Erica Cuttitta

I consistently hear from my contacts in the medical field that they *hate* the EMR/EHR systems they are forced to use. "I wish it did this..." or "why doesn't it do that..." or "why is it so hard to do this..." and so on and so on. Especially when it comes to charting. Nurses, doctors, etc spend a tremendous amount of time charting on patients... not just because they *should* or because accurate notes and observations are critical to patient care, but because the sad reality is they need to cover their butts for legal reasons, state audits, etc. However, I've witnessed first-hand the chaotic high-stress nature of what nursing staff have to deal with on the daily and *time* is often a problem. I've seen these people spend *hours* at the end of their shift charting or even charting after hours, off-the-clock, etc just to try and catch up. After all, their licenses are on the line. A lot of these systems are so monolithic, complex, and cumbersome... it's amazing anyone gets anything done at all. As an engineer, my gut reaction was: I can build something better. My wife practically begged me: "PLEASE build something better. I can help. I can tell you everything that sucks about all these systems." But then I was smacked with reality: Most of these companies and institutions spend a ton of time and money on the systems they have in place and are typically reluctant to pry themselves away from these systems. It's too hard. Too expensive. Too time consuming. Luckily, there are new add-on systems to simplify these kinds of things, but I still feel like building a more modular, simpler system with stellar integration support and data import/export facilities, and a cleaner easier UI and voice dictation support would be ideal. But I'm also one man with limited time and resources. I often wonder how much innovation has been stifled under these same circumstances. I'm certain the list is long. And that is a shame.

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One common pain point in software development? Scope creep. Projects start with a clear vision, but as new ideas and requirements come up, it’s easy for scope to expand—and timelines to stretch. While some flexibility is essential, uncontrolled scope creep can lead to budget issues, delays, and frustration across teams. The key is managing expectations early and often. Setting clear boundaries, revisiting priorities regularly, and creating checkpoints for any changes help keep things on track without losing momentum. It’s all about balancing ambition with practicality. How do you handle scope creep in your projects? #SoftwareDevelopment #ScopeCreep #ProjectManagement #TechStrategy #TeamCollaboration #Agile

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Remote work nails the perks, but it still can’t quite match the magic of in-person collaboration. Especially for those of us who thrive on the connective energy of a team, the daily digital-only interactions don’t quite capture that same creative spark. There’s a unique kind of collaboration that comes from being in a room together, sharing ideas in real-time, and building off each other’s energy. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to join a few folks from my team for an in-person strategy workshop in Utah. And what a difference it made! The workshop wasn’t just productive; it was invigorating. Collaborating face-to-face, we broke down complex challenges, mapped out ambitious goals, and had the real-time brainstorms that are so critical in setting a strong course forward. I came away from the day reminded of how important it is to create these in-person moments whenever we can, even within a remote-first environment. Yes, remote work brings flexibility, and that’s something I love, but nothing replaces the power of human connection. Excited to keep the momentum from yesterday going and bring these ideas to life - whether we’re in the same room or connecting from a distance. Jared Casper | Gary Brown | Richard D. Davis | Michael Storrs | Deric Hughes | Paul Bernard

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Stop calling it technical debt. We’re not fixing old code - we’re investing in our platform's future. As product leaders, we often struggle to get buy-in for these critical improvements because we're telling the wrong story. Here's what transformed our customer conversations: Instead of talking about refactoring legacy systems, we shared how we're strengthening our foundation to unlock new possibilities. Rather than discussing system complexity, we focused on how our platform investments directly improve reliability and speed. The magic happened when we stopped apologizing for maintenance and started showcasing the long-term vision. Our customers don't care about our code - they care about growing their business, staying competitive, and reducing risks. The key is simple - translate technical challenges into business opportunities. Customers want to hear about outcomes, not operations. #ProductLeadership #TechnicalStrategy #CustomerSuccess #ProductManagement

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These are great thoughts by Dan Goldin. Any tech innovation needs non-technical people as well as the technically literate. I wrote something similar here: https://lnkd.in/eADZCDgY

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Why does estimating suck, you ask? It has little to do with the practices themselves. In nearly every case I've seen, the problem with estimation is the culture that surrounds it. Leaders don't respond to estimates they don't like in a way that encourages honesty. Game devs are terrified of being wrong (and the leaders that don't respond well) because then they'll be accused of incompetence OR forced to death march to achieve a guesstimate. The practices have been pulled apart, rebuilt, convoluted, and "improved" to the point where half the team doesn't even know what's happening during estimation, OR the estimates have been removed from the team entirely, and now people who will not be doing any of the work and have no local context create every single one of them. The focus is on precise dates. Accuracy is (incorrectly) assumed. Nobody understands confidence intervals. Honesty is explicitly forbidden within the process. And lastly, if anyone tries to point out any of the above, they get their head chopped off by a system that won't tolerate dissent. With that set of preconditions, switching to powers of 2 rather than a modified Fibonacci sequence isn't going to be the game changer you were hoping for. Instead, you should start with the end in mind: If your organization was operating according to the culture you WANT to have, what would estimation look like? How is that different than what you have today? (hint: see above) What is something you can change to move closer to the good state? What's the most impactful, simplest shift that would get the org nearer what you want? Do that stuff. Then keep doing it. Estimation is NOT a disaster everywhere. But it is a disaster most places. Stop tinkering with techniques and agendas, and start looking at the underlying cultural issues. If you do, you'll end up fixing a lot more than estimation. #gameproduction #gamedevelopment #gameindustry #estimation

