Recent content in English Blogposts on Klaus Breyer
Here is a pattern I have seen too many times: A designer produces 100 Figma screens. The engineers review them, give a little feedback, and then start implementing. Somewhere along the way, they discover parts that nobody thought through, because one discipline designed the solution and handed it to the next. Breadboarding flips this. The name comes from electronics: a breadboard is a prototyping…
Every dictionary word .com is taken. Registered between 1995 and 2005, in every major language. The dictionary is sold out. But there are still plenty of creative alternatives: domain hacks. Cut the word so its last letters become the top-level domain. Wilderness becomes wilderne.ss . Uploading becomes upload.ing . Telephone becomes teleph.one . Everyone knows the famous ones: bit.ly , insta.gram…
A few months ago, the team had a thorough discussion about our git workflow. Trunk-based development vs. a more traditional branching model with a long-lived secondary branch. The team was split. People had good arguments on both sides. One engineer had prepared the discussion well, laying out all the pros and cons on a Confluence page. I read through everything carefully and then weighed in,…
This morning, one of our engineers spent 45 minutes with a candidate. No algorithm quizzing, no whiteboard, just Pairing in our actual codebase, on a real task. That session is the core of how I run technical interviews these days. And since I just sent out the emails for the current round, I want to write the whole process down - staying as close as possible to what candidates actually receive…
Because we now live in times where you can build a solution faster than you can spend time being annoyed about the problem, I built imaedge . The problem was simple, and we have had it on every trip so far: my wife and I want to collect our photos together, but none of the usual options really fits. Apple does not work for us because shared photo albums compress the images. Google Photos does not…
In the previous post I shared the keynote that opened our two-day team offsite: a barrage of theses on how AI changes the product development lifecycle. A keynote does not change how a team works. This post is the other half: the concrete workshop format we used to turn “interesting” into “what do we actually change on Monday”. Motivation ¶ Nowadays, there is no standard…
This week I ran a workshop with my team. The topic: the transformation of the product development lifecycle through AI. To open it, I gave a keynote. No neat framework, no finished playbook. Instead, a barrage of hypotheses I had collected from my own bubble over the previous months: things people I trust were writing, building, and arguing about. Some of these theses contradict each other, and…
Developers and designers each had four tickets in progress at the same time - and by “in progress,” I mean actually in progress: including tickets in review and tickets in testing. That’s a direct violation of one of the most basic Kanban principles: limit work in progress. The symptom is always the same. The board looks busy. Nothing ships. Everyone is “almost done”…
My son is absolutely fascinated by the scales in the fruit and vegetable section at Kaufland - the ones that print those little stickers with prices and barcodes. Watching numbers turn into a printed label feels like pure magic to him. That fascination became the inspiration for a small DIY project. I bought a cheap thermal printer, connected it to a Raspberry Pi, and added a simple USB numpad.…
I hadn’t hired anyone in a year. Then I stepped into my new role as CPTO at myo and now need to expand the team. We have a very specific stack, Elixir and Phoenix, so from the beginning I was open to remote candidates from across the EU. We posted the job on Join - you can find the job description here . They then distributes the job to places like Stepstone, LinkedIn, and probably others…
Today I’m speaking at ML Week Europe in Berlin. edding: Bridging the AI-UX Gap in B2B SaaS through Interdisciplinary Collaboration Machine Learning adds complexity to product design—not just in implementation, but even more during product discovery, where user value is explored. At edding, the easycheck team transformed to an empowered product team, collaborating across disciplines by rethinking…
Today I’m speaking at the code.talks conference in Hamburg! ¶ Software development isn’t a manufacturing line, where one group mindlessly executes what another has decided. It’s an interdisciplinary design process. Yet in many organizations, ticket systems, overloaded Kanban boards, and rigid roles create silos that slow everything down. This session explores how small, interdisciplinary teams…
