Field Notes - Nov 11, '25

Executive Signals

• Control planes over shells: one port, audits, and chat alerts replace SSH
• Compliance windows run roadmaps: simulate early, slip decisively when access lags
• Contracts beat scrapes: adapters, versioning, and backoff turn drift into noise
• Demos expose truth : psychological safety converts flake into compounding velocity
• Logs are the lever: retention and tails build trust without root

CEO

Engineer Demos for Psychological Safety and Signal

The first cross‑team demo will be awkward and flaky. Normalize misses, judge by the user‑visible flow, and make blockers explicit. When the forum is safe, velocity compounds by the third session because people stop hiding risks and start shipping evidence.

• Leaders go first: show a broken path and model calm post‑mortems
• Time‑box “complaints” into owners and dates for access and merges
• Demo the end‑to‑end outcome; log everything else for follow‑up

Product

Work Backward from Fixed Compliance Windows

Monthly or quarterly compliance gates (e.g., the 5th) govern when you can ship or test. If upstream access slips, the whole effort moves a month. Set a demo cadence that lands well before the gate and exercise with real data across representative tenants to surface scale and error paths.

• Schedule demos at T-24 and T-7 relative to the window
• If critical access isn’t ready by T-10, slip to the next window
• Test across 2–3 representative tenants/OEMs to validate scale and errors

Engineering

Replace SSH with a Thin Control Plane for Job Runs

When ops forbids box access, ship a minimal control plane to execute jobs, stream logs, and expose health checks. You get server‑side runs with live feedback, auditability, and alerting without violating infra policy.

• Expose one authenticated port; allowlist CI and on‑call sources
• Provide /healthz and /run; return run IDs and tail logs
• Push redacted errors to chat; retain success/error logs 30–90 days

Make Integrations Self‑Recovering, Not Fragile

Directly depending on another team’s internals snaps at the first refactor. Wrap external touchpoints with explicit contracts and healing paths so drift degrades gracefully instead of detonating timelines.

• Add contract tests and schema‑drift detection with alerts
• Use adapters with sensible defaults; circuit‑break and retry with backoff
• Version external interfaces; avoid scraping internals—prefer stable APIs