I hate the term minimum viable product. No customer wants something that is merely viable. Viable implies “meh”. I want to build things customers love, even if it is just a slice of a much bigger … Read more
Hiring is a high-consequence prediction made from incomplete, biased, and subjective evidence, so a leader’s job is to squelch the noise, amplify the signal, and make judgment inspectable.
I talk about this so often in coaching that I sometimes forget whether I ever wrote it down. I don’t think I have, so here goes… The 18-Month Rule Yesterday I asked a founder whether we … Read more
A volunteer is a leader who does the work only because it is Right (for the customer, for the team, and for the world) and who could walk away tomorrow without fear.
In May I helped a major medtech company jumpstart its internal AI efforts. In the process I came up with a way of thinking about the journey a company takes to fully embrace AI. I keep … Read more
If every tool invents its own copy of the principles, the tools start lying to each other. The model lives in one repo. The apps own the experience.
An interview-prep app: select the principle you want to test, get example questions and guidance. Hire and no-hire example sheets at Junior, Senior, and Exec.
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.
If you want help writing a 5Ps, use the 5Ps app. It’s a prompt you paste into an agent. It writes a first draft and revises it.
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
