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May 2026 Newsletter

May 2026 Newsletter

April 2026 Newsletter. I still think about the teams I was part of at Yahoo and Acorns and ask the same question: how big should product development teams be now, and what is the right mix of product, design, and engineering?At Yahoo!, my Messenger team was 5 people and we supported a product that had hundreds of millions of downloads. At Acorns, we had 10x that number, but we were supporting multiple businesses within the same app. Even then, we still tried to keep it small with a single, focused PM, a shared designer, and a dedicated team of 5 devs.

Newsletter
AI
Development
Claude Ciocan
Claude Ciocan
May 15, 2026
Quality Control at Hyper Speed

Quality Control at Hyper Speed

AI-assisted development has made writing code faster than ever. But speed exposes a split in what quality actually means and the different layers don’t all move at the same pace. The obvious win of AI-assisted development is speed. Features ship faster. Backlogs move. The less obvious consequence is that speed creates pressure on quality and “quality” turns out to mean several different things that don't move at the same pace and AI can only address some of the issues.

AI
Development
Metrics
Product
Claude Ciocan
Claude Ciocan
May 14, 2026
Agentic Engineering: Where the Judgment Actually Lives

Agentic Engineering: Where the Judgment Actually Lives

"Vibe coding" and "agentic engineering" sound like the same thing. They're not. One is a way to explore an idea; the other is a way to ship production software. The difference shows up in the boring, disciplined engineering habits that AI doesn't replace. It amplifies them.

AI
Development
Claude Ciocan
Claude Ciocan
April 27, 2026
Vibe Coding Is Quietly Eroding Shared Team Context

Vibe Coding Is Quietly Eroding Shared Team Context

Vibe coding lets one motivated person run from prompt to demo without pulling anyone into the messy middle. That speed can hollow out shared context. Knowledge transfer is what decides whether a product scales past its author, not just code quality.

AI
Development
Product
Matthew New
Matthew New
April 23, 2026
April 2026 Newsletter

April 2026 Newsletter

April 2026 Newsletter. I still think about the teams I was part of at Yahoo and Acorns and ask the same question: how big should product development teams be now, and what is the right mix of product, design, and engineering?At Yahoo!, my Messenger team was 5 people and we supported a product that had hundreds of millions of downloads. At Acorns, we had 10x that number, but we were supporting multiple businesses within the same app. Even then, we still tried to keep it small with a single, focused PM, a shared designer, and a dedicated team of 5 devs.

Newsletter
Matthew New
Matthew New
April 15, 2026
AI Made Timezones Matter Again

AI Made Timezones Matter Again

Cheap async handoffs made sense when build time was the bottleneck. When iteration and decisions move faster than overnight batches, overlap and shared clocks beat "work while you sleep" as a default strategy.

Design
Development
Product
Matthew New
Matthew New
March 24, 2026
User Adoption Is the Real Speed Limit

User Adoption Is the Real Speed Limit

Throwing AI agents at your codebase does not make customers adopt your product any faster. Development velocity and user learning run on different clocks. Here is why the bottleneck is human behavior, what that means for your roadmap, and when a technology partner model fits.

Product
Matthew New
Matthew New
March 19, 2026
March 2026 Newsletter

March 2026 Newsletter

In this newsletter for March 2026, I focus on software for hardware. While understanding context of use is always important when you're designing and building software, real-world usage considerations get magnified when you're working with software for physical products.

Newsletter
Design
Development
Adam Korman
Adam Korman
March 15, 2026
February 2026 Newsletter

February 2026 Newsletter

In the February 2026 Newsletter I take some time to celebrate our team and the great work they are doing, with a special spotlight on the work they've done for our client KQED.

Newsletter
Small Teams
Flutter
Development
Claude Ciocan
Claude Ciocan
February 15, 2026
AI Interfaces Are Ignoring Decades of UX Progress

AI Interfaces Are Ignoring Decades of UX Progress

In the rush to ship “AI-first” experiences, many products are discarding the interface patterns that made software usable. Chat-first UIs often increase cognitive load, hide capability, and push users toward prompt-engineering instead of clarity.

