12 posts
Every startup adopts Agile and then wonders why it doesn't work. Here's what actually happened: you confused Agile principles with Agile theater (ceremonies, velocity, standups). I'll show you what actually matters and what I use instead.
Read →A fractional CTO's opinionated case for six-week cycles, appetite-based planning, and the shaping discipline — plus the five situations where Shape Up will hurt more than it helps.
Read →Short-lived branches, feature flags, CI hygiene. How to migrate from long-lived branches and why it matters for shipping velocity.
Read →Technical debt isn't something you 'get to eventually.' It's a line in your engineering budget. I use a debt register, an interest rate calculation, and a framework to decide when refactoring is more valuable than shipping new features.
Read →Balanced metrics without surveillance. When to use DORA. When to use SPACE. How to avoid turning metrics into hammer tools.
Read →Why 2-week sprints are overhead at small scale. Ditching ceremony for flow and shipping velocity.
Read →On-call doesn't have to be painful. I run incident response for startups with 3–10 engineers using blameless postmortems, lightweight on-call rotation, and a culture where failures are learning, not punishment. Here's the exact playbook.
Read →Feature flags aren't toggles for features. They're an operational delivery pattern that decouples deployment from release, enables progressive rollouts, and gives you kill switches in production. Here's how I use them as a methodology.
Read →Bet-sized planning, appetite vs. estimate. Why Shape Up's appetite-setting beats story points every single time.
Read →Updated Definition of Done for the agent era. AI-generated code review, test coverage, security pass, spec match. What actually matters in 2026.
Read →An opinionated decision framework for picking a software development methodology based on your team size, product stage, and what you're actually trying to optimize for.
Read →A founder-friendly guide to the four DORA metrics, what good looks like at a startup, and how to start measuring them without buying an enterprise observability platform.
Read →