I just saw someone use the abbreviation “AI;DR” and I’ll be laughing for a while.

all discourse aside, there is one machine with consciousness. it's printers. they are alive and conscious and they hate you and they'd take your arm clean off if you let them. never trust a printer.

Great teams are less like awesome machines and more like awesome organisms. - Team of Teams

Slightly diminish a book Interviewing a user

The attached graphic is an excellent summary of everything that a good Product person does. You will note that "_project_ management," "manage tickets," "compel or browbeat people to build X," and "use Jira" are nowhere to be seen. 1/7

enshittification | noun | when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits

I want as many developers as possible to experience the joy of refactoring their code when they have a good test suite by their side. It's infectious. You'd want that feeling all the time.

Everyone has been trained to get high fidelity prototypes. I worked with a new team and they were hounding me on high fi artifacts to run research and I said let’s see how the research goes first. The research yielded changes so to spend all that time on the minutiae would have been a waste of time.

Once again for the people in the back: 'It's not a status meeting, it's a planning meeting: What is the best possible 'today' we can have?'

“I worked on 2045. I’ll continue that. I have no blockers.” “I worked on 3122. I’ll maybe finish that tomorrow. No blockers” “I finished 2066, then started 2173. No blockers” “I worked on 2754. Still on it. No blockers” “I did 2355. Still on it. No blockers” “I just started 2039. No blockers”

In this article, @lauraklein.bsky.social points out all the reasons organisations have for not doing the research and keep delivering things with low value, as well as the true underlying cause. Read it! https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-organizations-dont-do-user-research

I assume you mean that humans are tools, which is entirely fair.

cats are a tool-using species, though!

No cat has ever caught a tuna. It should not be food for cats. Yet cats love tuna. Makes no sense.

Attention chumps: If you, despite all our dire warnings, decided to put your newsletter on Substack, the untrustworthy asses who run the company just did what we all knew they would, and made it impossible to take your subscribers with you if you want to leave. support.substack.com/hc/en-us/art...

My account is now officially deleted so you can no longer read the post at the link above. Here’s what it said in case you’re curious.

This is all relatively easy when a company has the will to do it and genuine leadership (as opposed to management). A siloed company with command-and-control management and a focus on projects rather than the entire product probably won't be able to pull it off. 7/7

To do that, you must use an appropriate software architecture (see "Conway's Law"). Change must be easy. * Create a work environment that puts people first. See Dan Pink's "Drive" and Richard Sheridan's "Joy Inc." 6/7

* Build exactly what's needed—not one semicolon more. * Get feedback early and often, then immediately adapt and adjust to what you learn. That applies to both the product and your dev process. * Quality is not optional—you work faster in bug-free code. * Work incrementally. 5/7

* Work very small—ideally, you release at least daily to at least a subset of your users. The instant something is saleable, sell it. * Focus on what your customers find valuable. Talk to them frequently and do that directly, not through an intermediary. 4/7

* faster idea-to-customer's hands ("lead") time * happier employees, so low churn * higher quality * lower complexity (== lower maintenance and modification costs) Disadvantages: * (none) So, how how do you get those advantages? Here are a few of basics: 3/7

You cannot be agile while at the same time slavishly following a set of prescribed rules, and if you're not agile, you cannot be Agile. Advantages: * lower risk * faster revenue * guarantee that you'll build something people will want (higher sales) * lower dev costs 2/7

Was asked: What are the pros and cons of an "Agile" approach? Here's my list, but bear in mind that I am NOT talking about Scrum or SAFe or Kanban. I don't see those frameworks as even slightly Agile, at least not inherently. 1/7

It's alive! Komplexitetspodden (The Complexity Podcast) is now available at Apple podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/k... ...and at Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/40Cpa7M... First episode: Enkla regler (Simple Rules). A new episode, featuring a unique theme, will be published every Thursday.

