A Checklist for Custom or Third-Party Services
Build custom for features that define your product and buy commodity functions. This eight-factor checklist weighs cost, debt, operations and vendor lock-in.
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Blog
Insights
Articles on product strategy, engineering principles, and building software that lasts.
Separating Planned and Reactive Work
Keep the roadmap predictable by defining planned and reactive work, tracking them separately, triaging requests, and reserving capacity for incidents.
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When Not to Use AI in Your Product
When not to use AI in your product. Six signs a feature should wait, a short checklist before building and why rules or better data often beat a model early.
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What Repeated Manual Investigation Reveals
Repeating the same manual steps to diagnose production issues signals an observability gap. Document the steps, then close it with targeted instrumentation.
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Signals It Is Time to Start Selling
Iteration should give way to sales once engagement, repeatable value and a stable product confirm early fit. This nine-step approach shows how to decide.
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Why Incidents Drain Engineering Velocity
Incident response and bug fixes displace planned work, so velocity falls. Measure the drain, then reduce it with monitoring, reviews and reliability effort.
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How to Prototype AI Features Cheaply
How to prototype AI features before committing to infrastructure. Fake the output with a person, test a hosted model on an evaluation set, then decide on infra.
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What Reliable Production Systems Share
Reliable systems share clear boundaries, observability, practiced incident response, fault tolerance and managed complexity. See how to assess your own system.
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How to Choose Between SQL and NoSQL
SQL vs NoSQL for a first product, compared in plain terms, with a seven-step way to choose, when NoSQL is the better first pick, and the mistakes to avoid.
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Why Production Toil Pushes Engineers Out
Manual, repetitive production work drains engineering capacity, morale and retention. Measure it, budget for its reduction and automate it at the source.
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Why AI Integrations Add Complexity
AI integrations often add pipelines, infrastructure and monitoring without matching product value. Compare simpler options and full lifecycle costs first.
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Incident Response Versus Investigation
Response restores service fast and investigation finds the root cause afterward. Learn why keeping the two phases separate shortens outages and stops repeats.
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