The reading list
Essays, tech notes, and the in-between.
- Product·3 min read
15% Solutions as a Retro's Last Twenty Minutes
Our own CI took thirty-eight minutes and every retro ended with the same conclusion: we need a build-infrastructure hire. Bolting 15% Solutions onto the end of the next one turned a hiring request into nine things people owned by Friday.
- Product·3 min read
15% Solutions With People Who Don't Work for You
Thirty Course Guru instructors on a call, all asking for the mobile app we weren't going to build this year. Turning the hour into 15% Solutions — in breakout rooms, with people outside our org — produced a completion-rate experiment we'd never have specced.
- Product·3 min read
15% Solutions: What the Team Could Fix Without Asking Anyone
Recap CRM's activation problem had been waiting eight months for an onboarding redesign that kept missing the roadmap. Twenty-five minutes of 15% Solutions surfaced eleven things people could already do — and moved the number before the redesign ever got a slot.
- Product·3 min read
What, So What, Now What: Debriefing the Week Nothing Went Wrong
Black Friday week shipped four themes and a live-preview rebuild with zero incidents, and the team's explanation was 'we got lucky.' Twenty-two people, three rounds, and an hour later we had the actual mechanism written down — which is the only version you can repeat.
- Product·3 min read
What, So What, Now What: A Carryover Cutoff Debrief With Support in the Room
The year-end carryover cutoff generated wrong balances for 1,900 employees, and engineering and support walked out of the incident with two different stories. Running the debrief as three separated rounds was the only way to find out which facts each side had been missing.
- Product·3 min read
What, So What, Now What: Debriefing a Rollout That Went Green and Broke Anyway
Our self-healing selectors shipped to beta, and for nine days a customer's checkout suite passed while the checkout was broken. The retro opened with a theory instead of a fact — so we threw the agenda out and climbed the ladder one rung at a time.
- Product·3 min read
Mad Tea: Nine Sentence Stems Before a Migration Nobody Wanted to Question
Moving every customer onto the new test-runner infrastructure had been decided months earlier and reviewed to death. Twelve minutes of rotating pairs found the two things the review had missed.
- Product·3 min read
Mad Tea: Reading the Room in Twelve Minutes Flat
Before committing a quarter to a mobile rewrite, I wanted to know what the team actually thought — not what they'd say in a planning meeting. Nine sentence stems, thirty seconds each, two moving circles.
- Product·3 min read
What I Need From You: A Submission Deadline and Nowhere Left to Hide
Nine days from a theme-store submission cutoff, four functions were each waiting on the other three. Banning every answer except yes, no, I'll try, and it's unclear got us to a real plan in thirty-five minutes.
- Product·3 min read
What I Need From You: Four Functions, Two Asks Each, One-Word Answers
Launching live cohort sessions needed four teams to depend on each other, and every dependency lived in someone's head as an assumption. WINFY forces the ask into the open — and permits exactly four replies.