On the Death of Amazon’s Writing Culture
How AI has turned what was once a superpower into a liability.
execution
What is a Block Flow Shipyard and Why Don’t We Do It?
Why block flow works, why American yards lost it, and how to get it back
Why Every High-Performing Leader Needs a Pacer | Jim Detert and Rahul Bhandari | MIT Sloan Management Review
Many of us concentrate on a leader’s actions, not the speed at which they act. But the wrong pace can hurt teams.
Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
https://stratechery.com/2026/write-things-down/
Build Wide, Ship Narrow | Blog
Splitting a finished branch into small PRs used to be the expensive part, so we decided the boundaries before the code existed. That cost collapsed. Now the code can tell you where to cut it.
Skunk Works and the 14 Rules Behind Fast Engineering — Flow Engineering
NASA invented systems engineering. Skunk Works perfected it.
The 13 software engineering laws
Hyrum's law, Conway’s law, Zawinski's law, and 10 others.
🚀Guide to HW Product Requirements Documents (PRDs): Step 2 of Product Making
How to define a physical product concept and get it ready for execution.
Stop trying to make people read instructions: 10 startup lessons from Convoy co-founder Dan Lewis – GeekWire
Convoy co-founder and Microsoft Corporate Vice President Dan Lewis drew on his experience building the one-time unicorn trucking startup to share lessons for entrepreneurs at this week's Seattle AI Startup Summit.
It’s the Hottest Restaurant in America. It’s Probably in Your Mall’s Parking Lot. How Did This Happen?
It started with a cheese pull.
Lessons Learned Shipping 500 Units of my First Hardware Product
Building in consumer hardware as a software engineer
How Accurate Are Learning Curves?
We’ve talked several times on this substack (as well as in my book), about the learning curve, the observation that costs of a produced good tend to fall by some constant proportion for every cumulative doubling of production volume: go from 100 to 200 units, costs might fall by…
The Coffee Warehouse
Starbucks ascended as a "third space." Maybe it should run like a 3PL.
Do Things that Don't Scale
The Importance of the Semantic Layer by @ttunguz
Data without context is noise masquerading as insight. How many times have you sat in a board meeting where the marketing team reports a 40% increase in qualified leads while sales insists conversion has plummeted? Both teams are right, and both are wrong. Marketing measures…
. The fundamental problem is the absence of a semantic layer that creates shared understanding between raw data and business logic.
The Silent Strain of Solo Product Managers
When brilliant work leads to breakdowns
Task estimation: Conquering Hofstadter's Law
How to turn your time estimates into reliable predictions — and communicate them.
First-Time Silicon Success Plummets
Number of designs that are late increases. Rapidly rising complexity is the leading cause, but tools, training, and workflows need to improve.
“Historically, it’s been around 30%. Two years ago it dropped to 24% from 2023 to 2024. It dropped to 14% this time around. That’s one data point. Another is that historically we’ve seen about two-thirds of projects were behind schedule. That increased to 75% behind schedule.”
Frustration Tolerance: An Essential for Surviving Large Orgs
In leadership and life, ambitions often outpace our ability to consistently execute on them. A hidden hurdle that trips up many is their level of “frustration tolerance.” This is particularly true in large organizations that are literally designed to frustrate ambitions and…
Binstack: Making a maximal multi-dimensional decision
Binstack is a technique for selecting the "single most impactful" solution when there are multiple, incomparable dimensions to evaluate.
How I ship projects at big tech companies
What I think about when I'm lead engineer on a project
Goodhart's Law Isn't as Useful as You Might Think
Goodhart's Law is useless. It tells you about a phenomenon, but it doesn't tell you how to solve it. We look at how organisations actually prevent Goodhart's Law, and illustrate this with Amazon's Weekly Business Review as an example.
How Sprinting Slows You Down: A Better Way to Build Software
Sprints promise to accelerate development, but often do the opposite. Check out this alternative approach to building software.
