Overcoming the pressure to add features in product development

Most teams measure engineering in sprints, tickets, uptime. Useful, sure, but when you’re running at real enterprise scale… Those metrics stop telling the full story. I love the shift Steve Jang talks about here: cost per customer interaction. Suddenly, engineering performance isn’t just about system health; it’s about business value. It connects what your teams build to how the business grows. For me, that’s where clarity comes from. Complexity is unavoidable when you’re processing billions of signals and interactions. The trick is finding the one metric that cuts through the noise and makes sense to everyone, from engineers to the board. That way, decisions stop being “how fast can we ship?” and start being “is this the best use of our resources to serve the customer?” If you had to pick one metric that ties engineering directly to business value in your world, what would it be?

Deleting 70% of your platform complexity is the only way to achieve 10x engineering velocity. This isn't opinion. It's math. Every platform component adds: ↳ 12 hours/month maintenance ↳ 3 potential failure points ↳ 5 new monitoring alerts ↳ 2 required expertise areas With 20+ components, your team spends more time managing the platform than using it. Platform Fix OS has proven this with 50+ transformations: ↳ Reduce components by 70% ↳ Increase velocity by 10x ↳ Cut operational burden by 80% The formula is simple. The execution requires discipline. Most teams add tools to solve problems. Winners remove tools to eliminate problems. Your move. — Enjoy this? ♻️ Repost it to your network and follow Steve Wade for more. Get my free weekly frameworks that show you the exact methods I use to simplify K8s platforms. Join 500+ engineers here: https://lnkd.in/eYiAF8TP

Engineers often face three doors: 1 - 𝐃𝐨 𝐢𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐲 This doesn’t mean building everything perfectly upfront. Even core systems can hide hacks under solid abstractions and evolve over time. The “right way” is about designing clear interfaces and integration points so you can improve without breaking everything later. 2 - 𝐎𝐯𝐞𝐫-𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 By definition, this is building beyond what’s needed. It’s wasted effort, unjustified complexity, slower delivery, harder maintenance. This door should never be opened. Time isn’t infinite, you must have solid reasons for introducing complexity. 3 - 𝐇𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐲 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡 𝐝𝐞𝐛𝐭 Useful when you’re exploring an idea, validating assumptions, or racing to get feedback. Hacks are fine, as long as they’re grounded in intentional trade-offs. Once you know something is worth investing in, it’s worth doing it the “right way”. If you learn it’s not worth investing in, then you saved time and resources by not spending them upfront. Having a well engineered solution is not the goal. Solving the business needs are the goal. And that may mean not wasting effort on perfecting something that has not yet proven its value.

It still shocks me how many senior people in software confuse extreme engineering with extreme over-engineering culture. Extreme engineering means pursuing ambitious, sometimes unimaginable goals with maximum efficiency (and minimal resources). Anything redundant needs to go. Best part is no part. Extreme engineering requires curiosity, creativity and courage more than just craft.

PROMPT ENGINEERING The right prompt determines the quality of the responses we get from one tool to another. Generic responses don’t answer many questions and may not give insights that are particular to the scenario at hand, as you still end up doing a lot of work. With the right prompt, we would have done much in less than. That’s effectiveness! Nothing beats that.

So, when we design  for the most impactful feature, we build upwards from the first principles. That tell us:    improve functionality    improve ease of  adoption    improve ease of assembly    improve  nature friendly compliance    improve longevity And these features - eventually differentiate for impact. That need to be protected by IP. To establish and validate this uniqueness and respect for the process. A process that builds in fundamental engineering and deep domain logic.

Systems Engineering in a nutshell; Question: How does product A integrate with product B? Meeting Required: Product A stakeholders, Product B stakeholders, Program stakeholders, customer stakeholders, Systems Engineer asking the question. Outcome: Systems Engineer creates a model (or a diagram within the model) for the integration based on the feedback from the represented stakeholders. Alignment: All stakeholders individually review/critique the output. Model is revised until agreed upon by all. Result: 1 valid model to be leveraged organizationally for the development of the associated elements. This seems obvious but in my experience, the value of enabling team members to reference a managed model is significantly underestimated. Trying to get time with a stake holder, time to articulate the question accurately, and then time to receive a valuable response is consuming your development schedule and those one-offs, add up! #systemsengineering #simplify #leveragewhatsbeendone

Most CTOs can't answer this question: "Where are we actually spending our engineering hours?" And that's a $10M+ blind spot. I was talking to a CTO recently who thought his team was spending 80% of their time on new features. Reality: They were spending 45% of their time on new features and 55% on technical debt, bug fixes, and unplanned work. That's not a developer problem. That's a business problem. When you don't have visibility into how code quality impacts your engineering investment, you can't make strategic decisions about where to focus. Here's what engineering leaders are starting to track: → Investment Hours by Category: How much time goes to features vs. debt vs. maintenance → Change Failure Rate Impact: What percentage of deployments require immediate fixes → Cycle Time Trends: How code quality affects your ability to deliver features quickly → Developer Focus Time: How much uninterrupted time developers get for strategic work The teams that measure this stuff are making data-driven decisions about technical debt prioritization. Instead of arguing about whether to "slow down and fix things," they're showing exactly how much fixing specific quality issues will accelerate future delivery. Quality isn't the opposite of speed. Poor quality is what makes you slow. But you can only optimize what you can measure. What metrics do you use to connect code quality to business outcomes? #EngineeringIntelligence #InvestmentHours #TechnicalDebt #EngineeringMetrics

How to spot and unblock engineering bottlenecks Learn how your team can identify and fix what’s really slowing them down. The post How to spot and unblock engineering bottlenecks appeared first on LeadDev. Josh Fruhlinger https://lnkd.in/eTrKEMGp

I've seen engineers be incredibly productive when they're in a state of "flow." But the way we structure most programs actively prevents this. Here's an analogy. Think of an engineer writing complex software like a mechanic assembling a high-performance engine. All the parts are carefully laid out on a table making it easier to assemble. An interruption is like someone bumping the table and sending the parts across the floor. The work doesn't just resume. The engineer has to painfully reposition the parts to get back to where they were. I've experienced this first-hand writing code that wasn't all that complex. This is the reality of "context switching." It’s why a "quick question" can kill 30-60 minutes of productive time. Protecting your team from these interruptions isn't "coddling" them; it's sound economic policy. #ModernVRO #GovTech #ArmyFutures #PEO #DevSecOps