Tech Guidance for Non-Technical Founders
A daily newsletter on building software products for non-technical founders. Give me two minutes a day, and I’ll help you make technical decisions with confidence.
Portable applications
Today one of my clients asked me how they can duplicate their whole application to run in the UK. This came from a request from one of their customers to satisfy GDPR laws. When I first set up their application to run in Australia I did it via tools and programming languages (Infrastructure as Code.) This means that we can deploy the UK instance in a couple of hours, because we just need to change a couple of configuration variables, update our deployment pipeline to deploy to both regions,...
Cashflow or perfection
Sometimes it's hard to persuade founders to adopt the experiment-learn-adapt cycle. In other words, build the smallest meaningful increment that allows learning via feedback and measurement. Then adapt based on these learnings and repeat.I'm not sure exactly why it is but many are unable to break away from the idea that they must deliver a fully functional, almost perfect product. Maybe it's fear of releasing a product that draw criticism. Maybe they're putting off getting real feedback....
One dev or two?
A common question I get from founders is how to structure their development team. Specifically, how many developers they should have and what their roles should be. While it may seem cheaper and “safer” to find one great developer, I always recommend that they have two or more. This is because: you have redundancy if one developer leaves, or is on leave you can have “urgency-based queues”, i.e. one developer is focused on feature work, while the other can respond to more urgent issues like...
Confusing measures with goals
Founders primarily track their business' vital signs using numbers, also known as metrics. While it's important to have metrics by which you can gauge progress, those metrics must only be a way of measuring progress towards a real outcome and not become a goal in themselves. To take a simple example, many founders focus on revenue as an indicator of success. After all the more people pay indicates that they like the product, right? It could be but it fails to recognise an even more important...
The Magic of a Blinking Cursor
Have you ever wondered why some apps just feel better to use? Often, it’s the subtle design decisions—the ones you barely notice—that make all the difference. For example, a major difference between each of the popular AI chatbots is how they “type” their responses. ChatGPT, for example, uses a smooth, animated output that mimics a human typing in real-time. It’s engaging, natural, and conversational. Compare this to Google Gemini or Claude. While they use a similar approach, the timing,...
Getting project updates just right
As a non-technical founder, tracking the progress of your development team can be a challenge. The technical tasks may not always be clear to you, even if developers assure you they are necessary. This can make it tough to gauge whether progress is on track, especially when the team is partially or fully remote. So, how can you ensure you're in tune with the development process? Is the pace too slow, too fast, or just right? Yes, we're applying the Goldilocks principle here! The key is...
Improve focus and results with cycles
Once your team’s processes are working well, development can sometimes transition into feeling endless. And by contrast, have you noticed how work seems to somehow get done when it’s subject to an immovable deadline? This phenomenon aligns with Parkinson’s Law, which states: “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” Without clearly defined time periods, work in progress can become virtually infinite, with no clear sense of when it should end. This is why establishing...
Soft skills FTW
A lot of developers have a marketing problem. They can be great at their job but they think the measure of this is just the depth of their skills and the complexity of their solutions. Following the initial hiring, this is not what you as a product owner care about. You want to know that the developer can deliver work on time and to specification. This is why hiring needs to consider attributes such as: willingness to speak up and question reliability communication skills These can be a bit...
Speed over perfection
We're always more critical of our own work than of others'. The quality of our software reflects our identity, or so we think. But customers just want to see a pulse. Find the balance between quality and frequency of updates. A fast process enables fast feedback. Fast feedback means fast learning.
Accuracy or AI
If you're thinking of including an "AI chat" interface in your app, it's important to know it will sometimes return incorrect information or straight out nonsense. These are know as "hallucinations". There are ways to constrain the output and augment the model's "knowledge" but this can still occasionally happen. While people kind of expect this and tolerate this from free options, they won't feel the same way when your paid app provides unreliable info. Rather than including this because...
A daily newsletter on building software products for non-technical founders. Give me two minutes a day, and I’ll help you make technical decisions with confidence.