Customer Obsessed Engineering

Good product team / bad product team

Marty Cagan’s good-team / bad-team list is a decade old and still the cleanest mirror in the business. Pin it to your wall. Ask yourself how many strike…

May 21 • Zac Beckman

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Pull requests are a symptom of low trust: here’s the fix

T*D is the new name for the Playbook trifecta: Test-Driven Development, Trunk-Based Development and Team-Focused Development, fused into one operating…

May 16 • Zac Beckman

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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

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April 2026

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

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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

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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

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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

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March 2026

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

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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

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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

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January 2026

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

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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

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