In this talk, I want to share how at Kiddom, we recognized and systematically tackled tech debt: the startup story of transitioning from going as fast as we can on product development, to balancing that work with addressing accumulated technical shortfalls.

Some things we'll be going over:
- Recognizing when we were starting to get overwhelmed and reaching a breaking point
- Communicating and evangelizing the issue, particularly to non-technical teammates
- Setting up processes to tackle immediate issues, but also setting up ownership in the long run within the engineering team so we continue to pay down our debt over time
- Interleaving the work with product development and prioritizing both concurrently

How we handle tech debt at Kiddom

Engineering executive • ex-Affirm | Square | Google

Allen Cheung

VP of Engineering

In this talk, I will go over how we evolved the QA function at Kiddom, starting with bottlenecking on manual testing to enabling automation, as we looked to delineate clear responsibilities between the QA and software engineering teams.

Some areas we'll explore:
- The building of a dedicated QA team and where they add value in modern software development
- Figuring out our automation and CI/CD story
- Leveling up our entire engineering team to emphasize quality via these tools and processes

How we do QA at Kiddom

In my talk, I will go through how we evolved our meetings at Kiddom: by implementing agendas, constraining our audiences and cadences, and promoting participation from the attendees, all to drive towards time that's better spent.

Here's some of the things we'll cover:
1. Agenda documents, when to use them and how.
2. Iterating on *who* and *when* meetings are useful.
3. How to tell when participants are engaged, that the meeting is creating value.

Allen Cheung

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