Articles

Make a better decision about your software.

These are questions that come up before and during real software work. Each article works through one of them, so you can answer it for your own business.

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Questions we help teams think through.

Choosing a solution

When is a new tool worth it?

Run one real job through a packaged tool to find the gaps that matter, then decide whether any part is worth building and owning.

Checking progress

Is your software build making progress?

Ask the team to show you working software at each milestone, test it with your own examples, and get what is still unfinished written down before you approve it.

Trusting your information

Why won’t the records line up?

Before you automate a report or a handoff, find where your records conflict, decide which copy to trust, and test the exceptions.

Moving your data

Why read the old code first?

A migration can move every row and still be wrong. Why the old system’s code holds what your data means, and what to check before you switch it off.

Getting orders right

Why do good-looking orders go wrong?

Costly custom order mistakes usually look complete. Here is why a normal choice slips through review, what to check the order against, and where AI helps and where it doesn’t.

Keeping a system running

When your developer is gone

Your developer left or stopped answering. Someone else can take over without them. You need the code, the logins, and the people who use the system.

Notes on building and leading software work.

Hunter Goram · Sep 2, 2026

Building software just got cheap. That's the problem.

Most companies about to build custom software shouldn't. Four questions tell you whether you're the exception, and a study of 219 projects shows what happens when you skip them.

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Ryan Clements · Jan 31, 2026

Breaking Initiatives Into Tasks That Actually Get Done

Vague tasks never end, so we break initiatives into clear, trackable tasks, each with an owner and a definition of done.

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Ryan Clements · Jan 24, 2026

Your Team Is Using AI Wrong

AI coding tools speed up routine work, but they can also erode your team's skills and make delivery less stable, which is why quality gates and code review matter more now.

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Ryan Clements · Jan 16, 2026

How to Prove Your Team Is Aligned Before a Project Starts

Projects fail when a team assumes it's aligned. Write down where you are and where you're going, and the difference between the two becomes your backlog.

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Ryan Clements · Jan 9, 2026

Using Well-Placed Friction to Change How Engineers Work

When arguing doesn't change how your engineers work, change the system around them by adding friction to bad behaviors and removing it from good ones.

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Hunter Goram · Dec 19, 2025

Next.js CMS: How to Choose a Headless CMS for Next.js (Sanity, Payload, and More)

Choosing a Next.js CMS? Compare Sanity, Payload, and major headless CMS options based on previews, workflows, hosting, and scaling.

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