Financial Times, as it transformed from 12 releases a year to more than 20,000, embracing autonomous empowered teams and adopting microservices, DevOps, containers and platform engineering.
She is the author of the O’Reilly book Enabling Microservice Success: Managing Technical, Organizational and Cultural Challenges.
