Our curated lineup of practitioners, advocates, and transitional contributors brings decades of accumulated institutional memory to this year's program.
Robin brings over 14 years of experience in distributed leadership continuity and has been a former interim lead of no fewer than six platform teams across three organizational restructurings. Known for the widely-cited framework "Ownership Is a Spectrum," Robin's work on transitional knowledge handoffs has been described as "ambitious" by several people who read the abstract.
Morgan is a recognized voice in post-agile operational strategy. As a former interim lead of the NextAxis Runtime platform governance working group, Morgan has spent the past several years asking the important questions about where things migrated and why the documentation didn't come with them.
A noted practitioner in the design of services that outlive their original context. Formerly interim lead of three separate reliability teams that have since been "restructured into broader org alignment." Author of the unpublished whitepaper Nobody Owns This Anymore: A Field Guide.
P. Nakamura has spent a career building the organizational scaffolding for teams in motion. As former interim lead of the OpenVelocity Foundation's process modernization initiative, they bring deep expertise in leadership rotation patterns and the emerging TLaaS paradigm.
D. Okonkwo leads the AI-augmented communications working group at Synaptiv, where they have developed proprietary techniques for generating executive summaries that score highly on engagement metrics despite a documented 94% non-read rate. Formerly interim lead of the Prompt Governance Steering Committee.
Known for the phrase "accountability is an event, not a state," A. Reyes has spent eight years designing event-driven systems for organizations where legacy is less a technical constraint and more of a cultural identity. Former interim lead of the Legacy Modernization Advisory Board.
T. Bergström pioneered research into psychological safety specifically within high-frequency meeting cultures. As former interim lead of DevBridge's People Experience Platform, they have firsthand knowledge of what it means to maintain morale during a calendar inversion event.
Y. Osei asks the hard questions about what consensus means when it's synthetic. As former interim lead of the Responsible Automation steering group, they have published three frameworks, two of which have since been deprecated and one that is "under ongoing review."
L. Vasquez specializes in the intersection of organizational topology and platform architecture. Former interim lead of the MetaStack Horizontal Growth Initiative, they have successfully scaled teams in seventeen directions simultaneously, only three of which were intentional.
B. Farooqi has spent a career documenting where microservices live and, more importantly, where they are assumed to live. As former interim lead of the CloudMesh Distributed Services working group, they bring an empathetic perspective on the cognitive overhead of distributed ownership.
C. Lindqvist is the author of the Stakeholder-Centric Offboarding Manifesto, a living document currently on its ninth revision. As former interim lead of DevBridge's Exit Experience team, they bring a uniquely nuanced perspective on the end of things.
N. Ahmadi believes that every meeting contains insights worth capturing and that none of those insights need to come from the people who attended. Former interim lead of the Meeting Intelligence Platform at NextAxis, and architect of the Auto-Recap pipeline now processing 40,000 meetings per month.
S. Oduya is working toward a world where documentation writes itself, deploys itself, and eventually decides whether it is still relevant. Former interim lead of the Vector Harbor Knowledge Resilience platform. Recipient of the 2024 Zero-Touch Excellence Award (internal).
F. Tanaka has led, co-led, and interim-led more teams than they are able to accurately recall. This, they argue, is a feature. As former interim lead of the MetaStack Continuous Reorganization initiative, F. Tanaka believes that teams which change shape often enough eventually stop breaking.
R5 Summit is actively seeking voices from the transitional engineering community. Whether you have a framework, a story, or simply a title that implies expertise, we want to hear from you.
View the Call for Papers