The biggest failures I’ve seen in engineering teams didn’t start with code. They started with someone making a small assumption, skipping a conversation, or filling in a gap under pressure. Over time those tiny gaps add up to something I call “communication debt” — and it quietly shapes your architecture more than your code style or framework ever will.

In this talk, we’ll break down the recurring patterns that cause teams to drift into misalignment, the decisions that create long-term fragility, and why even brilliant engineers end up building conflicting mental models of the same system. I’ll share lightweight techniques for preventing drift — alignment rituals, decision logs, architectural “checkpoints,” and habits that keep humans in sync so systems stay predictable.

If your team has ever shipped something that “should have worked,” this session gives you the tools to fix the root cause, not the symptoms.