complexity
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🧊 The hardest thing to manage
The things we know and understand are easy to manage. We can hire managers who are good at this. Tools can effectively track this. Life is good. The difficulty arises in the unknown. The iceberg analogy illustrates this well. The things we …
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🧩 Why things fall apart at the end
As discussed in the previous two posts, things often go haywire near the end of a project cycle, right before the BIG Release. Why is this? Things seem to go so well at the beginning of the project. While it is impossible to detail every re…
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🔗 What defines reliability?
Reliability is a common concern - this thing is critical - it needs to work! Many things affect the reliability of a system: Bugs in software we write Bugs in 3rd party components (OSS, etc.) Hardware failures Edge condition failures (thin…
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🔍 It is often more work to review something than to do it
As an experienced person, I am sometimes called on to review something. This can be a frustrating, seemingly hopeless task. With one developer, I commented that he could write code faster than I could review it. While there are some issues …
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✨ Impressive is not always effective
When AI generates something, the result is often “impressive.” We might marvel at how quickly lots of code is generated that mostly works. Generated documentation is extremely detailed and well formatted. AI-created diagrams are colorful, u…
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⏳ The long-term compression timeline
Below are several timelines illustrating long-term compression comparing a product development timeline: 20 years ago Today Today with Platform Thinking The big effect of long-term compression is that negative consequences can hit much ea…
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🤔 Isn't this just agile?
A reader responded to the last post with a comment: Isn’t “agile” a part of product thinking too? That doesn’t seem linear? This is a good question. Agile covers a lot of ground. The Agile Manifesto states: We are uncovering better ways …
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⏳ The "long-term" may be closer than you think...
A common objection to “Platform Thinking” (proactively build your platform from the start) is: there isn’t time right now; this can be done after the 1.0 release when there is ample time and resources. The “long-term” can be defined as when…
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💡 Reflections from AI-coding a 10,000 line app
Lessons from AI-coding a 10,000 line app BRun is getting usable. Claude Code wrote almost all of it using Doc-driven development (manually write/update the docs, and have Claude write the code). Some thoughts: Claude is fast – there is no …
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🌀 Complex systems are hard to predict
My wife makes sourdough, which is a multi-day process and at times unpredictable. Recently, the current batch was a little sluggish and not expanding like it should, so she “fed” it and left it on the counter. It took off during the night a…