(2/2) ...you might soon find your COO or CFO asking you (or your boss) to cut spend because they don’t see the business impact from all the extra output. The time is now to bridge the gap between features shipped and dollars earned. Here's how:
www.impactintel.net/impact-intel...
#prodmgmt
Run costs mount as more functionality is added, putting pressure on tech spend which won't be allowed to grow without evidence of business impact. Yet, the same lack of evidence gives rise to new ideas (try something else, spray and pray) causing more functionality to be delivered, now supercharged with AI-assisted engineering.
(1/2) Product Leaders now have the opportunity to close gaps in measurement alongside creating new functionality. AI-assisted engineering has increased velocity. If you use all the extra velocity for even more functionality, without the means to verify downstream impact, ...
sensible but so GenX
“Outsourcing the struggle involved in learning to AI is a form of cognitive deprivation just dressed up as efficiency.” I heard this in a podcast and I think it is well put. Employers may not mind it but employees had better watch out.
Karpathy predicts about AGI, "Education will play out in the same way. You'll go to school like you go to the gym." But only 17% of the adult population exercises to the recommended extent. So the future will be full of couch potatoes and airheads?
Review: A Manifesto for CTOs With Spine and Soul By Emilia Sherifova Sriram Narayan’s “The Reformist CTO’s Guide to Impact Intelligence” reads like a long-overdue intervention in the theater of tech-enabled business transformation; it is equal parts operating manual, cultural critique, and subversive scripture for technology leaders stuck inside the output-obsessed hamster wheel of the enterprise. What Sriram gets absolutely right is the central hypocrisy plaguing the productivity discourse in tech: the insistent demand to “measure developer productivity” as if engineering output were conveyor-belt widgets or feet of drywall installed. Anyone who’s actually built software or led those who do knows this is a false god. Sriram reorients the compass toward impact over throughput, and in doing so, grants beleaguered CTOs a vocabulary (and a moral imperative) to fight back. The article
is a Trojan horse: what seems like a discussion about metrics quickly unfolds into a systemic diagnosis of organizational dysfunction: politics, power, and misplaced incentives included. The framing of impact intelligence understood as a live, networked awareness of how delivery efforts tie into business outcomes is not only brilliant, it is operationally generative. What makes this work so refreshing is that it doesn't stop at lofty diagnostics; it drills down into four practical actions: introducing robust demand management, paying down measurement debt, validating impact, and equipping teams. These aren’t shiny frameworks designed to please management consultants. They are gritty, real-world interventions that reflect the daily tradeoffs faced by progressive CTOs trying to protect their engineers from becoming backlog fulfillment drones. Sriram is also unflinchingly honest about resistance. His section on objections such as "This
isn’t agile!” “Innovation isn’t predictable!” “It’s not collaborative!” – reads like transcripts from every Product-Engineering offsite I’ve attended. His suggestion to rebrand “robust demand management” as “Ideas with Full Disclosure” is political survival wisdom wrapped in humor. As someone who’s led tech orgs across legacy financial institutions and hypergrowth startups, I found myself nodding (and smirking) often. This isn’t an article for tech executives seeking safe prescriptions. It’s a call to action for those willing to challenge organizational inertia with structure, rigor, and humility. Sriram offers no shortcuts. He hands you a scalpel and dares you to perform organizational surgery before your next budget review renders you irrelevant. In short: if you are a CTO tired of being asked to measure the unmeasurable and justify the unjustifiable, you should read this. Then print out Figure 1, tape it above your desk, and start being usefully difficult.
martinfowler.com/articles/imp...
Excellence ends when eminence eclipses evidence.
FINAL §
@srny.bsky.social concludes his article in impact intelligence by addressing five common objections to this activity, including slowing down, lack of agility and collaboration, and the unpredictability of innovation.
martinfowler.com/articles/imp...
NEW §
@srny.bsky.social continues his article on impact intelligence by outlining five actions that can be done to improve impact intelligence including: demand management, impact validation, and an alternative to ROI.
martinfowler.com/articles/imp...
NEW POST
Sriram Narayan looks at how to properly assess the effectiveness of software development - by developing an intelligence about its business impact
martinfowler.com/articles/imp...
CTOs have been saying that the demand for new functionality far exceeds delivery capacity and tech budgets. Thanks to AI, delivery expectations have only increased. What's a CTO to do? Here's part one of my three-part answer published by Martin Fowler.
martinfowler.com/articles/imp...
Cover page of the COO magazine, Q2-2025 edition. It says, "Re-imagining the first line of defence: From Chief Control Officer to Head of Business Risk"
The COO community is taking note of Impact Intelligence. Armstrong Wolfe invited me to write an article for their COO magazine. My article is on page 16.
cdn.armstrongwolfe.com/wp-content/u...
Or have it read aloud by your word processor?
Glad you liked it.
TechLead Journal interviewed me about Impact Intelligence
www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXau...
In another story called, "The Brave Little Tailor", the protagonist goes around wearing a broad waist belt that says, "Seven at a Blow", implying that he had slain seven people with one blow. A fairy tale resume headline!
Padding a resume (inflating skills or achievements) is nothing new. We may think it is a LinkedIn phenomenon but it is at least two hundred years old. I discovered a German connection to the practice. Circa 1815, the Brothers Grimm wrote many famous short stories including Snow White.
In truth, he had slain seven flies at one go. Nonetheless, the headline provides him with stretch jobs which he performs with aplomb. Here's the story:
www.childstories.org/en/the-brave...
Has #agile killed the business case?
www.agileorgdesign.com/content/agil...
The closer you get to “facts,” then like a Mandelbrot diagram the subtleties are revealed and the more qualifications are needed, and when it comes to interrelations between “facts”, the problem is geometrically worse.
- Aurelien
It’s no good just demanding “the facts,” in order to make judgements, since facts do not line up like soldiers ready to be deployed...
A summary of Cleararchy: digital-age appropriate hierarchy.
www.cleararchy.com/exec-summary
#selfmanagement
Laws are meaningless, and ultimately unenforceable, if those in power choose to ignore them.
www.reuters.com/breakingview...
What floats your boat? A closer look at intrinsic motivation.
www.agileorgdesign.com/content/what...
Should have included the most populous country even if its graph tells a slightly different story.
Today, Makara Sankranti is observed around January 14-15, approximately 24 days after the winter solstice (real beginning of Uttarayana - northward journey of the Sun).
