Aditya Kushwaha

10x developers don’t use requirements. They don’t need to. They’re already connected to the customer. They understand the problem deeply. They shape the solution as they build it. Requirements are what you give someone when they don’t have the context to decide. But when engineers own the outcome, When they think like product builders, When they care what happens after the code ships, You don’t have to hand them detailed requirements. You give them a goal. They get to work. The best developers don’t wait for clarity. They create it! That’s what real product thinking looks like. And it’s what most teams are missing. Not velocity. Not better documentation. What’s missing is connection to customer and the product. If you want more impact from your team, don’t hand them more tickets. Help them understand who they’re building for and why it matters. Because once they do, everything changes.

561

151 commentaren

Here's a recipe to destroy an effective software product development company. Punish every failure, no matter how insignificant. Disincentivize risk, and make it safe to play it safe. Create a serious and professional environment. Ban all colour, and stop anything fun. Hold people accountable to respect all rules. Punctuality first and foremost. Steadily introduce more rules. Require proof and metrics for anything. Want to rewrite something? Forget it, show me the money! What's the ROI of a good user experience? Let's scrap it. Keep people constantly busy. Everything should have a deadline. Nobody should stay idle. Discourage direct collaboration. Make everything asynchronous. Request PowerPoint presentations and spreadsheets for everything. Ask people to declare how they spent their time, weekly. Every half hour should be filled with what the employee has done. Introduce matrix management, with at least 3 managers per employee. A functional manager, a product manager, and a people manager. Request that all work must be well planned upfront, with PI Planning or similar, via committees. Likewise, establish change management, including architectural reviews by an architecture review board, quality inspections, QA signoff, security signoff, etc. Hire ex-McKinsey consultants that never wrote a line of code as directors. Outsource large parts of your codebase. Establish a vigorous and continuous corporate learning, through online videos, and with periodic refreshers. Consolidate your tech stack: Azure, TypeScript, Node.js, and MongoDB. And do the same in IT: Windows, Edge, and Virtual Machines. And finally, most importantly, lock down your employee's machines, lest they access the web, their own email address, and anything fun. Require a manager's approval for your developers to install software on their laptops.

98

26 commentaren

"How much is poor code quality actually costing us?" This question came up in a board meeting last month, and the engineering leader couldn't answer it. Here's the problem: Most companies treat code quality as an engineering concern, not a business concern. But poor code quality has a direct P&L impact: → Customer churn from bugs: When your app crashes, customers leave → Developer productivity loss: Engineers spending 40%+ of their time on technical debt → Opportunity cost: Features delayed because the codebase is too fragile to change quickly → Incident response costs: Engineers pulled off roadmap work to fight fires I just saw data from a company where improving their change failure rate by 15% translated to $2.3M in recovered engineering productivity over 12 months. Another company reduced their mean time to recovery and saw customer satisfaction scores improve by 18%, directly impacting renewal rates. The companies that get this right don't talk about code quality in technical terms. They talk about it in business terms: reduced risk, faster time-to-market, higher customer satisfaction. Because when you can quantify the ROI of quality, it stops being a "nice to have" and becomes a strategic business investment. How do you make the business case for code quality at your company? #EngineeringROI #TechnicalDebt #BusinessImpact #SoftwareQuality

45

4 commentaren

The biggest threat to engineering velocity is non-technical folks with technical opinions Had a CTO tell me last week: “We want to pay down tech debt. Write docs. Improve DevEx. But the business side just keeps screaming for features.” This happens way too often and here’s the catch…this wasn’t a startup It was an established company, post PMF Imagine if engineering told sales: “Hey, skip discovery. Just wing the call.” You’d get laughed out of the room. But we do that to engineers constantly. Ignore the details. Skip the tests. Docs? Later. It’s lazy leadership. You’re not saving time. You’re accumulating chaos. Let them build it right. Or watch it rot fast.

387

65 commentaren

The sequence matters: 1. Build with no-code 2. Find paying customers 3. Hit limitations 4. Then hire engineers Not: 1. Search for CTO 2. Spend 6 months pitching technical co-founders 3. Build something nobody wants 4. Wonder why it failed The market doesn't care about your tech stack. It cares if you solve a problem worth paying for.

41

10 commentaren

A Director of Engineering for a 100-person team told me their biggest bottleneck isn't CI/CD or code review. It's the staging environment. Director: "We have one staging environment. At any given time, 3-4 teams are trying to push their changes in for testing. It's constantly breaking, and we spend hours trying to figure out whose change caused the issue." Me: "So it's a race to merge, followed by a blame game?" Director: "Exactly. Devs get frustrated. QA gets blocked. We either delay releases or ship things with less confidence because we couldn't get a clean testing window." This is a classic scaling problem. The old model of a single, shared, long-lived staging environment creates a zero-sum game. The new model? Give every developer a personal, ephemeral "sandbox" for their feature within the shared environment. Instead of fighting for control of the environment, smart request routing isolates each developer's changes. Dev A can test their PR without ever being affected by Dev B's work, even though they share the same underlying infrastructure. The results we're seeing are profound: - Testing contention: Eliminated. - Environment-related release delays: Down 90%+. - Time spent debugging "who broke staging": Near zero. The Director’s follow-up was telling: "You mean my teams can test in parallel without stepping on each other's toes?" Yes. That’s the power of modern development infrastructure. How does your team manage the staging environment bottleneck? I'm keen to hear your strategies. #PlatformEngineering #StagingEnvironment #DeveloperExperience #CICD #Microservices #EngineeringLeadership #DevOps #Testing

414

353 commentaren