FinOps Flops

If you’ve been paying attention, I’ve been writing about profitable product-engineering teams recently. As part of that, some people reached out to me to talk about FinOps. Ostensibly, that’s part of it, right? Well, not really. That’s because focusing on cloud optimization wins does help with the bottom line, but it’s purely cost-centered thinking. Special […]

Futility of Shortening Iterations

Many of us in the tech industry have experienced the dread of working in environments with prolonged development cycles reminiscent of the archaic waterfall processes. The instinctual reaction is to swing the pendulum to the other extreme, advocating for the release of software as early and as frequently as possible. While this approach has its […]

Scaling Out Product-Engineering

In recent years, spurred by the era of zero interest rate policies (ZIRP), startups have been on a hiring spree, scaling up their teams with little regard for the impending complexities and inefficiencies. This approach has often led to bloated organizations with layered hierarchies, slowing down innovation and decision-making processes. However, as we pivot away […]

Tech Ahead of Business Fallacy

“Oh, we’re doing great on our end; tech isn’t the bottleneck for us.” Have you said anything along those lines recently? Many startup tech leaders have boasted about this situation in the past. Now, I’d hate to be a bottleneck, but truth be told, in most cases where I witnessed the described situation, things didn’t […]

Dropping Vanity Metrics

🎶 You’re so vain, you probably think these metrics are about you 🎶. Having just wrapped up a series about profitable R&D organizations, I realized there’s one added aspect that we need to cover, and that’s aligning your own personal sense of progress, achievement, and impact with actual business value. To do that, let’s quickly […]

R&D Innovation for Fun and Profit

We’ve covered profitability in your tech team when it comes to the guiding principles, actual software, and your organization. Today’s (last?) installment of the series will address a holy grail of highly impactful teams: innovation. How do you handle tech debt profitably? Why aren’t hackathons worth it? And more. This is part 4 of a […]

Profitable R&D Structure and Growth

For the vast majority of tech executives, profitability was an entirely foreign concept for years. Startups rarely aimed to reach that goal in general, and even more rarely was R&D viewed from that lens in startups. Continuing this series on profitable tech teams, this article will focus on the people in your organization and what […]

Making Profitable Software

My latest article about highly profitable R&D teams got a lot of attention, and thus, we’re continuing with that subject. We’ll start and cover first aid: how can you quickly stop the bleeding in your already unprofitable software? This is part 2 of a 4-part series: Unprofitable Software? First, I feel this is something we […]

Highly Profitable Engineering Teams

Up until a year or so ago, less than 5% of startups would even consider the concept of engineering being a profitable and healthy organization. ZIRP and the financial climate meant that wasn’t really a consideration. You could continue piling up more and more coders. As the industry is going through a healthy correction, you […]

The Mediocrity Limbo

As part of the new year, I’d like to see more people being proactive and not waffling on decisions. One of the major issues is of having things that don’t suck enough. That’s when you can trick yourself into believing it’s not that bad. However, once too much time passes, it definitely is taking a […]