Seven great reads this week (5/7/2025)
Psychological safety, AI restraint, product-minded engineers, and the craft and context of architecture.
Why Do We Do Blameless Incident Reviews? (Fred Hebert)
Hebert walks through the mechanics of a post‑incident “five‑whys” done without finger‑pointing, showing how teams that feel safe surface root causes faster and push code more boldly the next week. He bolts in the neuroscience (cortisol vs. learning), the cultural math (psych safety × frequency of change = shipping velocity), and a set of concrete facilitation tips you can steal for your next retro. My takeaway: blamelessness is less about warm fuzzies and more about protecting the feedback loop that keeps us competitive. (link)
How to Work Better with Product, as an Engineer (Gergely Orosz interviews Ebi Atawodi)
Ebi Atawodi—now Director of Product at YouTube Studio, formerly at Netflix & Uber—recounts how she and Gergely transformed a rocky PM/eng relationship at Uber into a high‑trust, high‑impact partnership. Tactics I loved: a quarterly “business scorecard” that tied every squad to revenue or cost metrics; “State of the Union” updates that let engineers see the why behind head‑count asks; and a rule that new PMs must earn trust before rewriting roadmaps. The thread running through the episode: product‑minded engineers out‑execute everyone else, and the fastest way to grow them is full transparency into how product gets funded. If you coach eng managers on cross‑functional trust, bookmark this. (link)
Melissa Perri: Why AI Is a Terrible Strategist (Interview by Leah Tharin)
Perri argues most “add AI” mandates come from boardrooms chasing higher multiples, not from user pain. She recounts coaching a Series C team that burned $2 M on a Gen‑AI feature nobody adopted, and offers a litmus test: if the model’s outputs can’t meaningfully change customer behavior today, ship a slide deck instead. Clip-worthy quote: “Strategy is what you won’t ship—especially when the hype train is loud.” (link)
It’s Me, Hi. I’m the Vibe Coder. (Katie Parrott)
Forget the “everyone will be a developer” cliché. Parrott—writer, not engineer—shares how AI helped her build real tools not by learning to code, but by reimagining code as conversation. She frames “vibe coding” as a kind of applied domain intuition: a marketer fixing their own workflow, an ops lead spinning up an internal dashboard, a parent prototyping a family planner. The power isn’t technical, it’s contextual. It’s a good distillation of why I find these full-stack AI coding tools compelling. (link)
Politics (Rich Mironov)
Mironov says we call it “politics” when we’re bad at it. He reframes exec‑suite jockeying as core product leadership: translating roadmap impact into P&L language, merchandising wins so R&D isn’t short‑changed, and pre‑aligning CFO/Support/Marketing before the next “special” sales request lands. Coaching founders, I label this “managing up & across,” and this essay is a field manual. (link)
The Purpose of a Building Is How It Looks (Ralph Stefan Weir)
Glendinning chronicles the swing from utilitarian brutalism to today’s craft‑forward architecture, arguing beauty re‑emerges when artisans regain control from spreadsheet designers. Hard not to map his thesis onto software: frameworks & templates raised the floor, but differentiated products still come from opinionated craftspeople. Bonus inspiration for your next design‑system debate. (link)
How I Quit Shopping (Charlotte Cowles interviewing Ashlee Piper)
Piper’s “No New Things” experiment started as a 30‑day detox, morphed into two years, erased $22k of debt, and rewired her dopamine loop. Beyond personal finance, the piece is a mini‑case study in habit design—urges last 2‑7 minutes; add friction; replace with a quick win. A nice counterpoint to the “growth at all costs” mindset. (link)