Chad Fowler

GTM goals for early stage technical companies: 1. Be referenced often in internal meetings of your prospects (exploratory phase of adoption) 2. Be referenced often in externally facing architecture diagrams of the top companies in your market (first path to production + PMF) 3. Be endorsed often in communities as experts/influencers see 1 + 2 appear without your promotion (your real ARR + NRR story happens here) 4. Be endorsed as the gold standard by communities (moat, hang on for dear life and keep shipping and making money) #2 is v hard as things shift often, but Founder time should be with customers to make this occur as often as possible. #3 + #4 become your roadshow focus over time so you can scale your company.

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For the first time in US History, it's now possible to search for land based on exactly what you intend to develop. Introducing SearchAI Intentions, by Prophetic. When we started building Prophetic, one of the things that frustrated us most about land search was the invisible prerequisite: before you could find a site suitable for your townhome, hotel, data center, warehouse, etc. project, you had to already intimately know the market. You had to know the zone codes. You had to know which municipalities allowed what uses. You had to translate your vision into zoning language and then go hunting. If you didn't have that local expertise, you were starting from scratch or waiting for a broker to call you. That has been true for every developer, in every asset class, since the beginning of the industry. We just changed how the industry works - nationwide. SearchAI Intentions now lets you search by exactly what you want to build with 120+ development type categories, any market, any jurisdiction, and results in seconds. A hotel developer searches "Hotel - Full Service". A data center developer searches "Data Center". A senior living operator searches "Senior Living - Active Adult" or "Senior Living - Assisted Living". SearchAI reads the actual zoning codes across every zone and jurisdiction in your search area and returns every viable parcel, ranked by fit. It cites the specific municipal code section behind every result so you can act with confidence. What this means practically: for the first time, hotel developers, energy companies, warehouse and logistics operators, data center site selectors, cell tower companies, senior living operators, medical facility developers, commercial and retail developers, economic development agencies, and major brokerages have a land search tool built for how they actually think about acquisition. They can find sites that meet their exact criteria, in any market, in seconds - instead of literal weeks. If you have ever spent days in county GIS systems trying to find viable sites for a project, I would love to show you what this looks like now. For a deeper look at how it works and how Prophetic unlocks development across all verticals, read the full breakdown here: https://lnkd.in/gPzJbt3w #PropTech #LandAcquisition #RealEstateDevelopment #SearchAI #Prophetic #DataCenters #SeniorLiving #EnergyInfrastructure #IndustrialRealEstate #HospitalityDevelopment #homebuilding #cre #realestate #commercialrealestate #realestatebrokerage https://lnkd.in/gz-zrt2P

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I thought this was a good and very reasonable talk by Eleanor Millman on how to prioritize projects for a platform engineering team: https://lnkd.in/gaYtUHRH A few insights I took from it: - Unlike product features which can be more directly tied to revenue, platform engineering work is a couple steps removed. But that doesn't mean it's unimportant! Far from it, platform engineering projects can make everyone at the company more efficient, able to produce higher quality software, etc. - While "urgency" is always going to be a factor, you don't want to just be putting out fires, you want be able to prioritize work which is "high impact" ... even if that impact isn't felt immediately. - Good rule of thumb: prioritize "highest impact for lowest effort". - The talk has some ideas on what factors to choose for impact, and how to blend them. For instance "speed of development" is one factor, "cloud cost optimization" might be another. The weighting of different impact factors can change over time, depending on the needs of the business. I would say that a lot of companies don't have much methodology here but I can really see the value in codifying it. You can always change the methodology or the weighting if it's spitting out results that don't pass the smell test or you really feel it is leading the company astray. Clarity can give the org more freedom to put resources behind projects that would otherwise never be taken on. When things are unclear, prioritization still happens implicitly, but the decisions tend to be a lot more random and fear-based and the org is worse off as a result.

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We’re all sold on OpenClaw, but can it ACTUALLY be useful to the average person who doesn’t just sit around writing code? Turns out it can! Here’s how Matthew Berman used OpenClaw to help solve his stomach issues!

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In this presentation, Colin cogently articulates the rationale for choosing Components over Containers and why Agentic Systems provide a catalyst for that paradigm shift (especially from around the 19 minute mark).

