London Platform User Group (LOPUG),Wednesday 9th July, 6.30pm onwards

For our July meetup, we're meeting at the awesome Atomico offices! We have a fantastic line-up of speakers, the agenda will be:

• 6:30pm - arrive, drinks, networking
• 7:00pm - Talk 1: "Technical Debt Is Business Debt"

Technical debt is often seen as a problem for engineering teams to quietly manage but this view is not only wrong, it’s costly.
In this talk, we’ll reframe technical debt as business debt: a shared responsibility that impacts product velocity, customer experience, and long-term competitiveness. Whether you're in tech or not, this talk will help you see technical debt as the business risk it truly is and how to start addressing it today.

Speaker: Andrea Laforgia, Lead Consulting Engineer @ Armakuni
Andrea Laforgia is a UK‑based software engineer with nearly 30 years of professional software engineering experience. He's a passionate advocate for high‑quality software craftsmanship, blending agile delivery with practices like test‑driven development, trunk‑based development, and collaborative team techniques such as pair and mob programming.

• 7.30pm - food, more drinks & networking
• 7.45pm - Talk 2: Platform-as-a-product from the trenches

Moving from engineering-led delivery to treating your Platform as a Product is hard. It can feel like you’re crawling through the trenches. But the rewards are awesome.
In this talk, Cat will share not only what the Platform Engineering and Platform as a Product buzzwords mean, but also how you can get out of the trenches and onto the green fields of happy developers.

Speaker: Cat Morris, Staff Product Manager @ Syntasso
Cat is a Staff Product Manager at Syntasso delivering Kratix, an open-source cloud-native framework for building internal platforms. She has worked in tech for over 10 years, the last 6 have been in Platform Engineering across all kinds of domains. She specialises in bringing Product Mindset to technical teams that serve developers and other internal users - their user experience matters too! Away from work, Cat is an avid plant enthusiast with dozens of houseplants. She also shares her home with Opal, her equally adored and occasionally demanding cat.

• 8.15pm onwards - drinks and networking.

So, please come and join us, we look forward to seeing you there.
The LOPUG team.

• Food and drinks provided
• Good time will be had by all