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Tech Debt Burndown Podcast S3E5: Cloud vs On-Premises
In episode five of this season of the Tech Debt Burndown podcast, Chris Swan and Nick Selby dive into the widespread misunderstandings and economic realities of choosing between cloud and on-premises infrastructure. They discuss how cloud service providers have driven organizations to perform “lift-and-shift” migrations that replicate messy data center environments in the cloud. Rather than achieving the promised cost savings and agility, these organizations inherit the same technical debt while facing skyrocketing bills and unexpected administrative costs in areas like logging, compliance, and observability. They also highlight that while the cloud is invaluable for early-stage startups and rapid feature deployment, it can quickly become cost-prohibitive without proper optimization, architecture, and governance.
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Tech Debt Burndown Podcast S3E4: Sarah Wells
In the fourth episode of season three of the Tech Debt Burndown podcast, Sarah Wells joins Chris Swan and Nick Selby to talk about the lessons learned from her decade at the Financial Times, and their journey to implementing microservices (the same lessons that informed her book, “Enabling Microservices Success).” We touch on whether the purpose of microservices is to scale a system, or to scale an engineering organisation. By breaking down monoliths into independent domains, teams can reduce cognitive complexity and release software hundreds of times a day. Sarah warns, however, that this shift introduces a “maintenance treadmill,” requiring robust automation for library upgrades, security patching, and cross-service governance to prevent a sprawl of unmanageable tech debt.
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Tech Debt Burndown Podcast S3E3: Matthew Skelton
In episode three of season three of the Tech Debt Burndown podcastTeam Topologies co-author Matthew Skelton joins Chris Swan and Nick Selby to discuss the relationship between tech debt and cognitive load. Matthew explains that every organization has a finite “cognitive load budget,” and technical debt acts as a constant drain on this capacity, creating friction that slows down development and increases operational risk. By framing tech debt in terms of human cognition and team boundaries, the discussion highlights how healthy software evolution depends on keeping systems understandable and manageable for the people who build and run them.
Read moreTech Debt Burndown Podcast S3E2: AI Coding Assistants
In episode two of this season of the Tech Debt Burndown podcast, Chris Swan and Nick Selby chat about how AI Coding Assistants have suddenly become very good, maybe even good enough to write “load bearing” code. The constraints that existed around producing code have potentially disappeared, but other constraints live on, and we’re still finding out what this means for product management.
Read moreTech Debt Burndown Podcast Series 3 E1: Tech Debt as a Service
Tech Debt as a Service (Welcome to the Slopocene) After a long hiatus, the Tech Debt Burndown podcast has returned for its third season. We’ve got a bunch of episodes (some recorded quite a while ago) in the can, so more to come; along with some fresh stuff, as 2026 has been a wild ride already.
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Velocity's Edge Podcast S1E9 - Nick Selby on Factionalism
When leadership is struggling with organizational dysfunction that stems from resource constraints, they tend to see teams in conflict: product versus engineering, sales versus operations, etc. They might assume the solution involves coaching, restructuring reporting lines, adjusting compensation models, or hiring more diplomacy-minded managers. But as EPSD’s Nicko Goncharoff and Nick Selby have learned through years of organizational interventions, the biggest threat to mid-stage technology companies isn’t functional disagreement. It’s the personal resentment that calcifies when strategic pivots in the business force zero-sum resource allocation.
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Velocity's Edge Podcast S1E8 - Dr. Pablo Breuer on CISO Leadership
Many organizations hire Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) expecting them to be security experts who can implement controls and prevent breaches. But as Dr. Pablo Breuer learned through 22 years in Navy cyber operations and leadership roles spanning National Security Agency red teams to Fortune 50 financial firms, the fundamental challenge isn’t technical — it’s that most companies don’t understand what they actually need from a CISO in the first place.
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Velocity's Edge Podcast S1E7 - Peat Bakke on Operationalizing Decision Records
When Peat Bakke sits down for breakfast with engineering leaders, the conversation inevitably turns to the same frustrating pattern: talented people leave, and with them goes critical context about why systems work the way they do. Not just the technical details—those live in the code—but the reasoning behind architectural and technical choices, the problems those choices solved, and crucially, the alternatives that were deliberately rejected.
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Velocity's Edge Podcast S1E6 - Thomas Dullien & Chris Swan on Decision Records
Most engineering leaders think institutional knowledge loss is an inevitable cost of growth. They see departing employees take critical context with them—why certain processes exist, what problems they solve, how trade-offs were evaluated—and assume the solution involves better handoff documentation or knowledge transfer sessions. But as EPSD Advisory Board members Thomas Dullien and Chris Swan learned through building and scaling organizations, the biggest risk isn’t losing people; it’s losing the reasoning behind the decisions those people made.
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Velocity’s Edge Podcast S1E5 - Sarah Wells on Cultural Change
Most engineering leaders think velocity problems are technology problems. They see slow deployments and assume the solution involves better CI/CD pipelines, more developers, or migrating to microservices. But as Sarah Wells discovered as she experienced the digital transformation of the Financial Times, the biggest constraints aren’t in your codebase; they’re in your org chart.
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Velocity’s Edge Podcast S1E4 - Carla Geisser & Chris Swan on Crisis Engineering
As Carla Geisser puts it: “The incidents that actually matter to how people interact with technology are not security incidents … They are things like, they can’t log into their bank account, they can’t buy their Taylor Swift tickets, they can’t get on an airplane.” And when everything’s on fire, most organizations make a critical mistake: they treat the crisis as the exception rather than the expectation. The companies that survive and thrive are those that understand a fundamental truth: if your business is growing, crises aren’t anomalies—they’re predictable outcomes of scale.
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Velocity’s Edge Podcast S1E3 - Melanie Ensign on Strategic Communications
Most organizations think of security communications as ‘crisis management’: what to say when something goes wrong. But waiting until an incident occurs to build relationships, establish trust, and create communication channels severely limits your response options.
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Velocity’s Edge Podcast S1E2 - Huw Rogers on Tech Debt
If you’re leading a profitable, cash-flow-positive business, you’ve probably watched technical debt pile up: those accumulated consequences of choosing quick fixes over well-designed, long-term solutions. If you’re not carefully managing it, it can become overwhelming.
Read moreVelocity's Edge Podcast S1E1 - Sarah Wells on Strategy
What makes an effective product engineering strategy? In the debut episode of the Velocity’s Edge podcast, host Nicko Goncharoff speaks with Sarah Wells about the importance of strategy to engineering effectiveness.
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Announcing Velocity's Edge: Where Speed Meets Strategy
We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Velocity’s Edge, EPSD’s new podcast premiering this Wednesday. Velocity’s Edge brings you to the pivotal point where speed meets strategy—that critical spot where the wrong decision can capsize your organization, while the right one propels you forward. Each 20-minute episode delivers insights from battle-tested experts who’ve guided C-suites and boards through moments when they’ve needed to navigate crises with speed and authority.
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