Topic

Collaboration

A collection of 8 issues

Understanding Before Speed

Lately, I’ve been thinking about something I see more often in development teams. Problem-solving has become incredibly fast thanks to AI. But interest in why things were built a certain way seems to be fading. Instead of understanding the context of existing code, the business background, or the history

When AI Ships Too Fast: The Real Debt Isn’t Only Technical

AI has made shipping feel absurdly easy. In the Bay Area, it’s almost normal now to see a solo builder go from “idea” to “working MVP” in a weekend. If you’re a one-person team, AI can genuinely feel like having a full stack of teammates: PM, designer, engineer,

AI Makes Code Faster, and Technical Debt Deeper for Teams

AI has moved beyond simply making development easier. It is now reshaping organizations, sometimes even driving discussions around headcount reduction. From my experience, one thing is clear: doing more work faster is absolutely possible with AI. Code generation, test scaffolding, refactoring suggestions, AI dramatically increases individual productivity. However, that doesn’

When Product Teams Agree But Build Different Things

We Agreed on the Destination, But Not on What “Arrival” Meant After more than 20 years as a developer, engineering manager, and CTO, I’ve learned that product failures rarely come from poor execution. They come from something far subtler: agreeing on the same words while imagining different endings. “Let’

AI now worries about performance. We, as developers, must worry about

When I was deep in hands-on development years ago, I had to understand the inner workings of databases to achieve acceptable performance. Even a small change in query casing could cause cache aging out, leading to HDD hits and a dramatic drop in speed. To avoid this, I spent countless

Beyond Cycle Time and Lead Time: What Productivity Really Means in Software Engineering

For years, our industry has tried to measure developer productivity in a simple way. Cycle Time, Lead Time, deployment frequency, sprint velocity—these metrics are useful, but they are far from the whole picture. And yet, many teams still fall into the trap of managing productivity as if we’re

When Developers Move Faster Than the Team Can See

A perspective from a developer and engineering leader with 19 years of experience In nearly two decades of building software and leading engineering teams, I’ve seen technology reshape how we work many times. But nothing compares to what happened recently — a moment that showed just how far individual execution

AI Made Us Faster — But It Also Created a New Problem: The AI Silo

Why the age of AI requires even stronger human collaboration As AI tools rapidly accelerate the pace of work, it feels like every role — from product to design to engineering — can now execute faster than ever before. With a single prompt, prototypes can appear, features can be implemented, logic can