Today I’m speaking at Agile Prague about a topic that lies at the heart of modern product development: why tickets create silos – and how we can move beyond them to unlock true interdisciplinary collaboration. In the early days of software development, tickets served an important purpose: they protected developers from overbearing management and created structure in a simpler process. But today’s…
Today I want to share about the trip with my wife to French Polynesia. The journey had been planned for a long time – a dream destination with a family backstory: my parents-in-law went there when they were our age, so they were more than happy to take care of our kids for three weeks to let us experience the same. French Polynesia is a place not everyone knows about – let alone knows where it…
“Building software is a design process. As software engineers, we are not implementing a solved problem. We are solving the problems. We are making creative decisions every hour of the day.” Is your software development process stuck on a conveyor belt? Discover how to break free from outdated manufacturing mindsets and build truly high-performing, agile teams that “Move Fast and Break Silos.” In…
I taught a masterclass for CTOs of the alphalist community: Distributed, Yet Focused – High-Impact Remote Teams Remote work isn’t a challenge – it’s an advantage. But offices create culture by accident. Remote teams need to design it on purpose. We’ll talked about: 🧭 How async communication, sync rituals, and clear expectations make the difference 📊 Why visibility ≠ productivity – and what to…
Let’s start with one of my favorite quotes: Organizations [that design systems] produce designs that mirror their communication structures. This is Conway’s Law from 1968 and fifty years later, it’s still true. That’s why designing systems ( slicing work ) and designing teams must go hand in hand. If they don’t, your architecture will follow your organizational chart…
Building software is fundamentally different from manufacturing . Software development is an exploratory and creative process where decisions are made continuously within evolving systems. Rigid assembly-line thinking focusing on ticket-driven workflows is not suited and only creates silos . To empower small, interdisciplinary teams, we need to rethink how we slice work so that it aligns with the…
I’ve ranted about Teams often enough. As much as that always generates good LinkedIn engagement ( here and here ), I can provide a remedy this time. To summarize the rants, MS Teams has multiple UX challenges: Forced threaded conversations make casual, spontaneous exchanges cumbersome. Older replies bump threads to the top, burying new updates. Public visibility in channels often makes users…
Lets start with a quote: Agile now means, we do half of Scrum poorly and Use Jira. (Andy Hunt, 2017 ) Coders had a vision, but business took over. ¶ Remember the Agile Manifesto ? It wasn’t about Jira tickets or stand-up meetings. It was about values—like individuals and interactions over processes and tools. But somewhere along the way, Agile got hijacked. Coders had a vision, but business…
Let’s rewind to 1913. Henry Ford was already a successful car manufacturer but was far from the global icon he would later become. At that time, his factory floor looked quite different from what we imagine today. Cars stood still while workers walked around them, building each car in a single place. The process was slow and tedious. It took 12 hours to complete just one vehicle. But then…
I recently joined Zuzi Sochova’s #AgileWay podcast for a short and sharp conversation on agile practices in interdisciplinary teams — with a nod to my upcoming talk at AgilePrague . In the podcast, I hint at what I’ll be doing live in Prague: provoking a room full of certified Scrum practitioners by challenging the idea of tickets. I’ll show how they create silos — and what truly collaborative…
I taught a masterclass for CTOs of the alphalist community: Move Fast and Break Silos - Leading Interdisciplinary Teams and Organizations 🎨 Software isn’t manufacturing with specialized disciplines—it is supposed to be an interdisciplinary design process. 🎟️ But tickets create silos, short cycles with big teams lead to micromanagement, and endless Kanban columns drain energy. ✂️ Slicing the work…
After three years and 42,000 km from Copenhagen to Maranello with the IONIQ 5, I’d like to share my experiences – the good, the not-so-good, and the reasons why I’ve now decided to get a new car. Defects ¶ I had four recall actions in total. For these, I had to drive across Berlin to the dealer, usually during rush hour. After just a few weeks, fast charging stopped working. I think a…
While managing product & tech at edding AG, my work sometimes spans from the strategic to the operational level. Balancing these different levels of responsibility often led to context switching and a confusing to-do list that lumped everything together—making it hard to focus on what truly needed deep thought versus what just required quick action. That’s when I discovered a simple yet effective…
