Influences
Most product decisions, disagreements, and trade-offs don't come from different opinions. They come from different context.
These are some of the readings that helped me think more clearly about product, teams, and how decisions are made.
Reading
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Common software project conflicts and how to navigate them
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A breakdown of common sources of conflict in software projects, from priorities to ownership and expectations. What stands out is that many of these aren't real disagreements, but people making decisions with different context. Several conflict types described here feel like symptoms of the same underlying issue: unevenly distributed information.
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This Is How Successful People Make Such Smart Decisions
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Introduces the idea of having strong opinions, weakly held. While the principle encourages flexibility, in practice many disagreements are not caused by strong opinions but by incomplete context. What appears as healthy debate is often people optimizing for different realities.
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The Product-Minded Engineer
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Argues that engineers should engage with product decisions, not just implementation. Decisions improve when context is shared across roles instead of being handed off. Highlights how collaboration between product and engineering leads to better trade-offs and outcomes.
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Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
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Coding agents make it possible to build much faster, but they also remove the natural constraints that used to limit mistakes. Small issues that would normally be manageable can quickly compound into systems that are difficult to understand, maintain, or trust.