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You know you’re a CTO when: You say “let’s not over-engineer this”—then promptly over-engineer it. Your Slack is 90% context-switching and 10% actual progress. You hire a great engineer… and immediately start worrying someone else will steal them. You dread giving the same "we can't do everything" speech—because you know no one will listen. You open your laptop “just to check something” and accidentally start a full team reorg. Am I close?

The first job of a software engineer is knowing why they are even building the product. The second is ensuring it actually delivers customer value. Third is writing code.

Engineers don't care about OKRs and KPIs - they care about making a real difference. This was a key insight from my recent Product Driven podcast with Raechel Boston, Product Manager at Kroger. In too many organizations, software development has become an assembly line: ➡️ Product managers write detailed requirements ➡️ Engineers implement them without question ➡️ Everyone measures success by output (PRs, velocity) not outcomes Engineers feel like "cogs in the machine" rather than problem solvers. If your engineers are just order-takers following requirements, AI will soon do that job faster and cheaper. But the engineers who understand your business, talk to customers, and think about outcomes? They're more valuable than ever. At my company VinSolutions, our most successful product innovations came when engineers understood the WHY behind features and had direct customer feedback loops. The key difference between companies that just ship code and those that build groundbreaking products is how they connect engineers to real business outcomes. When was the last time your development team heard directly from a customer about how their work made a difference?

Engineering manager job: Production firefighter SDLC process expert Budget manager Business strategist Cloud infrastructure strategist Product visionary Software architect Expert mentor Inspirational leader Rockstar coder Nobody can wear all these hats. It takes multiple people. Why do we expect engineering managers to be superhuman? Which hat do you wear and when do you pass the hat and ask for help?

What if we stopped telling software engineers what to do and started asking them what we should do? It sounds simple. But it would change everything.

Don't confuse velocity with value. Your team is shipping features at record speed, hitting every sprint goal, and clearing the backlog with impressive efficiency. But then what? Silence. No customer feedback. No measurable impact. No real value delivered. 💡 Velocity without driving real value to users is just a waste of time. AI is accelerating how fast we write code, but it's not improving how we make product decisions. If your team is prioritizing output over outcomes, you're just building the wrong things faster. The most successful engineering leaders I know have made this critical shift: ✅ They don't celebrate when code deploys - they celebrate when customers get results ✅ They don't ask "how many story points did we ship?" - they ask "what problem did we solve?" ✅ They don't measure success by velocity - they measure it by customer impact This is the product mindset that separates high-performing engineering teams from the rest. Is your engineering team building features fast or solving customer problems that matter?

Most startups fail because they're marketing a product nobody actually needs. Founders invest thousands in marketing before doing the most critical work: understanding their customer's real pain. An hour of genuine customer research is worth more than $10,000 in ad spend. Period. Your job isn't to build what you think is cool. Your job is to solve a problem so painful that customers can't imagine living without YOUR solution. Want to know how to startup "up there"? Stop guessing. Start listening. If you've ever wasted money on marketing a product that didn't solve a real problem, sound off in the comments. We've all been there, but it's never too late to pivot!

If AI really made us 10x more productive, where are the solo devs building unicorn companies over the weekend? In reality, software is still hard as hell. It is a slow process due to the lack of focus, clarity, and ownership by the engineering team. AI isn't going to solve those problems. It is actually making them worse. The engineers can move faster than decision making around it. AI is exposing the weaknesses in existing engineering teams: product thinking.

Engineers coming out of school are starting in the best era ever of software development. It's never been a better time if you have a strong product mindset. You can build software with AI at a 10x speed. You'll run circles around engineers that are used to implementing the detailed requirements that were given to them. Compare that to the ability to understand business problems and go create solutions all on your own. The real competitive advantage today isn't just coding skills—it's the ability to identify problems worth solving and rapidly prototype solutions. With AI tools handling more of the implementation details, your creativity and business acumen become your superpower. Today's graduates who embrace both technical fundamentals AND strategic thinking will have a huge advantage. While experience still matters, the playing field has never been more level for newcomers who can harness these new tools effectively. My advice to new engineers: Don't just learn to code—learn to solve problems. Ask "why" before "how." The engineers who will thrive are those who can translate business needs into technical solutions and iterate quickly. The future belongs to Product Driven engineers.

The worst engineering managers ask “how fast.” The good ones ask “how.” The best ones ask “why.” Because I’ve seen teams hit every deadline—and still ship the wrong thing. They moved fast. They delivered clean code. And none of it mattered. Because no one stopped to ask: “Why are we building this at all?” Speed without purpose isn’t impressive. It’s just failure in a nicer dashboard. Curious where you stand on this— Is “why” something your team asks enough? Or do you feel like it always gets drowned out by the pressure to move faster?

