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.
Doing the right things right
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When it comes to software development, there are two things that you shouldn't mix up. Doing things right This is how fast and efficient you are at making improvements. You track DORA metrics like the time it takes from a successful commit to deployed code, deployment frequency (daily vs weekly), change fail percentage, and the time it takes to recover from a failure. This is all optimizing the development process to get to good faster. But if you work on the wrong things, you're just adding tech debt faster. Doing the right things This is about making sure that the features you work on have a measurable business impact and are based on the business goals. You set a few relevant KPIs and track changes before and after feature rollouts to make sure you're increasing value. They also serve as a guideline to detect if you're working on the right things. Here's the thing ... You need both. Doing things right, without doing the right things is just burning money on development. Doing the right things, without doing them right is a huge opportunity cost. Do the right things right. Optimize for both aspects. 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%...