Showing posts from product

Stop Faking Agile: How to Actually Deliver Faster

Stop Faking Agile: How to Actually Deliver Faster

Almost every company today claims they’re “agile.” They run standups, hold retros, track velocity. The word shows up in job postings, investor decks, and board meetings.

But let’s be honest: In 99% of cases, “agile” is just a buzzword. It’s a label slapped on the same old waterfall process, dressed up with sticky notes and Jira boards.

I’ve stepped into SaaS companies where work still moved in quarterly chunks, QA was a final-phase bottleneck, and priorities were dictated top-down. Nothing about that was Scrum or Kanban — it was waterfall in an agile costume.

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The Scalability Trap: How Premature Technical Excellence Kills the Product

The Scalability Trap: How Premature Technical Excellence Kills the Product

The “Build it right the first time” mantra has sunk more startups than bad code ever did.

I’ve seen it firsthand: One developer built his own message broker in PHP because ActiveMQ “didn’t fit his needs.” Another rebuilt Ansible in Perl to provision VMs. And the wildest one? Someone started designing a version control system on top of Elasticsearch because Git was “inefficient.”

These weren’t feats of brilliance. They were ego-driven distractions that added fragility, wasted money, and created zero customer value. And they all happened because leadership failed to ask the only question that matters: “How does this help the user?”

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