In Click , Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky provide a practical framework for building products that actually work—products that “click” with customers. The book introduces the founding hypothesis framework and a two-day foundation sprint process to help teams identify the right customer, problem, approach, and differentiation before building anything. It’s a systematic approach to…
In Developer Accountability , Stephan Schmidt provides practical techniques for holding developers accountable. The book covers starting with “anything left?” and otherwise “what about X?”, using the “echo technique” to make expectations clear, ensuring commitments come from the team, and making teams accountable rather than individuals (when the team is ready…
In Engineering Role Descriptions , Stephan Schmidt provides guidance on creating clear role descriptions for engineering teams. The book covers why roles matter (develops features and products), responsibilities (responsible for quality and security, responsible for developing and mentoring junior developers), what they own (architecture, code, and long-term maintenance; co-owns development…
In From Project to Product Mode , Sebastian Borggrewe and Thomas Hartmann outline seven challenges for shifting from project to product mode: segmentation (homogeneous customer segments), pricing (individual requests highly priced), product discovery (filters ideas), prioritization (long-term value generation), product orgs (empowered PMs and cross-functional teams), push vs. pull (validated…
In Rewilding Software Engineering , Simon Wardley and Girba Tudor explore software engineering as a decision-making process about systems that are too large for us to fully grasp. The book introduces “holdable development”: constantly create new micro tools synthesizing new information which we then codify into our model of the system. Software engineering can be seen as primarily a…
In Startup Phases For CTOs , Stephan Schmidt outlines the core phases startups go through and what CTOs should focus on in each: ideation (generate ideas, talk to potential customers, resist coding and building castles in the sky), prototype (sell early, sell often), MVP (make something people want, start from scratch, stick with mainstream frameworks), PMF (B2B: sales can sell without huge…
I for sure knew designers and engineers didn’t think the same way. But I spent far too long trying to teach designers to think like engineers. I assumed designers could “adapt” to the engineers to build the design system iteratively, “on the go,” as they create reusable components: As we develop features, we identify patterns and gradually assemble a robust design…
It was just the usual mess: The product team had merged a couple of months before, inheriting a codebase from an agency working on a shoestring budget. Technical debt loomed, basic foundations were missing, and product management had many interesting problems. However, the good side in this case is that it is an empowered product team that includes insourced engineering, design, and product…
There was a time when I managed some individuals who weren’t particularly independent. They were talented, no doubt, but hesitant to take action without my input. My solution? Empower them. Or so I thought. I’d say things like, You’re empowered! Make the call! Take charge! But it never worked the way I hoped. They’d start a task, get partway through, and then ask for clarification—or worse, look…
Marty Cagan has been vocal in his books and online about his belief in co-locating empowered product teams. While I respect him and am fundamentally thankful for everything he shares on empowered product teams, I disagree with him on this precise aspect. First, I understand why he takes this position. Many managers who haven’t seen a robust remote culture in action assume it’s…
I know how important solid coaching skills are for any leader. Honestly, though, I’m still learning—and always looking to improve. I think we all do, and I had an epiphany today. Sometimes, it’s tough to translate my intentions into practical coaching questions, especially when I’m in the thick of team challenges, maybe even frustrated or emotionally attached. So, I decided to…
Let me share a recent story from a real project. We’re in week 4 of a 6-week cycle. We haven’t entirely kept up with the expected speed, and it’s taken much longer than anticipated because we had to modernize a lot of the architecture and the process. After all, the team is relatively new to an existing codebase. Which is okay. But we would need more time to complete everything…
