A BOOK FOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS WORKING ON PRODUCT TEAMS

Your Code is Not the Most Important Thing in the World

What value creation really means
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battle-tested mental models for optimized decision making, excellent communication and navigating organizations

You're a Good Developer. You Work Hard. You Care About Quality.

So why does it feel like your efforts aren't being recognized the way they should be?

Maybe you've spent weeks perfecting an implementation, only to have it deprioritized. Or you've built something technically excellent that never gets used. Or you feel like no matter how much you improve your code, your career isn't progressing at the pace you expected.

Here's what I discovered when I talked to the people making decisions about your career...

I interviewed CEOs, CTOs, Engineering Managers, and Tech Leads from product organizations and here's what they told me when I asked them about the challenges they had with their teams:

"People don't understand what truly delivers value to the company; they think code is the most important thing in the world."

"The team doesn't really have a sense of usefulness. They do things just for the sake of doing them, without thinking about the trade-offs of what will actually generate more value. They write code for the sake of code."

"There's a really good guy who, whenever someone asks for something, he just goes and builds it — but, like, no, it's a random project, a proof of concept, we don't even know if it's going to production."

Sound familiar? If you've ever received feedback like this, it's not your fault. Universities don't teach this. Companies and managers rarely provide any useful guidance on it.

But here's the truth: The people who can accelerate your career care deeply about value creation — and most engineers are not optimizing for it.

What If You Could Become a Value-Focused Software Engineer?

Value-Focused Engineers get:

✓ The best job offers

✓ The most interesting projects

✓ The highest salaries

✓ More clarity and less stress in their day-to-day work

✓ Career progression at the speed and direction they want

This book will show you a proven path to becoming a Value-Focused Software Engineer.

Here's what you'll learn:

Define Value

Understand value as helping people save time and reduce stress—and why code itself should be seen as technical debt.

Value Optimized Decision Making

Learn mental models for prioritization, risk assessment, and evaluating trade-offs systematically.

Communicate with Excellence

Facilitate alignment, become an information hub in your organization and someone people just love working with.

Navigate Organizations

Build alliances, choose your battles wisely, avoid drama, and understand where decisions really get made.

The result? A work life with less stress, more clarity, more intention — for you and everyone around you.

Why Listen to Me?

I've proven that value creation skills matter more than technical breadth

A few highlights:

•CTO at a leading mobile ad network, handling 5B requests/month
•
Built a 5-star Upwork profile with only amazing reviews
•Subject Matter Expert for systems generating $100M+/year in incremental revenue for the pharmaceutical industry

But here's the surprising part

Every role I was hired for knew this upfront:

I had professional experience with just ONE language (TypeScript) and ONE database (MongoDB)

I was never the expert in the latest framework, database or tech.

And yet, I was trusted with a lot of responsibility in every new job.

These outcomes weren't luck. They were the result of understanding value creation, making value-driven decisions and trade-offs, communicating with excellence and knowing how to navigate organizations.

And that's what this book is about.

What's Inside

A complete roadmap to becoming a Value-Focused Software Engineer

Why you should read this book and what you will get from reading it

Intro - The Value Disconnect

Defining Value as a Software Engineer

•Value is about "saving people time and reducing their stress"

•Decision making process optimized for value creation via battle tested mental models and excellent business context

•Create value through excellent communication skills that reduces friction

•You should see code as technical debt

Most Valuable Mental Models for Better Decision Making and Prioritization

•Prioritize in terms of opportunity cost (sense of utility)

•80/20 for deciding when it's good enough and where to focus

•Calibrate decision effort by the cost of being wrong (one-way vs two-way doors)

•Know what you don’t know for better risk assessment, prioritization and debugging

•Systems thinking for better architecture decisions and managing complexity

•Systems thinking: Everything is more complex than it looks

•Systems thinking: The hidden costs of additions to a system

•Systems thinking: Systems take time to adapt and arrive at a new equilibrium

•Systems thinking: Understand the difference between local optimization and global optimization

•Systems thinking: Look for historical context and trends

•Systems thinking: Work in progress tasks adds no value, drive them to completion

•Urgent/important matrix for not letting important things become urgent

•Problem space vs solution space for making sure you fix the right problem

•5 Why's to find the root cause

•How to prioritize tasks within a given scope of work

•Probabilistic thinking as a tool for clear thinking

Become an Excellent Communicator

•Prefer written async communication: improves your reasoning, creates documentation and turns you into an information hub inside the organization

•Anticipate possible responses and scenarios so you minimize the number of back and forth

•Communicate efficiently by compacting the most amount of relevant information in the least amount of words

•Know your audience and fine tune your message to what's relevant and important to them

•When in doubt, over communicate to prevent possible misalignments

•In an opinionated discussion, understand the other point of view better than yours

•Respect people time by keeping everyone posted about your progress and challenges

•Make One-on-ones valuable by having a clear agenda focused on creating alignment between the short and long term goals for you, your manager and the organization

Mental models for Navigating People & Organizations

•Assume ignorance or incompetence before bad faith to prevent drama at work (and life)

•Maintain the "We prism" for as long as possible to encourage collaboration

•Choose your battles and "disagree and commit" to prevent stress and burn out

•Help others and build your own network of value focused people inside your company to get things done and improve joy at work

•Understand your org structure and where decisions are being made

•Do everything that's necessary to get you and your team unblocked being respectful and without being annoying

Bonus Chapter: Value for you - Increasing your efficiency, effectiveness and converting the Value you create into Future Opportunities

•Increasing efficiency/productivity

•Increasing effectiveness by using checklists to maintain quality of your work

•Honing your skills as a developer: focus on fundamentals rather than on technologies/stacks

•Maximizing your future opportunities: Improve your positioning by creating content online

•Maximizing your future opportunities: Focus on the value you created in the past in your resume and interviews

•Maximizing your future opportunities: Create value ahead of time if possible

Conclusion and Thanks

Appendix: Toolbox

Needle-mover resources in my path as a Software Engineer

Ready to Become a Value-Focused Engineer?

Stop optimizing for the wrong objectives. Start creating the value that will accelerate your career and make your work life more enjoyable.

•Battle-tested mental models

•Real-world examples

•Actionable frameworks

Your Code is Not the Most Important Thing in the World

A book for software developers working on product teams