Talk@Software Architecture Summit 2026: The pizza party of the future 🍕 software teams and product value in the age of coding agents

Published

Conference

October 12 -16, 2026, Berlin

Software Architecture Summit Das groĂźe Trainingsevent fĂĽr moderne Softwarearchitektur

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Slide Deck

Impressions

collection in progress...

Abstract

AI will have a huge impact on our software development teams and our software architecture - nobody is sure how exactly, and Simon and Katie don’t have the perfect prediction either!

This is not the first time the way we approach software teams has changed: we’ve gone from silos and super specialization to cross-functional Scrum teams and 2-pizza teams; T-shaped and M-shaped professionals to full-stack, DevSecFin…Ops, value streams, Team Topologies and more. We’ve added all kinds of coaches and then removed them again.

Now that these teams have AI coding agents doing the typing we are seeing “new” (or maybe not so new?) bottlenecks: value questions (domain/product/requirements) and trust questions (quality/testing/reliability/architecture/process). And we’re seeing suggestions from moving down to one-pizza-teams or even just a product owner and their AI wrangler.

So who is invited to the pizza party of the future? Who makes decisions, who takes responsibility, what new and old roles and skills will be needed? And who is no longer welcome?

We’ll take a look at what some of the friendlier agile critics from the past can tell us. We will see how their takes can help us move to a more value-oriented future with agents and humans collaborating on user needs.

Further Reading

We are putting together a write up of all* the rabbit holes and materials we encountered during the talk creation on substack:

Katie & Simon's Conference Talks Substack | Substack
Links and further reading to support our conference talks. Click to read Katie & Simon's Conference Talks Substack, a Substack publication. Launched 2 days ago.
Katie & Simon's Conference Talks Substack | Substack