The technical calls you cannot undo: scoping, hiring, cost and risk. Written for the founder signing the cheque rather than the engineer doing the build.
You can't evaluate a candidate's code, so stop trying. Across 1,000+ interviews, the strongest predictor of a good hire wasn't a right answer — it was how they talked about a real failure. Here's the one question that works, and the hire it would have saved me from getting wrong.
When your engineers ask for cleanup time, they're not gold-plating — they're asking you to make a loan repayment before the interest compounds. I owned a product where a cut corner went uncaught long enough to become a formal non-conformance and three months of rework. Here's how to price technical debt instead of vetoing it on instinct.
Nobody on your team will walk in and say the system is fragile — not because they're hiding it, but because they've normalized it. Six behavior-based questions that surface real technical risk without requiring you to read a line of code.
AI can build your MVP — I've built the system that does this professionally, shipping MVPs roughly 3x faster. That's not a reason to relax. Generation is now free, which means your judgment about what to build is the only bottleneck left, and AI won't tell you when it's building the wrong thing.
Every feature you approve before launch costs you twice — once to build it, once in the reluctance to cut it. I over-engineered a product for millions of users; it ended up serving three. Here's the question that would have caught it, and how to sort a pre-launch roadmap into build, fake, and cut.