Measuring Time Lost to Investigations
Measure engineering time lost to production investigations by defining scope, logging start and end times, categorizing effort and tying hours to incidents.
Better Software Team
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Articles on product strategy, engineering principles, and building software that lasts.
Why MVPs Ship Features Nobody Uses
MVPs collect unused features through confirmation bias, stakeholder pressure and a loose definition of minimum. Define one core problem to keep scope small.
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Automating Away Repeat Investigations
Cut the incidents that need a human by finding recurring patterns, documenting root causes, and automating diagnosis and remediation for predictable failures.
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Estimating Engineering Timelines Honestly
How to estimate engineering timelines honestly with ranges, spikes and scope cuts, why early estimates miss by 4x, a worked example, and the mistakes to avoid.
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Engineering Support Ticket Triage
Engineering teams that inherit support work need a fixed triage sequence. Verify the data, reproduce, rate impact, assign an owner and escalate with next steps.
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Code Reviews Matter More in Small Teams
Why code review carries more weight in a small team, seven ways to run it without slowing delivery, what to check first, and when a lighter process works.
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Triage for Several Incidents at Once
Rank concurrent production incidents by user impact and data loss risk, find shared dependencies, name an incident commander, and mitigate before diagnosing.
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When to Invest in Performance Optimization
Early products should favor development speed. Five triggers that justify performance optimization, and how to do it without stalling feature delivery.
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Cutting Time to Diagnosis in Incidents
Diagnose production incidents faster with a fixed sequence. Verify scope, check recent changes, read the golden signals, test one hypothesis, then escalate.
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When to Stop Building and Start Marketing
Founders should start marketing once the core workflow solves one problem for one buyer. Six signals it is time, and how to split build and marketing time.
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When Simplicity Is a Competitive Advantage
When product simplicity becomes a competitive advantage, how to build it step by step, how simple and feature-rich products compare, and when it stops working.
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Database Schema Design for the Long Run
Which database schema design decisions to get right in week one, what can safely wait, the mistakes that surface in year two, and how to change a live schema.
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