Weeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 6th March 2026.

This week, I:

  • was reminded (again) that people issues are harder than technical issues.
  • started writing some KPIs.
  • started writing another pitch.
  • read a blog post about LLMs by the creator of htmx. (Thank you for the link, Simon.)

Pitches

In early November last year, the tech leads started talking about Shape Up. You might have heard of it. Shape Up contains a collection of product development techniques that are, according to the book’s introduction, tried and tested by Basecamp, now 37signals.

Central to the book is the idea that a delivery team should only start a piece of work when it has been properly shaped. Shaping is less like a planning activity and more like a design activity. The result of shaping a piece of work is a pitch. A pitch should:

  • describe the problem;
  • state the appetite, or the amount of time a team should spend delivering the solution;
  • contain a low-fidelity representation of the solution;
  • state any rabbit holes and no-goes.

I’ve written four pitches for OpenPrescribing v2. None are original; all draw on existing material. However, I’ve found that by using more-or-less the same structure, it’s getting easier to write, and to discuss, each pitch.

My main difficulty, so far, has been to identify both a problem and a solution that will occupy three senior software engineers for 270 hours. Estimation was hard before LLMs arrived; it’s even harder now, because writing code is quick and easy (for a senior software engineer, at least). Things that seem easy end up being hard; things that seem hard end up being easy.

Time’s up!