
Navin Ganeshan
5.7K posts

Navin Ganeshan
@NGaneshan
I lead products @amazon transportation. Data viz geek. Recovering slide jockey. Always a storyteller. Tweets all mine.










The MacBook Neo is such an interesting machine that it coaxed a thousand-word-essay out of me










Agile Has Broken Your Company The Agile Manifesto was signed in 2001 by 17 developers trying to fix broken software projects. It worked…until it didn't. Twenty-five years later, Agile has become a $20B+ industry, and the software it produces is getting worse. The Four Principles The Manifesto prioritized: - Individuals and interactions over processes and tools - Working software over comprehensive documentation - Customer collaboration over contract negotiation - Responding to change over following a plan These aren't wrong in isolation but the problem is what they became in practice. "Responding to change" became an excuse to never finish anything. Stanford researchers found scope creep was institutionalized and rebranded as "sprint replanning," one of the top drivers of cost overruns. "Working software over documentation" quietly gutted institutional knowledge. A 2023 GitLab survey found only 12% of developers felt their codebase was well-documented. In other words, technical debt became structural. "Velocity" replaced quality. Story points. Burn-down charts. Throughput. None of these measure whether the software is any good. The Manifesto said build software that works, and a focus on velocity forgot that. The Numbers Are Damning McKinsey found technical debt now consumes 20–40% of engineering capacity in most large organizations. The Consortium for Information & Software Quality estimated poor software quality cost U.S. companies $2.41 trillion in 2022, with $1.52 trillion from operational failures alone. Agile has been the dominant methodology for most of that period. The Standish Group's CHAOS Report found that in 2020, only 31% of software projects were considered successful. What You Don't Notice Until It's Too Late Current software development best practices have killed systems thinking. When your planning horizon is two weeks, you don't design systems anymore, you assemble features. The result is a mess of fragmented architectures, microservices sprawl, and codebases no single engineer fully understands. The "Product Owner" role that was supposed to represent the customer became a bureaucratic proxy. A layer between engineers and business outcomes, distorting requirements at every handoff. The Alternative: Software Factory The best engineers have always known what actually works. They write specs. They think in systems. They document decisions. They go slow to go fast. At 8090, we call this approach Software Factory. We look at software delivery like a production system with defined inputs, quality gates, and measurable outputs. Architecture is a first-class citizen from day one, not something you refactor into after 40 sprints. Documentation is built in, not bolted on. Quality Is Speed Every hour spent on rework, incident response, and technical debt is an hour that could have gone into upfront design or testing. Speed and quality don’t need to be in tension - it’s a false choice in modern mythology. If your team still measures success in story points and sprint velocity, ask yourself: What's your defect rate? Your documentation coverage? Your time to onboard a new engineer? Your incident frequency? If you don't like the answers, it's probably time for a different model. Try Software Factory at 8090.ai


Prediction: In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make. paulgraham.com/taste.html





𝗧𝘄𝗶𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗮𝘃𝗮𝗶𝗹𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝗼𝗻𝗲. twin.so We can’t wait to see what you’ll build. 𝗥𝗧 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 “𝗧𝘄𝗶𝗻” 𝘁𝗼 𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗶𝘁𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗗𝗠𝘀 👇 twitter.com/hugomercierooo…




