Author
Antoine Buteau

Antoine Buteau

2 min read Free

Shipping velocity series #5: Rework Is Usually a Design Failure, Not a Work Ethic Failure

When a team has to redo work they've already done, the instinct is to look for a people problem. Someone wasn't careful enough. Someone didn't pay attention. Someone should have asked better questions. This is almost never the real cause. Rework is usually a
2 min read Free

Shipping velocity series #4: Decision Latency Is a Hidden Tax on Shipping

Most teams measure execution speed. Almost no teams measure decision speed. This is a blind spot with significant consequences. A team can have excellent engineers, clean code, fast CI, and still ship slowly — because the decisions that determine what gets built, how it gets built, and when it gets built
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Shipping velocity series #3: Product, Design, and Engineering Are One System

Engineering teams routinely get blamed for slow shipping. In most cases, they're not the source of the slowness — they're the last place it becomes visible. The actual constraints are usually upstream: product decisions that aren't made, designs that haven't been finalized, specs
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Shipping velocity series #2: Scope Is the First Velocity Lever

When a team is behind on a deadline, the most common intervention is to add hours. Work weekends. Go faster. Push harder. This almost never works. Not because people don't try hard enough, but because the main lever is not effort. It's scope. A three-month
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Shipping velocity series #1: Most Teams Don't Ship Slowly. They Wait Slowly.

There is a moment every engineering manager knows. A feature was supposed to take two weeks. It's been four. The engineer is not slacking off — they're working hard. The problem is invisible: the work keeps stopping. It stops waiting for a product decision. It stops waiting
3 min read Free

The Builder Shift series #10: The Builder Shift Audit

The builder shift is not a slogan. It is an audit of how your company turns workflow knowledge into safe, useful, maintainable internal systems. The question is not whether you are "using AI." The question is whether AI has changed your build-versus-buy line, your internal builder
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The Builder Shift series #9: What Not to Build

The hardest part of the builder shift is not building. When AI lowers creation cost, more ideas will look reasonable. A team can prototype a custom CRM view, an onboarding tool, a contract assistant, a planning app, a forecast workflow, or a support triage system quickly enough that saying yes
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The Builder Shift series #8: Platform Teams Become More Important

AI does not make platform teams less important. It makes them more important. When fewer people could build software, central engineering and IT teams could control more through scarcity. Requests entered a queue. Projects were prioritized. Production access was limited. That model was slow, but the blast radius was somewhat

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