# Nicole Bouchard

**Senior Product Manager**

Nicole is a Senior Product Manager at Conduktor specializing in developer tools, infrastructure, and data platforms. Previously at Spotify.

[LinkedIn profile](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolebouchard/)

## Articles by Nicole Bouchard

- [Your Platform Team Can’t Fix Kafka Costs Alone](https://www.conduktor.io/blog/your-platform-team-cant-fix-kafka-costs-alone) (2026-05-19) — Kafka costs keep growing because most orgs lack the ownership model to act on them. Moving to the next stage of cost maturity is the engineering leader's call.
- [Why Kafka Costs Keep Rising (Even When Usage Doesn’t)](https://www.conduktor.io/blog/a-better-conversation-about-kafka-costs) (2026-04-30) — Kafka costs are driven by structure and provisioning, not usage. A view from the field on where the savings actually hide.
- [Introducing Schema Registry Proxy (Preview)](https://www.conduktor.io/blog/introducing-schema-registry-proxy) (2026-03-24) — Schema registry governance gets deferred because the tooling isn't there. We built Schema Registry Proxy to change that.
- [Chaos Testing for Kafka Compliance: DR Evidence That Works](https://www.conduktor.io/blog/chaos-testing-for-kafka-compliance-dr-evidence-that-works) (2026-03-19) — Map chaos experiments to DORA, SOC 2, PCI-DSS, and GDPR requirements. Turn your Kafka resilience testing into the compliance evidence regulators expect.
- [Kafka Chaos Tests: What They Teach You That Monitoring Can't](https://www.conduktor.io/blog/what-kafka-chaos-tests-actually-teach-you-that-monitoring-doesnt) (2026-03-12) — Monitoring tells you what broke. Chaos testing tells you what will. Five Kafka system behaviors that only surface under controlled failure.
- [Chaos Engineering for Kafka: Test Recovery Before You Need It](https://www.conduktor.io/blog/chaos-engineering-for-kafka-testing-recovery-before-you-need-it) (2026-03-04) — Five tests that validate your Kafka disaster recovery plan before a real outage does. A practical guide for platform engineering teams.
- [Kafka Disaster Recovery: The Complete Strategy Beyond Replication](https://www.conduktor.io/blog/kafka-disaster-recovery-the-complete-strategy-beyond-replication) (2026-02-11) — Three operational phases, six technical areas, and a failover runbook. The complete disaster recovery strategy most Kafka teams are missing.
- [Why Kafka Platform Health Requires More Than Monitoring](https://www.conduktor.io/blog/why-kafka-platform-health-requires-more-than-monitoring) (2026-02-02) — Platform health differs from infrastructure health. Observability alone won't cut it. Here are the questions that reveal your Kafka platform's real state.
- [Kafka Schema Governance: From Chaos to Confidence in 4 Steps](https://www.conduktor.io/blog/kafka-schema-governance-from-chaos-to-confidence) (2026-01-14) — Fix Kafka schema chaos with a 4-step governance framework: visibility, audit, accountability, enforcement. Used by Swiss Post across hundreds of topics.