GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech Building Software That Survives • Michael Nygard & Charles Humble
Jan 2, 2026
In this conversation, Michael Nygard, a renowned author and Chief Architect at Nubank, shares his journey from programmer to tech leader, emphasizing the importance of autonomy in organizations. He discusses the balance between centralization and autonomy in various activities and how architectural boundaries can alleviate alignment challenges. Nygard also delves into the implications of Conway's Law on communication structures and the influence of cultural factors in leadership, encouraging a focus on rewarding preventive efforts over reactive ones.
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From Dev To Ops And Back
- Michael Nygard moved from development into operations and built production infrastructure, then handled 3 a.m. outages firsthand.
- His operational experience exposed recurring failure patterns that became the basis for Release It!.
Sabre's Legacy And The Real Challenge
- At Sabre, Michael encountered 50 years of technical debt across many OSes and mainframes while modernizing systems.
- The biggest hurdle was modernizing dev practices and introducing automated builds and testing, not the cloud lift itself.
Autonomy Is Activity-Specific
- Autonomy and centralization are dimensions tied to specific activities, not opposite ends of a single spectrum.
- Teams can be autonomous for builds and deploys while centralized for finance, security, and data centers.