10 posts tagged “product”.
Throughout my career the one thing I've watched kill good products is a single word: resource.
Once a company calls its people resources, it starts treating them like resources. It adds them, rotates them, splits them across teams.
The product is the first thing to suffer.
Yes, you want a team. The dynamic of that team decides far more than the org chart admits.
Read More →I’ve seen non-developers build apps that would have taken engineers days, if not weeks.
Not just functional apps, but polished apps with rich functionality that bring joy to users. They meet real needs, and the attention to detail is unmatched.
Product people and domain experts can build good apps, and they build them fast.
So the question is: when does a vibe-coded app become a real product?
That is the question a lot of companies are about to face.
In many businesses, engineers are no longer the only people building the next prototype. Client managers, sales teams, product people and domain experts build it too, using tools like Lovable, Base44, Claude and other AI app builders.
And that is a good thing.
Read More →Strong opinions should be earned, not borrowed. If you want to propose a change, do the work first.
Understand the trade-offs before you walk into the room.
I see the same pattern again and again in software teams. Someone reads a blog post, watches a conference talk, picks up a new buzzword, or sees how a company like Spotify talks about working, and by the next meeting they are proposing that the whole team change how it works.
The idea often sounds compelling at first. But the moment you ask about the trade-offs, the case falls apart. There is no real research, no serious risk assessment, and no clear plan for what to do if the change creates new problems rather than solving the old ones.
That gap between enthusiasm and understanding is where teams get into trouble.
Read More →Dax is spot on.
Read More →sent this to the team today
— dax (@thdxr) March 10, 2026
everything great comes from being able to delay gratification for as long as possible
and it feels like we're collectively losing our ability to do that pic.twitter.com/HlIpY86eJn
It's like a new diet pill has hit the market, promising instant weight loss with no effort, and now everyone's scrambling to get their hands on it because it's all over their TikTok.
Some folks are talking about DeepSeek as if it's the second coming of AI.
The clamour might be because it's the first serious open non-US model with reasoning capabilities from China.
Most people are confused about which version of DeepSeek they're using.
Most providers offer a distilled, watered-down version that'll run anywhere, so you're not getting the actual full fat version people are talking as to really see its magic, you'd need a small fortune in computing power.
It's like being promised a rare vintage white wine, only to find the bottle filled with slightly grape-scented water. Same brand, same label, but all the depth and character stripped away, leaving you with a hollow imitation.
The hype suggests it can keep pace with anything OpenAI does, which might sound thrilling if you're already tired of whatever ChatGPT or its siblings spit out.
But here's where the alarm bells should start ringing.
Read More →Building AI products with stakeholders requires a fundamentally different approach than traditional software development.
From my experience working with AI, success depends not only on technical implementation but also on bridging the gap between AI capabilities and stakeholder expectations.
In this post, I’ll share lessons from guiding stakeholders through AI’s possibilities and limitations.
Read More →Should you build UI components and then add them to a page or build the page first then break it down into UI components is the chicken and egg of software development?
Read More →You've probably heard someone quote Norm Kerths' Prime Directive during a retrospective
Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.
In my experience, engineering teams doing their best at that time inevitably end up having to shoehorn features as requirements change or new information becomes available.
In this post, I'll discuss why great products need strong foundations.
Read More →It can be a struggle, endlessly trying to convince your organisation to believe in your ideas and vision.
In this post, I'll share how I managed to do this.
Read More →In 2015 I was hired by Cambridge University Press to develop a web application providing digital access to over 35,000 books and 1.5 million journal articles, consolidating several smaller sites. The application would go onto have over 2 million users a day and generate £65 million in revenue per year.
It was a fantastic technical learning opportunity, but it was our culture and approach to product development that would teach me the most important lesson of all.
Read More →