Insights from people who build products

A long software project fails slowly: people leave, platforms change their rules, early shortcuts get expensive and the plan drifts. Here are seven challenges a founder meets after month six, and what to set up before you sign for a year or more.

Conflict in an agile team is normal, and some of it is useful. Here is where it comes from, who should settle which kind, how to tell a healthy disagreement from a fight, and the conflicts a founder or product owner causes without noticing.

ScrumBut means “we use Scrum, but…”: a team drops a part of Scrum to hide a problem instead of fixing it. What Scrum is, the ScrumBut pattern with examples, what studies of real teams found, why it fails, and how to remove a ScrumBut.

Five situations where hiring a dedicated development team is the right call, with project examples, three where something else fits better, and the steps to take before a team starts.

What management means at a 3-to-15-person IT startup: the four roles a product build needs, a weekly rhythm, a decision log, money checkpoints and the signs you need more structure.

No sprint is free of pressure, but chronic stress in a software team is mostly made upstream: by dates set before scope, priorities that change mid-sprint and too few people. Here is what the 2025-2026 data says, the signs to watch and what a founder can change.

Activation, conversion, churn, MRR, lifetime value and the cost to win a customer, with the correct formulas, the payment and app store fees that cut your margin in 2026, and a worked example of when a SaaS build pays back.

A startup should hire a dedicated team after its first release, when users come back and the backlog keeps growing, and size it so it doesn’t eat the runway before the next round. The model for each stage, the runway math with 2026 seed data, the signs you’re ready, and how to grow in steps.

Most estimation mistakes are visible in the quote before any code is written. Here are eight checks a founder can run on any estimate, a worked example of how our estimate traces every hour to a user story, and what published MVP prices look like in 2026.

Switching development teams without losing your code, apps or data: what to check in the contract, which accounts to take back first, how GitHub, App Store and Google Play transfers work in 2026 and what they leave behind, and what to do if the old team won’t hand over.

Why agile estimates miss and what to do about it: seven estimation challenges, hours vs story points, why an estimate isn’t a commitment, what AI coding tools changed, and a worked example of how we estimate a product.

Hiring marketers before you know who buys and why burns cash on guesses. What a marketing team costs in 2026, what the founder should do at each stage instead, and five signs it’s time for your first marketing hire.