You may be shipping faster than ever before, but are you really shipping the right things right?
There's much more to building software solutions to problems than knowing which tools to use or how to prompt your coding agent. It doesn't matter how perfect your software is if it doesn't solve the user's core problem.
The question is, how do you know what the core problem is, and how do you make sure you keep your software aligned with that north star (and even make adjustments as the circumstances change over time)? That's what you'll learn in this workshop.
"But," I hear some of you out there saying, "isn't this all just the job of the product manager? Can't I just wait for the PM to figure out what we're supposed to do and then give me a spec to hand over to the AI coding agent to implement...? Oh... wait..." Yeah, I've got bad news for you ticket hot-potatoers out there. If all you're doing is taking tickets and converting them into a software implementation, I'm afraid to say that's highly replaceable. As coding agents continue to improve, the role of an individual contributor who doesn't deeply understand the user, the domain, and the software stack all at once is no longer valuable. Understanding the customer is not just the role of a PM.
The engineers who have always distinguished themselves from their peers are the ones with architectural and systems understanding who also deeply gets the bigger picture of why the system exists in the first place and where it's headed from a product perspective.
Durable Skills
That's the point of this workshop. And that's what you really should be developing in yourself. Yeah, you can continue to fine tune your agent loop and the workflows you use to build implementations of software solutions and that definitely can be time well spent... For the next couple months until coding agents take another leap forward and all that work you put in is now invalidated and you have to move on to the next thing. This can easily turn into spinning your wheels and constantly chasing the next perfect pipeline without making meaningful movement on the product you're being paid to build.
So many of us end up building things people don't need, don't want, or hate to use all because we aren't taking care to understand the upstream source and the downstream effects of our implementation work. That stops now.
In this workshop you'll learn practical skills and principles that are the hallmark of the most valuable and best compensated software engineers in the industry, including:
- Systems thinking - Zooming out to see the bigger picture in the context of the existing system and primitives and how to evolve the system to better solve problems
- Problem clarity - Asking the right kinds of questions to get at the core of the problem to be solved
- Judgement - Being able to know when and how to push back on upstream requests that should not be implemented
- Ownership and Accountability - Understanding the vital and valuable role you play as an accountable individual and how this can help you stand out from your peers
- Prioritization - Knowing how to properly prioritize your tasks so you accomplish the most impactful tasks first and avoid harmful shortcuts on the things that matter most
- Feedback loops - Develop an intuition for the downstream result of your shipped work to feed back into creating better implementations
And you'll learn all of this through intentional practice and application to the kinds of issues you're running into every day. You'll come away with a framework for making better decisions.
Right now, we've all got access to the same amazing tools. Coding agents aren't perfect, but they're getting better all the time and nobody knows where the ceiling is or how quickly we'll get there. But one thing's for sure, the skills you'll learn about in this workshop will go with you through all the evolutions of coding agents regardless of how good they get. As long as our industry is around, these skills will distinguish you from your peers and competitors and put you in a solid position to make the most out of the tools even as they evolve.
So join me and let's make your career durable.