01Ship fast or die
Going faster means removing what’s slowing you down.
Ask what’s slowing you down and get rid of it: blocked tasks, too many meetings, fuzzy ownership, PR reviews. Find the 10% that gives you 90% of the value, and get it in front of real people. Nobody knows what works up front. The quickest way to find out is to put it in someone’s hands.
02Don’t get attached
Even a failed first attempt teaches you what to build next.
Now that building is cheap, throwing code away costs nothing. Your first version is just a guess, so don’t get attached and keep iterating.
03Call every customer
Code got cheap. Knowing what to build didn’t.
At Fingertip we called every user. An actual phone call, then another one after they’d had a go with it. You hear the hesitation before someone works out how to say it politely. Ten people who need the thing will teach you more than a thousand who quite like it. Ring them and shut up while they talk. Skip it and you’ll ship a year of features nobody asked for, faster than anyone ever has.
04Own it, then hand over the keys
If something’s broken and you can fix it, just fix it and push.
Kill off “that’s not my job” wherever it shows up. One person owns a feature the whole way through. If you can’t yet say what “done” looks like, sort that out first. Ownership doesn’t scale by doing more yourself. It scales by handing someone real authority and the accountability that goes with it, both at once. One without the other isn’t fair on anyone.
05Build lots, keep it simple
Get it simple enough that it clicks in your head.
Solve your own problem, give the tool away, and show people how you did it. Find the little crux of each project and get it as simple as you can. Once it clicks, it’s like a ball rolling downhill.
06Risk scales with blast radius
How much you can break decides how carefully you ship.
An early MVP can ship fast and loose: push to main, get it in front of users. A platform with 90M+ people on it earns feature flags, staged rollouts, and proper review. The scariest code, anything touching money, tax, or permissions, earns stronger tests even when AI wrote it. CI going green doesn’t mean the product works.
07Stay at the frontier
Pick the role that scares you slightly more than it excites you.
Put yourself where you’ll learn the fastest, and keep learning the newest thing. Speed is a skill, and you only build it under pressure, when real people need a real answer and the deadline isn’t moving.
08You can sense carelessness
People never see your code, but they can feel when it was made carelessly.
It’s the sum of all the small details that people pick up on, even the ones they’d never consciously notice. So generate fast, then go and sand down the rough edges, and keep sanding. The thing that still sets you apart is knowing what’s good and standing behind it.
09Get in the room
A model can write any code, but it can’t be in the room.
Play the long game and optimise for opportunities. Do the talks, build in public, help people when there’s nothing in it for you. You can’t plan luck, but you can give it more ways to find you.
10Get it out of your head
Write it down and you stop having to remember it.
Don’t carry everything in your head. Put it in a system you trust, so you can be fully present on the one thing in front of you.
When AI can write anything, your edge is the stuff it can’t do: taste, ownership, being in the room.