Jessica Brentnall
Architecture & Engineering Leadership Consultant | JBrentnall Digital
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Jessica Brentnall is an Architecture & Engineering Leadership Consultant who helps organisations navigate the realities of complex, ageing software. Drawing on her background in senior technical leadership, she bridges the gap between commercial ambitions, product strategy, and technical execution, ensuring systems remain performant, audit-ready, and fit for purpose.
She specialises in taking "pre-loved" platforms built with good intentions that have since accumulated heavy technical debt, and turning them into resilient, secure systems without harming delivery. Rather than advocating for costly rewrites, she pragmatically evolves systems, processes, and team structures together. She shares hard-won lessons from the trenches, offering a candid and practical perspective on leading teams through genuine, lasting technical and cultural transformation.
Area of Expertise
Follow The Leader: Charisma, Tech Hype, and Influence
Think of a tech leader you admire. Someone who can step onto a stage, drop buzzwords like "AI," "Serverless," or "Quantum," and instantly convince hundreds of engineers to rebuild their entire architecture.
What makes these leaders and speakers magnetic? The answer lies in shared language, engineered belonging, and ritualised alignment, patterns that look remarkably similar to historical cult movements.
This tongue-in-cheek talk explores the fascinating overlap between modern tech leadership and historical cult groups. We’ll break down what makes charismatic leadership work, why technical teams are surprisingly susceptible to high-intensity alignment, and how to harness these influence patterns ethically.
Leave with a fresh perspective on team dynamics, practical leadership tools, and the ability to win hearts and minds without accidentally starting a movement.
Note: Contains historical references to cults.
Architecting the Defaults: Beyond the Compliance Checklist
Modern engineering teams face an overwhelming cognitive load. Developers building complex domain logic are expected to juggle performance budgets, security boundaries, and regulatory demands at the same time. Too often, these critical concerns are treated as an afterthought, bolted on during a final-sprint scramble or enforced through rigid, late-stage gatekeeping. The result is developer burnout, delivery bottlenecks, and brittle systems held together by sheer hope and effort.
This session explores how to move away from reactive, tick-box compliance towards embedded, architectural defaults. We will analyse why traditional governance fails and how late-stage checks can cost a company and degrade team morale. We will then bridge the gap between risk-averse business stakeholders and delivery teams, demonstrating how to align regulatory constraints with core product drivers. Finally, we will detail how to establish patterns and behaviours, such as using Architecture Decision Records, reusable infrastructure patterns, and Definition of Done guardrails, ensuring that building secure, compliant software becomes the path of least resistance.
You will leave with practical strategies to eliminate governance friction, lower cognitive load, and empower your engineers to ship robust systems by default.
NDC Oslo 2024 Sessionize Event
Newcrafts Paris 2024 Sessionize Event
NDC Porto 2020 Sessionize Event
NDC London 2020 Sessionize Event
NDC Porto 2019 Sessionize Event
NDC London 2019 Sessionize Event
Techorama NL 2018 Sessionize Event
NDC Sydney 2018 Sessionize Event
NDC Minnesota 2018 Sessionize Event
NDC London 2018 Sessionize Event
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