Danaher: Masterful Capital Allocation and Lean Manufacturing, Combined
How Danaher combines Lean manufacturing with masterful capital allocation to build a remarkable manufacturing company in the United States.
The Art of Decision-Making
Your life choices aren’t just about what you want to do; they’re about who you want to be.
Why You’ve Never Been In A Plane Crash—Asterisk
The United States leads the world in airline safety. That’s because of the way we assign blame when accidents do happen.
What’s an Operational Definition Anyway?
Two principles on collecting data, from the field of Statistical Process Control. As with most principles in SPC, this is both simpler and more important than you might think.
Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
I've been involved in spacecraft and space systems design and development for my entire career, including teaching the senior-level capstone spacecraft design course, for ten years at MIT and now at the University of Maryland for more than three decades.
Intellectual Laziness
Book Review: Power Failure
Fast · Patrick Collison
Welcome to Hillstone, America's Favorite Restaurant | Bon Appétit
It’s never going to win a James Beard Award. Or try to wow you with its foam experiments or ingredients you’ve never heard of. But it is the best-run, most-loved, relentlessly respected restaurant in America. And, oh yeah, Danny Meyer, David Chang, and Shaq all agree. Welcome to…
17 DevOps Metrics To Measure Success
Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash Productivity in software development has always been tricky to...
Be critical or be corrupted
I recently rewatched "The Wire". The show's central theme is about counter-productive metrics and their corrupting influence on institutions. I've noticed hints of this pattern in software engineering, too
What is SAP? | Retool Blog | Cache
What's SAP? And why is it worth $163B?
The Anatomy of an Amazon 6-pager
A deep dive into writing detailed planning docs from one of the most successful companies in the world
Cost Per Reasonable Decision (CPRD)
Note: With the arrival of my son, I’m slowing down on the blogging. Give me a couple months (or more sleepless nights), and I’ll be back…
2016 scrum guide us
A value creation checklist
This project you’re working on, the new business or offering, what sort of value does it create? Who is it for? What mindset and worldview and situation?Is it paid for by organizations or individua…
How to go faster
How do you get to market faster than the competition? How do you become more efficient without violating the laws of physics? How do you save time, money and frustration? It all comes down to decis…
David Nicholas Williams
The Art of the OKR
Read the updated post, Art of the OKR Redux instead! A lot has changed since 2014…. Original “Art of the OKR” below, for archival purposes: I wrote a book on…
Super successful companies
I spent some time recently thinking about what companies that grow up to be extremely successful do when they are very young. I came up with the following list. It’s from personal experience and...
What is an OKR? Objectives, key results and how to use them
Understanding what an Objective and Key Result is, why it's different from traditional goal setting, and what impact a good OKR will can have is vital.
Execution is Everything
I have wanted to write a review of John Doerr’s book Execution is Everything since it was first published five months ago. Some of you are probably saying right now: “That’…
The Tricks Used by Pilots, Surgeons & Engineers to Overcome Human Error
When Germanwings Flight 4U9525 crashed into the French Alps in March it did not take investigators long to determine the likely reason: Co-pilot Andreas Lubitz had allegedly been suffering from depression and may have crashed the plane as a means to commit suicide, taking…
Scaling Engineering Teams via RFCs: Writing Things Down
I have recently been talking at small and mid-size companies, sharing engineering best practices I see us use at Uber, which I would recommend any tech company adopt as they are growing. The one topic that gets both the most raised eyebrows, as well the most "aha!" moments is the
What is Kanban? A Quick Guide to Visualized Improvement
What is Kanban? Learn more about how the kanban methodology of visualizing work in progress can accelerate your team’s improvement efforts and minimize waste
Two Things to Do After Every Meeting
Don’t let progress end when the meeting does.
How Much Does It Cost To Make A Hit Song?
We go step-by-step through the making of Rihanna's song "Man Down." Bringing in top songwriters and producers costs tens of thousands of dollars. Trying to turn the song into a hit costs much more.