Ryan Graciano

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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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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Ontologies remain one of the most effective ways to ground AI memory, keeping extracted knowledge anchored to existing structures and adaptable through feedback. As memory systems evolve, their role remains essential, and a core focus at Cognee.

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I was talking platform engineering with a large bank yesterday and he said something that stuck with me: "The entire SRE process is just reverse engineering what is actually running in production." When he broke it down, you write Terraform or CloudFormation, push it through a pipeline, infrastructure gets created on the other side. Then the pipeline disappears. It's ephemeral. And terraform keeps a copy of what it thinks infrastructure looks like based on what it deployed, which isn't based on reality. So when something breaks, your SRE team starts scrambling. Check asset management. Check Terraform. Check Splunk. Check Datadog. Check other observability tools because you probably inherited a bunch and a fraction of the truth lives in each one. This then becomes hours of expensive senior engineering time just to figure out what is before you can even start fixing it. Git is a record of intent vs reality and the gap between those two keeps getting wider as people layer on cost optimizers, manual production changes, and now agents making their own modifications. Agentic SRE companies can pitch "we'll investigate 10x faster than your humans." but this just means they're also wasting their time and tokens doing the same grunt work. But fine, let agents do it. Agents don't have families or feelings, so let them toil away. Still, there's a difference between making the investigation faster and removing the need for it entirely. It seems like solving the source of truth problem upstream can be quite interesting. Perhaps there's a chance to evolve config management to automate steps that shouldn't exist in the first place and become an actual authority for the state of production.

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Marcus built his tech company from a garage startup to a $50 million enterprise. His board celebrated record growth. His employees admired his vision. His investors praised his strategic brilliance. Yet in the quiet moments between meetings, he struggled with something he couldn't discuss with anyone: a persistent sense that he was failing at everything that mattered. His marriage was strained. His sleep was fragmented. His confidence in major decisions had eroded to the point where he'd spend hours second-guessing himself. When his CFO mentioned therapy, Marcus dismissed it immediately. CEOs don't have time for that, he thought. More importantly, what would happen if word got out? The research tells a different story: → 55% of CEOs experienced a mental health issue in the past year (up 24 points from previous year) → 50% report feeling lonely in their roles → 61% believe this isolation negatively impacts their performance → 81% believe organizations view mental health issues as weakness → 70% of C-suite leaders seriously considered quitting for roles that better support their wellbeing Here's what most people miss: the very traits that propel someone to the CEO role—relentless drive, high standards, comfort with risk, the ability to compartmentalize—can become liabilities when psychological strain reaches a critical point. The isolation of leadership creates a perfect storm: immense pressure combined with virtually no safe outlet for processing it. Addressing these challenges doesn't compromise your leadership. It enhances it. https://lnkd.in/gJdyKVJd #CEOMentalHealth #Leadership #ExecutiveWellbeing

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Several people know about this problem but nobody talks about how to solve it. I was asked one time to help fix this issue at a company. The fix lies in breaking the work down to a few critical steps. First, never just hand off work in its entirety and expect you'll get anything you can use. Regardless of how good or bad the team is, always ask, always, the offshore team to pseudo code their approach. They should explain which files they'll touch, which systems they'll touch, integrations, which areas or layers of the application, etc. I call this the first pass. Why is this important? This tells me they're thinking about the problem right and if there are any gaps in their understanding, or any pieces they're missing. After that, they'll do a second pass. That is stubbing out which functions or code will need to be added or modified, maybe even making the functions and service calls work but with mock data. This is the "prove it to me" moment. This second pass also helps me as a dev manager gauge how fast or slow the offshore team is working, giving me indications too if they're stuck somewhere. Only after this second pass, do I actually turn them loose to go execute and "deliver" the solution. Only now, because I did some diligence on my managerial end, I've got greater confidence that what I'll get will be something on par with what I'm expecting and can use. This partnership and collaborative arrangement also fosters trust and over time the offshore team will learn how your organization operates, critical thinking, and that nothing should ever be done in a vacuum or cowboy way. For more helpful tips like this, follow me. I'm paying it forward in 2026 and will be sharing gems most people aren't talk about with a focus on the solutions, not just problems.

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Are we seeing a fleeting Silicon Valley: It’s not just about the taxes. For years, the narrative of tech leaders "fleeing California" was blamed on a single number: the 15% (now 5%) tax rate. But the real conversation in the Valley right now is much more human—and much more complex. According to a recent deep dive by TechCrunch, the "Great Dispersal" of 2026 is being driven by three things that money can't fix: 📍 The Rise of the "Micro-Hub": Founders aren't just moving to Austin or Miami anymore. They are seeking "identity-rich" communities in places like Bozeman, MT, and Bentonville, AR, where high-speed satellite internet has made "the middle of nowhere" the new "center of everywhere." The "Quiet Life" Pivot: After a decade of "hustle culture," there is a massive shift toward lifestyle stability. The move isn't just a tax play; it’s a search for better public safety, shorter commutes, and a tangible connection to local community—things that have become increasingly scarce in the Bay Area. The End of Geographic Density: With the 2026 breakthroughs in AI-driven remote collaboration, the "collision of ideas" no longer requires being in a Palo Alto coffee shop. Innovation is becoming decentralized, and for many, California is now a place you visit for board meetings, not where you raise a family. The Takeaway: Silicon Valley isn't dying—it's evolving into a state of mind rather than a zip code. The tech industry is finally learning that you can build the future without losing your sense of place. https://lnkd.in/gtNN7Bn5 #SiliconValley #TechTrends #FutureOfWork #DigitalNomad #CaliforniaExodus #Innovation

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In today’s installment of the Plan of Record Substack series, I break down the most common symptoms of prioritization failure in SaaS R&D orgs — from overcommitment and hidden work to heroic culture and black-box delivery — and begin to unpack the root causes behind the dysfunction. Here’s the link: https://lnkd.in/e6fdcNNj #SaaS #ProductManagement #EngineeringLeadership #R&D #Prioritization #Execution #CPO #CTO #CPTO

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