AI
Design
Adam Korman
Adam Korman
January 26, 2026
January 2026 Newsletter

January 2026 Newsletter

In this January 2026 Newsletter, we look at goal setting and how it's important to focus on outcomes, not tasks. What you should be worried about is not the work you accomplished, but the business impact that you want to acheive.

Newsletter
Product
Matthew New
Matthew New
January 15, 2026
December 2025 Newsletter

December 2025 Newsletter

It’s been another busy year at Uptech Studio, and we’re excited about what we’ve been able to accomplish with our clients. Not because we shipped a bunch of code (although we did). And not because we hit some arbitrary growth targets or won awards we can hang on the wall (although we did). We're feeling good because the software we built in partnership with our clients actually did things in the real world.

Newsletter
Design
Adam Korman
Adam Korman
December 23, 2025
November 2025 Newsletter

November 2025 Newsletter

This Newsletter for November 2025 focuses on the eventual reckoning for AI pricing. Behind those pennies-per-call API prices lies a harsh reality: venture capital is subsidizing your AI costs, and like Uber's early ride prices, this won't last forever.

Newsletter
AI
Claude Ciocan
Claude Ciocan
November 15, 2025
The True Cost of AI: When the Subsidies Run Out

The True Cost of AI: When the Subsidies Run Out

If you’re building on top of AI APIs today, you’re enjoying artificially low prices. The current state of AI pricing feels “too good to be true” because it is. Behind every API call that costs you fractions of a cent lies a complex economic reality: venture capital is subsidizing your AI habit, and like all subsidies, this one will eventually end.

AI
Development
Claude Ciocan
Claude Ciocan
November 12, 2025
October 2025 Newsletter

October 2025 Newsletter

In this newsletter for Oacober 2025, att New spotlights why developers should watch users struggle with your product.

Newsletter
Matthew New
Matthew New
October 15, 2025
Why Your Developers Should Watch Users Struggle With Your Product

Why Your Developers Should Watch Users Struggle With Your Product

Your developers knock out feature tickets efficiently and move on to the next. Meanwhile, your customer success team is fielding the confused questions over and over. Your users are clicking the wrong buttons, abandoning half-finished workflows, and finding creative workarounds for things that should be simple. The disconnect isn’t because your developers don’t care. It’s because they’ve never heard a customer say “I don’t understand what this button does” while staring at something that took three weeks to build.

Development
Product
Matthew New
Matthew New
October 9, 2025
September 2025 Newsletter

September 2025 Newsletter

Especially within B2B companies, there can be a tendency to think that your user don't care about design, but that may be based on some bad assumptions.

Newsletter
Design
Adam Korman
Adam Korman
September 16, 2025
The High Cost of UX Blind Spots

The High Cost of UX Blind Spots

B2B software UX strategy is about much more than aesthetics. Learn what to focus on, when to redesign, how to avoid common traps, and what it means to design for perpetual intermediates.

Design
Adam Korman
Adam Korman
September 12, 2025
August 2025 Newsletter

August 2025 Newsletter

Spotlight on the "Build vs. Buy" decision. AI coding assistants have fundamentally changed the build-vs-buy conversation. The barrier to entry for custom development has seemingly vanished. What once required deep domain knowledge now just needs a well-phrased prompt.

Newsletter
Development
Rapid Growth
Claude Ciocan
Claude Ciocan
August 15, 2025
“Not Invented Here” Syndrome, still a trap, even with AI

“Not Invented Here” Syndrome, still a trap, even with AI

“Not Invented Here” (NIH) syndrome is that voice in your head that says, “we can build that ourselves,” every time someone suggests using an external solution. It's the organizational equivalent of refusing to ask for directions because you're pretty sure you can figure out the route—even though your phone has GPS and traffic data that would get you there faster. For decades, this syndrome has led engineering teams down expensive rabbit holes: rebuilding open-source libraries, creating internal project management tools instead of using Jira or Linear, building custom authentication systems instead of integrating with Auth0. The drivers are always the same: technical pride, desire for control, and the belief that your requirements are uniquely special.

Development
Product
Rapid Growth
AI
Claude Ciocan
Claude Ciocan
August 12, 2025
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