November 4, 2025
As long-time advocates of flow-based delivery, Equal Experts sees Fast Flow Conf as a natural home for the conversations we care about most – how engineering teams can design for better flow, stronger platforms, and more sustainable ways of working.
Earlier this month, I was proud to return to Fast Flow for the second year running, this time with a large group from across our customer network representing a range of industries and disciplines. Bringing customers and peers together around shared challenges is what Fast Flow does best, so it was even more exciting to attend with Equal Experts as a sponsor this year.
Fast Flow Conf is a community-based event that brings together practitioners, experts and beginners to share knowledge and ideas. The conference continues to evolve as a cornerstone event for anyone interested in Team Topologies, platform strategy, and modern software delivery. The addition of a dedicated Platform Engineering track this year reflected a clear shift across the industry, from experimentation to embedding platform thinking at the heart of delivery.
The 2025 speaker line-up was exceptional. We heard from Dave Farley, co-author of the book Continuous Delivery and host of the Modern Software Engineering YouTube channel, which Equal Experts is proud to sponsor. In his talk, Dave framed 10 ideas that, when combined, can support organisations to go faster in software delivery whilst maintaining quality and safety.
I was also delighted to hear again from Matthew Skelton, co-author of Team Topologies, whose talk on Economies of empowerment challenged traditional management mindset. Instead of trying to choose between the traditional management approach of “economies of scale” – which doesn’t work well for knowledge work – and “economies of speed” (difficult to sustain) Matthew showed how organisations can achieve both speed and scale by organising for empowerment; giving teams autonomy around small, well-defined areas and actively curating how they share knowledge. It’s an idea that deeply resonates with how our own consultants help our customers design adaptive technology and ways of working.
Equal Experts’ own Steve Smith, our Global Head of Platforms and Modernisation, delivered a plenary talk on Platform as a Product (watch below). Steve reminded us that successful platforms start with empathy for their users, the delivery teams they serve.
“It’s about treating your internal teams as customers,” Steve explained. “Your success is entwined with theirs, and your job is to help them.” That customer-service mindset – building for real needs, not assumptions – is what separates effective platform teams from those who risk creating what Steve called “Cheetos Chapstick” solutions: technically clever, but nobody wants them.
Across the conference, I was struck by how many talks explored the human side of flow – how we can design teams and systems to support cognitive, emotional, and creative work.
One standout was Rachael Wonnacott’s keynote on Cognitive conservation, which reframed how we think about cognitive load. As she put it, “Cognitive load can’t be destroyed, but it can be designed.” For me, that’s a call to action: be intentional about how work is distributed across teams so they can focus, deliver more, and deliver better.
John Wilson’s session on Unlocking flow through deliberate practice also hit home. His message was simple but powerful: learning and improvement work best when you start small, build mastery incrementally, and accelerate only when ready. It’s an approach that mirrors how we help teams evolve capability sustainably – not through big-bang change, but via continuous improvement.
Meri Williams’ talk on implementing a platform engineering approach at Pleo was a stand out moment for me, I loved their simplicity and clarity:
These echoed the values we live by at Equal Experts: doing the right thing, not just the easy thing, and empowering teams to own their impact.
Fast Flow isn’t just a conference; it’s a community that’s shaping how the next generation of organisations will work. The conversations we had there – with customers, partners, and peers – will continue long after the conference ends.
I left inspired by the shared commitment to build better systems, empower better teams, and design for better flow.
I can’t wait to be back next year.
About the author
Katie Howe Browne is passionate about connecting brands and their customers, through the power of technology. She brings 20 years of client experience across a multitude of sectors from aviation and retail to insurance and media. Creating high performing teams who can deliver at pace and with passion is what drives Katie. She loves nothing more than seeing the technology her teams have built in the hands of the people who it was designed for. Connect with Katie on LinkedIn.
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