If engineers spend the majority of their time dealing with issues from the past, who's actually responsible for the future? Can your organization realistically adopt AI when its software foundation can't support change?

Gartner predicts 80% of technical debt will be architectural by 2027. Meaning, it’s shifting from the code to the actual foundation of your software. Your teams spend 40% of their time understanding legacy code, another 40% working around it, and just 20% building and developing new.

Leadership feels the pressure to drive faster innovation, while engineering teams feel like they’re barely keeping up. One of the biggest industry challenges in this area is treating it as an engineering problem. It isn't.

In this conversation, Miao Luo, Director of Technology Strategy at Qt Group, makes the case that chronic technical debt and slow innovation are organizational challenges, not solely engineering ones.

The daily struggles with legacy systems, slow development cycles, and compliance burdens are actually symptoms. The root cause is a systemic way of building software that was never designed to be sustainable. Drawing from +20 years of experience as software engineer, product leader, and strategist, Miao shares what it actually takes to shift an organization's mindset, processes, and investment strategy, so that quality and tackling technical debt become the enabler of speed, not the enemy of it.

This is for technical leaders who need to champion that transformation, not just cope and accept the current ways of dealing with one of the software industry’s biggest challenges.

This episode airs February 24, 2026 at 4pm CET

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Register for this episode if you're wrestling with:

• Legacy codebases where every change risks catastrophic failure

• Talented engineers who joined to build the future but spend their days maintaining the past

• The pressure to adopt AI while knowing your foundation can't support it

• Leadership conversations where the engineering reality feels invisible