Your Code is Not the Most Important Thing in the World

a short book on value creation, decision making, communication and navigating organizations for software engineers working on product teams

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Here's what you'll learn

Properly Define What Really Creates 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.

This book is for you if:

• You're a software engineer with 2+ years of experience working in product-focused teams (SaaS, fintech, marketplaces, etc.) at mid-sized companies (50-500 people)
• You want to feel more confident making the really hard calls related to architecture trade-offs, when to test (and how much), feature scoping, prioritization regarding what and how to build projects
• You believe good communication at work is important and you want to be known as an excellent communicator (the person teammates trust, rely on, and actually enjoy working with)
• You are a bit worried AI might take your job and you want to make sure you're focusing your limited self-improvement time on knowledge that is more durable than specific technologies or databases
• You sometimes feel impostor syndrome creeping in (maybe from lack of formal CS background or perceived gaps in technical experience) and you're looking for a path to feel good and confident with being a generalist

This is NOT for you if:

• You're brand new to programming (I use a lot of real examples that happened with me while working at different companies and that you won't be able to relate if you never shipped working software as part of a bigger team)
• You've never paid attention to soft-skills because you think it's a waste of time (this book is 100% soft-skills applied to the software engineer profession)
• You're looking for a quick hack book to increase your salary and get promoted (I talk about it in the book, but getting those things will come as a result of you putting real work into it)

Why Listen to Me?

•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
•
Book manuscript is already providing real value to early readers

What's Inside

Table of contents and sample sections

Why, What, Who, How

← READ SAMPLE CHAPTER

•Why read this book

•What this book is, what it isn't and who is it for

•Why I’m a relevant source of advice

•How this book works

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 ← READ SAMPLE SECTION

•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

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Your Code is Not the Most Important Thing in the World

A book for software engineers working on product teams

Curious how this book is being built? See the behind-the-scenes process