Your job is to help your customers (at least that's the way to create a product they want to buy). Your job is not to invent stuff out of whole cloth. 2/2

I often hear "The customers will *love* this!" No. They won't. Customers will happily tell you what they need. They do that every day when they call tech support, for example. Talk to them. Pay attention. 1/2

excellent post from @simplybastow.com on enshittification, why it happens, and what product people need to do to stop it.

None of this behavior is helpful, of course. Maybe it's time to stop running our software organizations as if we were a reality show. It's not working. 11/11

I was watching Project Runway last night (don't judge 😄), and this particular season's dysfunction-for-entertainment aligns closely with the problems of many (certainly not all) software shops. Let's discuss. 1/11

Transparency isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the foundation for collaboration, trust, and improvement.

What I want is enough money to never have to open LinkedIn ever again

The tragedy of venture capital: you raise it by pitching the smartest, most innovative ideas you can imagine. But you win customers by solving their dumbest, most annoying problems. That misalignment kills so many startups. So glad Prefect is now funded by the people who actually use it.

Saw this on LinkedIn and this is exactly the feeling I have right now with synthetic users and a lot of other "let's let the LLM be smart for us" things. Are we just a few people holding the line against madness? :-)

We’re not sure who needs to hear this, but ‘blueberry’ has two b’s.

This is the single best piece I've read on "replacing coders with AI," it fully dispells the myth from the perspective of a software engineer and does so in a calm, reasonable way. colton.dev/blog/curing-...

"So from an executive perspective, lighting comically large piles of money on fire trying to teach graphics cards how to read is, surprisingly, the logical play. The rest, well, that’s all just creative marketing." -- Marcus Hutchins #AI malwaretech.com/2025/08/ever...

If you’ll be held accountable for the outcome, you should have a say in the decision.

Also, when you narrow, you often find that the narrow story is sufficient to the users/customers, so you don't have to implement the stuff you left behind. Even if you insist on estimates, estimates made from very small units of work are much more accurate than if you didn't narrow. 5/9

You can improve accuracy by making the stories as small as possible, thus the focus is on narrowing (not slicing—we're talking about narrowing scope, not slicing out an arbitrary piece of the work). 4/9

When someone makes a statement you 100% disagree with, Chances are you are not open to learning from their point of view. When you feel that way, don’t respond. Listen with curiosity instead. You might be surprised what you learn.

It’s so funny to me when Adobe asks if I would recommend ACROBAT to a ~friend or colleague. I mean no I will not be bringing up your PDF software at brunch.

Take a break from all manners of hype. 😁 A recording of my closing keynote at #CampDigital, on the spectacular lies of maps, has now been published. This page has all the slides, reference links, embedded videos and a link to the full talk. axbom.com/cdmaps/

I'm copying this BlueSky post👇 for amplification [t.ly/lSbSF]. "The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't." Far from a big enough sample set, but the 1/5

Yes! The big win I found with TDD is that I _DIDN'T_ have to build such a big picture in my head. I could work more gradually, at whatever granularity fit my current thinking, and evolve a solution that expressed that thinking.

No, I do not imagine the code I'm going to write, and then write the tests that tie to that fully-imagined implementation. I don't know anyone clairvoyant enough to pull off that kind of trick. It seems impossible because it is. That's also not what anyone is asking you to do.

I've come to realize that one of my discomforts with AI at the program-creation level (as compared to small-snippet-of-a-program level) is that it's a fundamentally waterfall process that produces a black box solution. You need to come up with a highly detailed specification up front. 1/5

You don’t need more time between releases. You need less risk in each release. buff.ly/hhPyphD #ReleaseRidiculouslyOften

@tdpauw.bsky.social has a post about this: thinkinglabs.io/articles/202...

For me, one of the best definitions of Test-Driven Development comes from the paper "Mock Roles, Not Objects" by Steve Freeman, Nat Pryce, Tim Mackinnon, Joe Walnes. http://jmock.org/oopsla2004.pdf #tdd #unittests #softwaredesign

I see this a lot. Design and engineering teams trying to highlight important issues. However the CEO only hears problems and comes to the concluding that the individuals will to stand up are actually the source of said problem.