Hey, Luca here! Welcome to a new edition of the 💡 Monday Ideas 💡 — ideas and readings to start the week on the right foot.
I also publish an original essay every Wednesday. Here is the one from last week in case you missed it:
📊 AI sped up coding, but not reviews
This week’s newsletter is brought to you by our friends at DX!
AI tools sped up code authoring, but review and release systems haven’t kept pace.
DX’s newest AI Impact Report, based on data from 500+ engineering organizations, shows developers opening far more pull requests each week, each more than twice the size it used to be. As a result, PRs wait more than twice as long for a first review.
Download the full report to see where delivery friction is moving and where leaders should focus next to get the most out of their AI tools 👇
🤝 Ask hard questions before building for one customer
If you build a B2B product, sooner or later a big customer asks for something that only they need, and the request usually comes with some urgency attached: a deal to close, or a renewal at risk.
I don’t think there is a strict formula to decide whether this bespoke work is worth it, but there are good questions that help you look at the problem from more angles.
First, understand whether the work is for conversion or for retention. If it’s for conversion, can you make the customer pay for part of it, as a pilot? Or can you negotiate better terms in exchange?
Then ask yourself:
How much is it going to cost, as a fraction of the customer’s LTV?
How much evidence do you have that it’s really needed, and not just a random request?
Is it valuable for other customers?
Six months from now, will your product be better or worse because of it?
It’s also worth sitting down with the customer to figure out what they really need, because in my experience customers are most often right about the problem, and most often wrong about the solution.
I wrote a full piece about how to organize customer work and product work in B2B teams 👇
🧭 Stop trying to have all the answers
In March I talked with Richard Hughes-Jones, an executive coach who works with CTOs and founders of tech companies.
When I asked him about the most common challenges he sees in senior tech leaders right now, he didn’t give me a technical answer. AI is making everything move faster, but the underlying challenges are staying the same: ambiguity, complexity, uncertainty.
The problem Richard sees is that technical leaders are wired to have the answers, because that’s what got them promoted in the first place. But at the highest levels nobody has the answers, and pretending otherwise is counterproductive, especially now that nobody knows what the next couple of years will look like.
Richard also admits that telling someone to “get comfortable with uncertainty” is almost useless advice, because it’s abstract and doesn’t turn into action. So with his clients he works on sitting with the discomfort, and on designing small, safe-to-fail experiments: things you can try without damaging relationships or the business, that still give you real feedback.
You can find the full conversation with Richard here 👇
📚 Weekly Readings
Finally, here are the best articles I have read this week:
🥇 Our organizations are being DDoSed from the inside
4 min • by Karri Saarinen
Karri argues that teams and agents now ship changes faster than leaders can understand them, so companies are losing the ability to steer. And just because something already works, it doesn’t mean it belongs in the product.
A honest piece from the CEO of Linear, and it pairs well with what I wrote last week about managers.
🥈 Software engineers don’t get to be Luddites about AI
5 min • by Sean Goedecke
Sean argues that engineers can’t really take the Luddites’ side, because in that story we are the mechanics who built the looms, and automating other people’s work has always been our job. A bit harsh, but hard to disagree with!
🥉 Practitioner Voice
27 min • by Jim Highsmith
Jim explores a way of writing where your authority comes from having owned the consequences of your work, instead of academic method or thought leadership polish. He also shares how he writes with AI since Parkinson’s changed how he processes language. Long one, but I loved it.
And that’s it for today! If you are finding this newsletter valuable, subscribe to the full version!
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I wish you a great week.
Sincerely 👋
Luca