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I love Rails. I've built my wealth on it. That's exactly why I think we need to have an honest conversation about its biggest blind spot. Eileen M. U. gave a brilliant talk at Rails World last year: "The Myth of the Modular Monolith." After 6 years of modularizing Shopify's monolith, she concluded: "You can't solve human and cultural problems by changing your architecture." She's right kinda of about the culture part. But stopped one step short. Rails doesn't just allow tight coupling. It incentivizes it. ActiveRecord makes every model globally accessible from anywhere. Any controller, any model, any job can reach into any table through any association chain. There's no boundary enforcement. No import restriction. No compilation step that says "this module shouldn't know about that one." When your framework makes coupling the path of least resistance, blaming developers for coupled code is like blaming water for flowing downhill. Shopify tried to fix this with Packwerk. It just give you a map not a real solution. Rails Engines? Been there, done that. They are miniature apps that provide functionality to their host applications. They don't enforce real isolation and they weren't designed for progressive extraction. But this isn't a Rails problem. It's a missing tool problem. Look at what Nx did for the Node/TypeScript ecosystem: → Module boundaries enforced at the import level, not via YAML to-do lists → Dependency graph visualization built in → Affected-only CI: only test what actually changed → Clear public API per module, everything else is private by default → A real path from monorepo module to extracted service Nx didn't replace Node. It gave Node developers the guardrails to build modular systems naturally. The right thing became the easy thing. By default. Rails deserves the same. Imagine a Rails-native tool that: • Enforces module boundaries through autoload paths, not opt-in linting • Gives each module a public API (explicit exports) while keeping internals private • Generates a live dependency graph from actual code usage, not manual YAML declarations • Runs affected-only CI based on that graph Not a replacement for Rails. A companion that makes Rails' conventions work at scale. Eileen is right: culture matters. Education matters. Leadership incentives matter. But culture alone didn't give us CI/CD. Tools did. Culture alone didn't give us code formatting standards. Linters did. Culture alone won't give us modular Rails applications. Rails gave us developer happiness for building products. Now we need the same philosophy applied to building organizations of code. The myth isn't the modular monolith. The myth is that we have the right tools for one. Who's building this? 🎥 Eileen Uchitelle — "The Myth of the Modular Monolith" (Rails World 2024) https://lnkd.in/dabvzHQm

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I’ve come to believe that early experiences carry disproportionate weight - far more than we often acknowledge. For designers and builders, “minimum viable” may suffice for validating core functionality, but it rarely earns trust or sparks genuine delight. While velocity matters, I’ve always struggled with the notion that early versions should be merely viable, especially in a world where attention is scarce and emotional resonance is everything. This extends beyond product. Do you show up as the minimum viable version of yourself in your work, your relationships, your craft? I would encourage you to challenge the conventional MVP framework. Replace it with the Minimum Awesome Product. This doesn’t mean it’s fully-featured or pixel perfect. But it should be worthy of attention. Memorable, even evocative in the way it triggered emotion. The kind of product that prompts someone to say, “I didn’t know I needed this, but now I can’t live without it.” You can refine mechanics over time, but the emotional experience of a first interaction is singular and unrecoverable. Don’t settle for viability. Build something worth remembering… and make it awesome! ❤️‍🔥

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The org chart that helped you get to 10 partnerships starts working against you at 50. Unclear ownership, reporting lines that bury the function, specialists brought in too late. Scaling a partner program requires making structural decisions that reflect where you're going, not just where you've been. On Thursday, March 26, Nelson Wang (Partner Principles), Jessica Baker(AchieveUnite), and Eleanor Thompson (Gravitee) are joining Denise Duest, MBA of HubSpot to talk through the real decisions behind building a partner team that scales:   ➡️ When to hire generalists vs. specialists ➡️ How to structure around different partner motions and how that changes as you grow ➡️ What reporting lines signal about whether your organization actually values partners Join us for a candid conversation from people who've built partner teams from startup mode through enterprise scale. Register here to attend live or get the recording:  https://lnkd.in/eFSf_g8v

