Patrick Kua
Contents
Books in this wiki: Building Evolutionary Architectures
Background
Patrick Kua is a Principal Technical Consultant at ThoughtWorks with over 15 years of industry experience. He is known for bringing a balanced perspective across technology, people, and process — particularly around technical leadership, engineering culture, and the human dimensions of software architecture. He speaks internationally on technical leadership, architecture, and building effective engineering cultures, and has established a training programme for developers transitioning into tech lead and architect roles. He is author of The Retrospective Handbook: A Guide for Agile Teams and Talking with Tech Leads: From Novices to Practitioners.
Core Positions
- Technical leadership as a learnable discipline, not a personality trait or seniority milestone
- Engineering culture as an architectural force: team practices, incentives, and experimentation norms determine what kind of architecture a team can sustain
- Retrospectives and kaizen (continuous improvement) as engineering practices — systematic, not ceremonial
- The Inverse Conway Maneuver requires cultural and structural change, not just a reorg on an org chart
Books
Building Evolutionary Architectures — Building Evolutionary Architectures (2017, with Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons)
Co-authored the originating work on evolutionary architecture. Kua's contribution is most visible in the organisational and cultural chapters: Conway's Law, cross-functional teams, culture of experimentation, and the engineering practices that sustain incremental change over time.