Case studies
Case studies from running a Tech & Product department: the decisions, the constraints, and what I would do differently.
Two stacks, one root cause: reading an incident that lied about where it was
Two unrelated systems failed at the same minute with no code change between them. How I run a root-cause analysis when the error is loudest in the place that is not actually broken.
Read →I built our reporting tool myself, with an AI coding agent
Management could not see where engineering time and cost were going. Rather than buy a platform, I specified and shipped an internal Laravel application — and that turned out to be the clearest statement I could make about how AI belongs in a leadership role.
Read →Six developers, no process: how I built a Tech & Product department
I joined an engineering team of six with no defined way of working and built it into a 25-person Tech & Product department. The order I did things in, and why that order mattered more than the speed.
Read →A sprint is not one hundred per cent features
Why our capacity model reserves explicit time for support and technical improvement, what changed when we enforced it, and how the delivery metrics are framed so they cannot be turned against the team.
Read →