Hi, I’m Taj Pelc. I write about technical leadership, business mindset and enterpreneurship. Daily advice on building fantastic tech teams that deliver great products. I'll see you inside.
Agile lessons from SpaceX
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SpaceX just caught their booster using oversized chopsticks and there's a lesson there we can apply. 🥢🚀 When we compare the build process for Space Launch System to Starship, it's like waterfall vs agile. The NASA approach is to gather requirements, have a long planning phase, build components for many years, assemble the rocket, test some more, and finally launch with fingers crossed. It's often late, over budget, and conservative in execution. The SpaceX approach is optimized for learning. They don't assume; they build it and test it iteratively. Each new ship has many improvements, but the turnaround is months rather than years. When you optimize for learning, flying is optional. A rapid unscheduled disassembly can be just as good if it provides experimental data that you can use to improve the next version. Agile is not following a framework. It's shipping early and often and experimentally getting real world experience that you can use to get to good faster. It works in software too. Yours, Taj |
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Hi, I’m Taj Pelc. I write about technical leadership, business mindset and enterpreneurship. Daily advice on building fantastic tech teams that deliver great products. I'll see you inside.
I was making a sandwich analogy. The butter makes things run smoothly. The other components are good tech/business alignment, an agile dev process, testing, and automated deployments. To succeed, you can't get just some parts right; you need to get all the parts right. However, one of the most underrated aspects is the developer experience. I'm constantly surprised by how much pain people suffer through just because it's always been this way. Here's what you can do today ... Make it run in a...
Yesterday, I attended the Czech Executive meetup in Brno, which was held in a WWII-era bunker. As the communists had a top-secret base there, I thought creating a little old-school digital business card to share at the networking event might be fun. I generated the code with Claude, uploaded it to GitHub pages, and programmed an NFC tag with the URL so that you can just tap it with your phone. A hacking game in the middle "protects" the links to my website. Eat the red packet, and you're...
Find out how much <the thing you want to do> is worth. This can help in two ways. If it’s internal it helps you to prioritize and focus on doing the most impactful things. If it’s for a client it helps you set a price as a fraction of that value. That’s not always easy, but it’s worth it. Problem is people don’t even try. Here’s what you can do. Break it down into spefic measurable outcomes like increased sales, time saved or reduced costs. Then assign a reasonable estimate to each. Like 10%...