The biggest impact of AI is that everyone has unrealistic expectations. Build an app in a day! Write a blog post in 5 minutes! Write a book in a day! Create ads in an hour! Don't give employees unrealistic expectations because now you think they should do everything 10x faster. The reality? Even with cutting-edge AI tools, creating quality work still requires thoughtful iteration, clear direction, and proper time for refinement. Let's stop setting unrealistic expectations and instead focus on how AI can enhance our work rather than artificially compress it.

The job of the CTO isn’t to scale code. It’s to scale product thinking. Yes, they need to care about architecture. Yes, they need to unblock delivery. But if the team doesn’t understand the problem they are solving or why it matters, none of that will save you. A great CTO builds a system where engineers understand the mission. They drive clarity. They build real ownership. They connect the work to real user problems. You can’t think about code without thinking about the people it serves. The CTO has to make sure no one forgets that.

I've sat through thousands of standups over my 25+ years building software companies. Elite tech leaders don't listen for status updates, they listen for these 3 warning signals: 1️⃣ The Timeline Explosion When you hear: "I thought it would take a day, but it's been three days already..." This isn't just a delay—it's a warning that your entire project timeline is built on fantasy. Smart teams immediately recalibrate ALL connected deadlines, not just that task. 2️⃣ The Silent Dependency When someone says they're "almost done" for the third standup in a row. This reveals hidden technical debt or dependencies nobody wants to admit. Top teams create a "blocker buster" role with authority to eliminate these roadblocks immediately. 3️⃣ The Integration Blindspot When two developers describe the same feature completely differently. This misalignment guarantees integration chaos later. Successful leaders pause immediately for alignment—even if it means a longer standup. Want to transform your standups? ☑️ Track patterns across days, not just daily updates ☑️ Make "What's blocking you?" more important than "What did you do?" ☑️ Create consequences for repeated blockers ☑️ Measure success by problems prevented, not updates given Your standups should prevent disasters, not just report on them. What warning signs do you look for in your team's standups?

Assigning 2 software engineers to do the work of 1 rarely delivers 2x the output. Pair programming can be powerful for complex problems and knowledge sharing. But it fails miserably without extremely tight collaboration. This means literally sitting together or staying on a continuous call. Otherwise, the overhead of communication, coordination, and assumption checking creates massive inefficiency. The fundamental issue is accountability. Someone must own the work. Shared accountability usually means no accountability at all. Strategic pairing works when the complexity justifies it and when roles are clear. Otherwise, divide and conquer will get you further. What do you think?

Engineers who join big companies don't just lose productivity. They also lose their spark. I've seen this pattern repeat for 25 years. Brilliant developers join growing companies and slowly transform from innovators into order-takers. It's not their fault. 🚩 They're isolated from users and business problems 🚩 They receive pre-chewed requirements through multiple layers of management 🚩 They're measured on velocity and output rather than customer impact 🚩 They have zero involvement in deciding what to build The result: Your brightest technical minds start "checking out" mentally. Here's how to fix it: 🟢 Make engineers talk to users weekly 🟢 Run company-wide demo days where engineers present their work 🟢 Give developers context about WHY features matter, not just WHAT to build 🟢 Measure impact on customers, not just story points 🟢 Let engineers influence product decisions After founding multiple tech companies, I've learned that successful engineering teams aren't built with the best coders. They're built with engineers who understand what problems they're actually solving. What's the biggest challenge you've faced getting engineers to think beyond code?

Never met a 10x software engineer? I bet you haven't worked in startups. In big companies everything is crazy slow due to complex processes, no decision making, risk aversion, and more. In a startup you can just go go go without asking very many questions or being worried about breaking a giant legacy app. An engineer who has a strong product vision in a startup can be 10x all day compared to big companies.

AI isn’t coming for developer jobs. It’s coming for developers who don’t know how to use it. The best engineers I know are already 3x–10x faster than they were just a year ago—not because they’re working harder, but because they’re working smarter with AI. They’re using it to: Speed up boilerplate code Generate tests Refactor faster Document on the fly Explore solutions without context-switching That changes the cost equation. Not just how much you pay… But how fast and well your team can deliver. Hiring devs who know how to wield AI is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s a multiplier.

Startup success depends on your CTO having a strong product mindset. If you don't understand why, you probably shouldn't start a tech company. A technical co-founder who only cares about elegant code will build impressive solutions that nobody wants. The best CTOs understand that technology exists to serve users. This product mindset means: ⚡ Prioritizing features based on user impact, not technical interest ⚡ Knowing when "good enough" beats "perfect" ⚡ Building with scale in mind without overengineering ⚡ Seeing technology as a means to solve problems, not the end itself Your CTO doesn't need formal product management training. But they must fundamentally care about solving real problems for real people. Without this mindset, you risk building sophisticated technology that nobody needs - and all the brilliant engineering in the world can't save a product that doesn't matter. What's your experience with technically-focused CTOs and product thinking?

Software engineers don't take requirements and "engineer" code. They take business problems and "engineer" solutions. That might not even require code at all! Most engineers don't understand this.

How do you block every post on LinkedIn that mentions vibe coding? Asking for a friend. And me. And probably everyone else.