Customer Obsessed Engineering | Zac Beckman | Substack

How to use a playbook

Even engineering teams need a playbook, just like a sports league or an elite operations unit. Here’s how having a playbook transforms your team.

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Transform your standups and retros: intention matters more than status updates

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The 30-minute guide to Domain Driven Design: A secret weapon to solve tough problems

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The Delivery Playbook

Product teams really do outperform: bringing the receipts

Researchers at DORA, McKinsey and Google have spent a decade proving what good engineers already know. It’s time to put that knowledge into practice.

Apr 30 • Zac Beckman

3.7 Elaboration

Elaboration takes your specifications from skeleton to sprint-ready, fully fleshed out across every layer at which the system is tested — and…

Apr 28 • Zac Beckman

3.6 Specification

Before coding we need to make sure our design has enough fidelity. Specification is about adding those details, the happy paths as well as the failure…

Jan 28

Engineering models eliminate mistakes & complexity, ensure better testing & reliability, and improve collaboration & understanding.

Dec 29, 2025 • Zac Beckman

How to use a playbook

Even engineering teams need a playbook, just like a sports league or an elite operations unit. Here’s how having a playbook transforms your team.

Aug 14, 2025 • Zac Beckman

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Elevate Your Career

Ask your team how to make this worse

A 30-minute workshop called TRIZ turns a comedy round into a confession booth — the most valuable half-hour you’ll spend this quarter.

May 7 • Zac Beckman

Your AI is not your mentor

Use it relentlessly for code tutoring. But the formation work — being seen, stretched and told the truth — has to come from a person.

Apr 29 • Zac Beckman

Observability as architecture: why you can’t bolt it on later

Most teams treat observability like a nice-to-have. They’re building blind — and paying for it in ways they can’t even see.

Mar 13 • Zac Beckman

How to fix a $25 bug before it becomes a $37,500 problem

Stop debugging and start designing by "shifting left" with BDD. It's not about testing. It's about feedback loops and thinking clearly about intent…

Jan 24 • Zac Beckman

Transform your standups and retros: intention matters more than status updates

Do you try to skip your standup? Or feel like retros are a waste of time? Then your team isn’t doing it right. Here's my formula for giving your team…

Jan 14 • Zac Beckman

Design Thinking

Product teams really do outperform: bringing the receipts

Researchers at DORA, McKinsey and Google have spent a decade proving what good engineers already know. It’s time to put that knowledge into practice.

Apr 30 • Zac Beckman

Part 3: Refining our data pipeline architecture to solve a few hidden challenges

Ensuring scalability, reliability and responsiveness pose interesting problems in distributed architecture. Here’s how to build a forward-looking…

Jan 8 • Zac Beckman

Part 2: Steel thread first: a practical data pipeline architecture

Learn how to build a sound data pipeline architecture, from the ground up, using an iterative approach that ships fast and scales.

Dec 22, 2025 • Zac Beckman

Data pipelines are really cool. But also, really hard to build.

Data pipelines pose challenges we should all master. They push the limits on design, architecture, performance and even predicting the future.

Dec 3, 2025 • Zac Beckman

DevSecOps

Microsoft’s collaboration stack breaks every rule of a modern delivery toolkit

How SharePoint will sink your project: hidden pitfalls that suck the life out of teams. It’s getting worse, not better.

Apr 27 • Zac Beckman

Observability as architecture: why you can’t bolt it on later

Most teams treat observability like a nice-to-have. They’re building blind — and paying for it in ways they can’t even see.

Mar 13 • Zac Beckman

Why you need a Zero Trust Architecture (and how to get one)

Shifting from “trust but verify” to simply “never trust, always verify” is the only safe path. Here’s why, plus, a step-by-step plan to get it done.

Apr 17, 2025 • Zac Beckman and Will Yang

Ephemeral environments are the best way to fight “‘waste gremlins”

Save yourself from hundreds of hours of unnecessary work and headaches. Ephemeral environments are the key.

Nov 17, 2024 • Zac Beckman

Passing Thoughts

When to go waterfall

If you're working in a multi-modal organization you'll find this helpful: the canonical waterfall / agile decision tree.

Mar 24 • Zac Beckman

How waterfall is wrong for software

We've known for decades waterfall and software don't mix; why do we keep doing it?

Mar 8 • Zac Beckman

What happens when the next developer has to understand your AI code?

This study into the long-term cost of AI-driven development reveals some surprising findings. Most other studies only examine short-term outcomes. But…

Jan 30 • Zac Beckman

Happy holidays, good luck, don't work too hard

Burnout is a thing. Don't forget to recharge.

Dec 14, 2025 • Zac Beckman

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Recent posts

Ask your team how to make this worse

A 30-minute workshop called TRIZ turns a comedy round into a confession booth — the most valuable half-hour you’ll spend this quarter.

May 7 • Zac Beckman

Product teams really do outperform: bringing the receipts

Researchers at DORA, McKinsey and Google have spent a decade proving what good engineers already know. It’s time to put that knowledge into practice.

Apr 30 • Zac Beckman

Your AI is not your mentor

Use it relentlessly for code tutoring. But the formation work — being seen, stretched and told the truth — has to come from a person.

Apr 29 • Zac Beckman

3.7 Elaboration

Elaboration takes your specifications from skeleton to sprint-ready, fully fleshed out across every layer at which the system is tested — and…

Apr 28 • Zac Beckman

Customer Obsessed Engineering

Customer Obsessed Engineering

Elevate your career, execute with confidence, and build your customer obsessed mindset. Advice from an ex-Accenture Director, startup veteran, CTO.

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