#three-stage

#three-stage

Santa Cruz de Tenerife is one of the most idyllic cities in the Canary Islands. At its heart stands the jewel - the Auditorio. It's a place where talent from both worlds, New and Old, comes together. A theatre, opera, dance, and music heaven.

Her payment form wasn't connecting to the payment processor, and every attempt ended in an error message that made no sense. I understood her frustration. As a founder myself, I was acutely aware of the pain of trying to run a business and feeling like nothing was going your way. When I dug into her form, I found the problem a few minutes later: a mismatch between test mode and live credentials.

"I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue."

Most of these companies start the journey from a functional standpoint, avoiding extra layers that may "divert users' attention", such as refined flows, potential edge cases, and, sometimes, proper visual design foundations and user experience. Here, the goal is to ship the product first to validate its value, then address other considerations.

For decades, the to-do list has been a catalog of debt, a deceptively thin list of items to do, with icebergs of work hidden beneath the surface. AI transforms tasks to work that has already been done. Vibe Kanban, Gastown, & Conductor are the first instantiations of this for software developers. They have jargon-laden descriptions like "multi-agent orchestrator" or "visualizer," but they are, at heart, simple & beautiful Kanban boards of done & dusted work.

Scrum has a bad reputation in some organizations. In many cases, this is because teams did something they called Scrum, it didn't work, and Scrum took the blame. To counter this, when working with organizations, we like to define a small set of rules a team must follow if they want to say they're doing Scrum. Enforcing this policy helps prevent Scrum from being blamed for Scrum-like failures.

During my eight years working in agile product development, I have watched sprints move quickly while real understanding of user problems lagged. Backlogs fill with paraphrased feedback. Interview notes sit in shared folders collecting dust. Teams make decisions based on partial memories of what users actually said. Even when the code is clean, those habits slow delivery and make it harder to build software that genuinely helps people.

To find the typical example, just observe an average stand-up meeting. The ones who talk more get all the attention. In her article, software engineer Priyanka Jain tells the story of two colleagues assigned the same task. One posted updates, asked questions, and collaborated loudly. The other stayed silent and shipped clean code. Both delivered. Yet only one was praised as a "great team player."