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You can run a perfect dashboard and still be making bad calls. The numbers say everything's fine - but you haven't spoken to anyone close to the work in weeks.

In this solo episode, Simon unpacks the three people-shaped foundations of good leadership decisions: how you get people to care when there's no ROI line for it, why culture has to be lived rather than written on a wall, and the discipline of reconciling hard data with real anecdotes. He draws on the leader who taught him culture by example, the case against hot-desking, and the AWS rule that when data and anecdotes disagree, you dive deep.

Because in the end, technology is made of people - and so are the decisions about it.

Hosted by Simon Elisha - former AWS Chief Technologist, 35+ years in enterprise technology.

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What if the whole business went fast together?

You've spent two years getting product and engineering shipping multiple times a day. Releases are fast and of high quality. Then you notice the company isn't actually moving any faster.

Herry Wiputra spent seven and a half years at hipages tackling that exact problem. After accelerating product and engineering, he made a controversial call - break the silos open, restructure around cross-functional teams that own customer flows end-to-end, and put senior leadership members on the hook as direct sponsors of each team. Simon and Herry walk through the decision, the near-mutiny it triggered, the guardrails that kept it from collapsing into chaos, and the two environments where the whole approach is an anti-pattern.

A decision case on cross-functional teams, theory of constraints, and what it actually takes to move end-to-end velocity from a tech conversation to a board-level one.

Guest: Herry Wiputra, Chief Product Officer, hipages

Hosted by Simon Elisha — former AWS Chief Technologist, 35+ years in enterprise technology.

Subscribe to The Qualified Answer newsletter: https://pages.thequalifiedanswer.com/subscribe

Learn the strategies we discussed in this episode - head to https://pages.thequalifiedanswer.com/profile for our full training program.

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You wired up a service, did the mental arithmetic, moved on. Then the bill arrived and it wasn't $20, $50, or even $100. It was thousands.

In this solo episode, Simon Elisha walks through his own recent bill shock and what it forced him to confront: the difference between intending to monitor a system and actually building the feedback loop that does it for you. He works through the architecture of the recovery - budgets and alerts as the missing mechanism, optionality through separation of concerns rather than expensive abstraction, and the better-faster-cheaper trade-off as a forcing function for naming what you actually want.

A meta-model episode for anyone running systems whose true cost they're not seeing.

Hosted by Simon Elisha - former AWS Chief Technologist, 35+ years in enterprise technology.

Subscribe to The Qualified Answer newsletter: https://pages.thequalifiedanswer.com/subscribe

Learn the strategies we discussed in this episode - head to https://pages.thequalifiedanswer.com/profile for our full training program.

Want cool merch? [NULL]Shirt: https://shop.nullshirt.com/