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Most teams don’t have a delivery problem. They have a portfolio visibility problem. Your execs ask: “Where are we on the strategic initiatives?” “Why are 12 projects red?” “What did we actually commit to this quarter?” “Why didn’t we see this risk coming?” And suddenly everyone is scrambling through: ❌ 47 Jira boards ❌ 12 spreadsheets ❌ 3 disconnected roadmaps ❌ Slides built at midnight Jira works beautifully at the team level. But when you try to use it for portfolio project management without the right structure? It becomes noise. Initiatives don’t roll up correctly. Roadmaps aren’t trusted. Dependencies are invisible. Capacity is guesswork. Leadership loses confidence in the data. And here’s the hard truth: Most Jira admins and PMs were never actually taught how to design Jira for portfolio-level thinking. They were taught tickets. Not strategy alignment. Not funding models. Not cross-program visibility. Not executive reporting architecture. That’s exactly why I’m hosting a 1-Day Portfolio Project Management Workshop right before Team ’26. This is not: 🚫 “Here’s how to create an Epic” 🚫 “Here’s what a board does” This is: ✔ How to architect hierarchy for strategic initiatives ✔ How to structure Advanced Roadmaps for true portfolio visibility ✔ How to manage cross-team dependencies without chaos ✔ How to track planned vs. unplanned work at scale ✔ How to design executive-ready dashboards people actually trust ✔ How to govern portfolio data so it doesn’t decay in 3 months If you’re: • A Jira Admin being pulled into portfolio conversations • A PM expected to report at the initiative level • A Portfolio Lead struggling with visibility • A Leader tired of “slide engineering” every quarter This workshop will change how you think about Jira. Before Team ’26. One full day. Deep dive. Practical architecture. No fluff. If you want Jira to move from “task tracker” to “strategic system of record”, sign up for our conference -> https://lnkd.in/gK8FGx96 Let’s build systems executives can actually trust.

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To be fair, sometimes it *is* the seed. Not all seeds are going to sprout, thrive, or survive to bear fruit. But you can't control the seed, you can only control the conditions. Sometimes seeds fail to thrive because they are in a poorly fitting environment, and sometimes the environment is just poor, and no one really thrives. Wow, you can ride that analogy all kinds of distance. A culture that is direct and kind can be a great asset to a business, but it does not guarantee success. If the culture does not serve the business and help ensure its survival, the culture is not achieving its most important job.

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Enterprise integrations have long been a tar pit for great software, where months of costly manual work eats margin and kills momentum. Refold (formerly Cobalt)’s agents flip that script, automating the heavy lifting so that tool implementations plug in and deliver value in a fraction of the time. Incredibly excited to see Jugal Anchalia and Abhishek Kumar demolish the most stubborn bottleneck in enterprise software!

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We did not build AlturaQuantera app for the DORA deadline. Deadlines are loud. Real work is quiet. When DORA hit, a lot of teams did what they had to do: scramble, document, align just enough to pass the first assessment. External consultants, war rooms, late-night evidence hunts. It worked, at least on paper. What I kept seeing after the rush was different: - controls that were implemented but not really owned - policies copied from templates no one had read twice - audits treated like single events instead of recurring checkpoints - compliance sitting in SharePoint, reality sitting in production That gap between "we did DORA" and "we live with DORA" is where most of the pain lives. Not in the law itself, but in the operational residue of doing it as a project instead of a system. AlturaQuantera came out of that pain. It is not a get compliant fast tool. It is a workspace for the months and years after the consultants leave, when systems change, vendors rotate, incidents happen, and someone has to explain how all of that still fits DORA. It is shaped for reassessments that do not start from zero. For evidence that ages alongside your architecture. For policies that evolve instead of accumulating as versions in a folder called Final. Most teams already survived the deadline. The real question now is quieter, and harder: will your compliance survive your normal operations? #DORA #compliance #SaaS #fintech #riskmanagement

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Decision modeling is key. Intent + decision traces created by agents need to be modeled to create self learning or ever improving decision quality ( measured via outcomes), while the criteria is non stop shifting. Process modeling - aka crud on system of records will also get eroded and merged with decisions models being stored. This is where Agebt plane and human plane converge.

