People ask me which of my posts to read if they want to get better at product management. I never had a good answer, because I did not write them as a curriculum. I wrote them because something was on fire.
Excellence in organizations starts and ends with hiring. Most leaders agree in principle. Very few behave as though they believe it.
Effective leaders master the skill of choosing memorable terms, defining them precisely, and using them with unreasonable consistency. I call these load-bearing terms: words and phrases that hold up part of the structure. Remove one and something falls down.
These are the tenets for Principal Engineers that define the engineering culture at Amazon. They are just about as perfect as a set of rules that define senior engineers’ behaviors as you’ll find. Ensuring your company’s … Read more
In 1938, P.G. Wodehouse wrote this in The Code of the Woosters: He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled. … Read more
This week the argument found a name. Uncle Bob Martin, who started coding in the late 60s and wrote the book on clean code, posted that his current strategy is to not read any of the … Read more
Software engineers stopped opening IDEs. Hardware engineers are about to stop opening KiCad. I define Prompt to Metal, explain why the prompt-box startups have no moat, and share five weakly held opinions about where this all goes.
The Model Context Environment Controller is eyes, hands, and a safe front door for agents on Windows; and the same battle-tested remote control for smart-home systems.
Updated July 2026. The original March version of this post is below, revised. The biggest changes: my credentials for giving this advice got stronger (I stopped reading the code entirely; see No-Look Coding and the Five Stages … Read more
For the past few months we’ve been architecting, refactoring, and refining. 146 commits. Dozens of PRs. One PR touched 493 files. The long-awaited Beta isn’t just about revolutionary features. It’s about getting the architecture right and … Read more
I’ve heard “program” used to mean everything from a team to a project plan to a portfolio to lines of code. At some point, someone has to stop and say: you keep using that word—I don’t … Read more
Mechanisms are complete processes—owned by a leader, built around a tool or ritual, broadly adopted, and continually inspected and improved—that make the right behavior the default. Rather than hoping people do the right thing, great leaders engineer processes that guarantee it.
You don’t scale excellence by inspecting outcomes—you scale it by designing systems that send the right signals. These are called Fitness Functions.
The right kind of feedback can transform teams, while the wrong kind erodes trust and performance. SBI, which stands for Situation–Behavior–Impact, is a structured way to give feedback that’s clear, non-defensive, and actionable.
Terminal.Gui is a .NET UI framework for cross-platform terminal apps. It started life as gui.cs, created by Miguel de Icaza. Miguel, being Miguel, casually dropped a complete cross-platform console UI stack into the world, made it … Read more
Here’s a simple yet powerful exercise, the CBTO Stack Rank, designed to force you into uncomfortable clarity about where you really stand as a leader.
Organizational Silos Are Like Gravity. You Don’t Hope Them Away. You can’t culture-doc them into nonexistence. You Engineer Around Them.
Every great org starts the same way: a handful of people with conviction, urgency, and the energy of a shared mission. The best ones are driven by clarity of purpose, crisp principles, and a team that … Read more
