No news is actually good news.

Including “Agile is a dumpster fire” - some non-obvious things I’ve learned as a 10 year self taught CTO…

Engineering’s job is sometimes to be quiet, build things and live in the background.

A ton of teams struggle because they over prioritize, they over engineer, they over build and ultimately they under focus on customers, sales and growth pipelines.

In my time from junior developer to CTO with a portfolio of startups, I’ve developed some patterns that seem to work;

- developer standup once a week
- a well written card is nowhere near as useful as developers who know everything about the product, the goal and are empowered to take the right actions (everyone speaking a close language in a close (same) timezone is huge)
- a developer’s peak is about 80-120 hours a month, if you are running lean, you can save a ton of $$$ by not employing developers full time or paying for 170 hour work months.
- focusing on the cost of a developer hour is nowhere near as useful as focusing on their output over a quarter - tons of low hourly cost developers will not produce very useful gear over the months, projects will drag on, and on, and on

It might seem weird, but when dealing with CEOs sometimes no news IS good news.
The CTOs job is to make sure the technical picture is sorted out so that CEO can focus on growth - I frequently find myself starting projects with tons of CEO interaction and as time goes by, that interaction tends to come from VP Product, the CEO is heads down focused on pushing growth.
Nothing else matters.

If you are a non-technical leader who thinks you spend too much time on product and would like to change, please join my office hours and we can talk about my counter-intuitive non way to build products.

Thanks to Brandt Slayton for the above pictured session, much of this post is summary of some of the things I've done working with him.