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After founding two IaC companies and nearly 20 years in the industry, I’ve noticed a pattern. Most teams fall into this invisible infrastructure trap without even realizing it: It’s thinking in absolutes. → “Everything is broken. Let’s rewrite it from scratch.” → “Everything still works. Let’s never touch it again.” Both are seductive. Both hold value in the right context. But neither tells the whole story. The first can turn engineers into arsonists, burning it all down for the sake of change. The second can turn them into museum curators preserving legacy systems at the expense of innovation. Thankfully, there’s a third path. It’s less dramatic. Less tweetable. But much more practical: 👉 Build forward — without forgetting what got you here. Some of us built our careers on Terraform. Others on YAML, JSON, HCL, or even Pythonized infrastructure dreams. Now the shiny new things are everywhere: Crossplane, System Initiative, a constellation of opinionated platforms claiming to be the future of DevOps™. The hype is loud. The pressure to “disrupt” is real. But here’s the thing: You don’t scale infrastructure by starting over every six months. You scale by asking better questions. → What problems are we solving out of habit, not necessity? → What brittle assumptions are hiding under years of "we’ve always done it this way"? → What’s the tech du jour we’re all scrambling to adopt just because it’s new? Sometimes, the problem isn’t the tooling. Sometimes, it’s our mental model of how things should work — and the blind spots that come with focusing too much on what’s familiar or what’s next, and not enough on what’s actually needed now. The good news? Thinking is free. Reflection is free. It costs nothing to question the premise before you rewrite the system. That’s what the infrastructure-as-code conference (IaCConf) is about. Not tool worship. Not one-size-fits-all solutions. Real talk about the infrastructure decisions that actually move teams forward (or quietly hold them back). This isn’t about tearing it all down or blindly preserving what’s always been. It’s about evolving deliberately with your eyes open, your assumptions on the table, and your hands still on the keyboard. Better infra isn’t just about innovation. It’s about intention. And intention starts with asking, “Why are we doing this in the first place?” 📅 So let’s talk about it. Join us May 15 for IaCConf, the first-ever virtual conference dedicated to Infrastructure as Code, hosted by Spacelift. Register here ➡️ https://www.iacconf.com/

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We sat down with the co-founder of a $1B tech company. He shared with us how engineering teams can leverage AI in ways no one has been thinking about. Most engineering teams aren't struggling with whether to use AI. They're struggling with how to extract real value from it. In July, we co-hosted an event with Guy Gur-Ari (co-founder, Augment Code) and Tushar Jain (CTO, Docker) to discuss what they are seeing in engineering teams. Guy pointed out that building with AI agents requires a fundamental shift in how engineers think about their craft. It's no longer about reading code, reasoning through it, refining it line by line. Working effectively with AI introduces a new skill entirely. It's about breaking problems down so intelligent systems can actually help. This shift takes time because you're rewiring decade-old habits, current workflows, and expectations. This Thursday, January 15th, we're hosting a small, off-the-record dinner for CXOs to have an honest conversation about one question I’m hearing everywhere: How are engineering teams actually getting real leverage from AI in code today? I'll be joined by Guy and Igor Ostrovsky (co-founders of Augment Code) and peers from Enrich - our private members-only network of CTOs and VPs of Engineering from companies like OpenAI, Slack, and Reddit. We'll share what's working, what's not, and how teams are adapting in practice - not theory. Comment if you're interested in joining; priority given to Enrich members.

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Reading Metronome’s Monetization Operating Model, I kept coming back to one idea: pricing has become product. Software now delivers outcomes, not access. Yet most companies still charge as if they’re selling seats or licenses. That disconnect creates friction: for customers, unpredictability; for companies, stalled growth. The paper’s argument is simple but sharp—monetization isn’t a late-stage decision. It’s strategic infrastructure. Pricing needs the same ownership and iteration as any feature. Treat it like a surface that customers touch, not a spreadsheet buried in finance. If value is continuous and dynamic, pricing must be as well. That means product, GTM, finance, and engineering working from one system of truth. How many of us still treat pricing as an afterthought—when it should be a growth engine? https://lnkd.in/gnH7WzYf #Monetization #ProductStrategy #AI

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Most DevRel programs are set up to fail. Not because the people running them are bad at their jobs. Because they're measuring the wrong things, reporting to the wrong people, and have no system for proving their value. This is the playbook that fixes it. Opinionated. Practical. Designed to turn DevRel from "the team that gets cut first" into a growth engine with a seat at the table. https://lnkd.in/gt-WUiaK

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