I am always amazed to think that people 6,000 years ago were not so much less intelligent than we are today. We simply build on such a vast body of knowledge accumulated over time. Biologically, we are almost the same humans. Only a minimal evolutionary selection could have taken place since then if we consider the relatively few generations since civilization began. But the people 6,000 years ago…
Conferences are everywhere, but some stand out. The Leading Eng Berlin Conference 2024 was one of those rare events, offering actionable insights, meaningful connections, and a fresh take on key topics. The audience consisted mainly of the middle management layer—directors and engineering managers. There were no pure developers and not many CTOs or CPOs. I didn’t spend too much time checking…
Ensuring the security of your WordPress content is essential, especially when sharing sensitive information. To address this need, I’ve developed Password Protection with Shareable Links , a WordPress plugin that allows you to protect any post, page, or custom content type with a password. Additionally, the plugin generates encrypted links that provide direct access to your protected content,…
Effective planning and organization are crucial for team productivity. To assist in this, I’ve developed the Whole Year Calendar for Online Whiteboards , a client-side tool that generates quarterly calendars tailored for online whiteboards. 👉 Try the Live Demo to see it in action! You can customize the calendar view using URL parameters: year : Set the year (e.g., ?year=2024 ) quarter : Choose…
Organizing workshops and group activities often requires randomizing participant lists to ensure fairness and engagement. To facilitate this, I’ve developed randomized , a Go-based web application that shuffles and displays names in a random order. This tool is particularly useful for assigning tasks, forming teams, or selecting individuals randomly during events. randomized operates as a web…
Google Photos often alters the original file timestamp during uploads, making it difficult to organize photos chronologically. To solve this issue, I created rename-all-your-photos-based-on-exif-because-google-fotos-destroys-the-file-timestamp , a script that renames photos based on EXIF metadata, preserving the original capture date in the filename.…
First, the key dates: 25.07.2024: Toraja 30.07.2024: Rammang-Rammang & Leang-Leang 31.07.2024: Bangka 07.08.2024: Return journey Arrival ¶ Traveling to Indonesia or Southeast Asia always has two key moments for me: Moment 1: When you suddenly become the “foreigner” yourself. In our case, that means being the only white people on the entire plane. Moment 2: The humid, heavy air that…
Apple’s Shared Albums are convenient for photo sharing but often reduce image resolution, which can be problematic when you need the original quality. To address this, I’ve developed select-original-photos-based-on-file-names-because-Apple-s-shared-photo-albums-reduce-resolution , a shell script that helps you retrieve original photos based on filenames from a reference directory.…
Hopefully, every development team reaches a point where they discuss their guidelines and policies. Part of this discussion, hopefully, includes expectations around documentation. So far, so good. Unfortunately, many teams (and I have made this mistake in the past as well) take the easy route and claim they don’t need extensive documentation if they write self-documenting code. Besides the…
When I read inspiring stuff like Stephan’s radicalsimpli.city , I always think about all the situations where wrong decisions have already been made, some of them from my past—stuck with a zoo of tech and frameworks that are either unsuited or unmaintained or facing significant version changes close to a rewrite. In short, it is a setting where many things are messed up, and tech decisions…
Out of my daily work during testing callbacks locally, I have created and released a new open-source project called All The Requests . A simple HTTP server (built in Go) logs every incoming request. This tool captures details like timestamps, paths, headers, and payloads, making it great for debugging callbacks and webhooks. Why Use It? ¶ Comprehensive Logging: It logs request paths, headers, and…
I am currently hiring senior developers, and I assumed that AI would be used to “cheat” during coding tests. So, I made it part of the task that they should explain afterward how and for what they used AI. I am a coder at heart, and I feel developers should use AI tooling at every opportunity. And I mean it quite literally. They should use every opportunity to determine how the current…
Regularly, I encounter team members who are surprised that they got to meet the candidates before I made the decision. They weren’t used to this from their past experiences. But let me provide some context: I am currently the Head of Product and Technology for edding AG , transforming a team around the easycheck product into an empowered product team. So, we’re not the typical tech…