Code Freeze 2025 speaker: David Laribee

From Technical Debt to Product Investment: A Playbook for Sustainable Software Development

Abstract

Product engineering teams often struggle to balance feature delivery with maintaining system quality, leading to rising costs, eroded trust, and resistance to change. What if your technical debt could be reframed as an investment? This session offers practical tools to help teams identify the root causes of debt, prioritize improvements, and strengthen collaboration between engineering and product teams—transforming debt into small investments yielding value.

Biography

David Laribee is a change strategist, international speaker, award-winning developer, and co-founder of Nerd/Noir. Over the last 25+ years, he’s helped product development teams and organizations unlock their full creative and productive potential, working across a wide variety of industries. David was an early practitioner and pioneer in several key evolutions in software development, including Domain-Driven Design, immersive learning, product thinking & agility, lean & kanban, and engineering craft.