Benjamin Day

Two kinds of thinking: Extractive: "How do I get more from what I have?" Generative: "What could this become?" Most orgs drifted extractive without realizing it. Every metric looks fine while the soul of the place shrivels. New post — first in a series. benday.com/blog/generativ…

'Yeah, we do GitHub Flow.' No...I'll bet you don't.

You have 5 product backlogs and 5 developers. You think you have 5 teams. You have 1 team with 5 bosses who can't see each other's demands.

Technical debt is compound interest. The $25k fix becomes $100k because every layer you peel back exposes another layer underneath.

Angela Dugan (⁦⁦@ChicagoALM⁩ ) and ⁦@benday⁩ discuss how to Master the Human Factors in Engineering. Hands-on lab day at #VSLive is in full swing!

The core of project management isn't 'management' at all. It's delivery.

Brittleness increases when redundancy gets optimized away. Just a thought.

@ErikEJ Awesome! Nicely done.

@benday My database is always in source control! github.com/rr-wfm/MSBuild…

Your app is in version control. Your database isn't. Which version of the database goes with which version of the app? Nobody knows.

Your AI agents are writing code your team can't maintain. Working beautifully... until it doesn't. I call it Comprehension Debt.

AI helps you go faster. If your development process has problems it just makes the problems come at you faster.

Everyone on your team is at 100% capacity. That's actually the problem.

What does 'in trouble' actually mean for a work item? It's subjective... unless you have data. Here's how to define 'typical' so you can spot the outliers. youtube.com/watch?v=eSN5bh…

'We'll refactor after we ship' = We'll never refactor. 'We'll write tests later' = We'll never write tests. 'We'll document it when it's stable' = We'll never document it.

'When will it be done?' sounds like a simple question. It's not. You're never predicting one item — you're predicting a pile of items landing in sequence. youtube.com/watch?v=wks_Rz…

The rewrite project isn't a process problem. It's a hubris factory. You already built it once so how hard can it be? Very. Very hard.

'They're all important! Get them done!' just shifts prioritizing to the team — and they'll prioritize differently than you would.

A client once told me they were proud of their low development costs. They had the invoices to prove it. But they were measuring the wrong thing entirely. youtube.com/watch?v=N7IkyZ…

At 3 concurrent projects you're spending 40% of your time switching between them. That's two full days a week of pure waste.

Everyone talks about trunk-based development like it's the promised land. Just commit to main! Problem solved! It's not that simple. youtube.com/watch?v=yu_s9Z…