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Building genuine connections and conversations within the team can sometimes feel like a challenge. One tool I’ve found to be effective in breaking the ice —especially with a team of product managers and developers—is TableTopics. Its a stack of cards that I randomly pull from to spark conversation. Last week, I drew this card from the deck: How do you define success? "Finishing coffee ☕ before it gets cold" was my personal favorite but it’s amazing to see how one simple question can open up new perspectives and bring out shared experiences. Majority of the team responded with happiness and growth being a big part of how they define success, even if its small steps. Moments like this build trust, empathy, and connection within the team—elements that are essential for achieving great things together. What are some of your go-to's for starting meaningful conversations? Evan Maxon Kyle Griffin Aretae Christina Cherry Kevin Hu

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I'm embarrassed. After a few enlightening conversations with mentors at at iHub Innovation Hub of Utah this week, I realized I've been dropping the ball on our beta tester program. It was too long, unstructured, and expectations were unclear for our awesome and patient testers. Basically, it was a half-baked plan that sounded better than it actually worked. The biggest fail of all was that I wasn't asking people to pay for Viddy Studio. This kept us from running into objections and discovering obstacles. It also made it so we didn't even have the ability to get a paying user even if they wanted to pay. So, I created a basic outline of how we doing it going forward and I've provided a screenshot of the outline of our (work in progress) internal Notion page we're using to outline the program. Starting today, all new beta testers will get to use Viddy Studio for free for 7 days and will then be charged $99 monthly. We will be following up bi-weekly and we'll catalog the answers to the questions in the screenshot below and track their answers over time. The main goal is to get us to get better feedback, more feedback, and give them a chance to pay for it if they like it. If they don't like it, we'll accept discovering their true objections as a consolation prize. If you can't tell, this is my first time building out a beta testing program, so if you've got insight on how to improve this, I am all ears! I'll send out another update once some of the data comes in on how well this works.

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Few agencies without a technical lead are able to get by (and none thrive). Relying on contractors can be a double-edged sword: they bring specialized skills but often lack a cohesive vision that aligns technology with your customer’s long-term goals. This disconnect results in software bloat, where unnecessary features and technical debt pile up. The pain is real: without a consistent, forward-thinking approach, your business is at risk of compounding technical debt that will stifle innovation. Don’t let short-term fixes lead to long-term problems. It’s time to rethink how you approach technology, ensuring it supports—not stifles—your growth.

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Thought experiment... delete your roadmap. Stop everything. Now play things out... For the past year or so I have experimented with an activity. I ask teams to imagine that they stop "shipping". Nothing new. No improving existing features. They keep their jobs, and fix major production issues, but otherwise stay idle. When possible, I ask them to refer to some sort of business dashboard or statement. How do these numbers change? They imagine industry press, coffee machine conversations, customer feedback, and board meetings. What happens with the passing months? Could X possibly go unchanged? Would you be surprised if Y doubled? The responses are very interesting. It feels unnatural to imagine doing nothing (even if doing nothing may be the best decision). We're wired to keep ourselves busy and talk ourselves into our grand plans. In some businesses, the impacts of doing nothing are felt quickly. In others, teams find they can go a year or more without real "damage". A competitor gains ground. Cost of acquisition increases. Team members leave for a competitor (or to start their own businesses). It hits home that successful products are a slow burn, the result of many decisions over time. To tackle the exercise, some teams review the past year. How did that work contribute to where the business is today? For new product launches, add-ons, packages, etc. it is easy to say "if we hadn't done this, then X wouldn't have happened." We gravitate to obvious connections, but that is a trap of sorts. The purpose of this exercise is to surface assumptions, and to focus the team on the Opportunity. Yes, it is "not realistic". It takes some practice, but more than practice it takes freedom and safety. Freedom to explore a possible future without judgement. "Non-business" types (if there is such a thing) need to feel free to explore the problem-space. Give it a try! With a big cross-functional group. Folks with more familiarity with “the numbers” should be prepared to teach and guide. Folks with more familiarity with the long-term, slow-burn issues (market share, inertia, product phases, ecosystems, etc.) should do the same.

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Okay, I didn't know the word "Bottleneck Managers", but I have definitely met the kind. The kind that hired contractors to take things off their plate, but then they cannot trust the contractor to do things well, so they keep becoming the bottleneck. More often than not, unfortunately, they end up sabotaging their own project. Rather than dismissing them, why not ask the question of "WHY?" - why do these owners/managers act like that? Answer: TRUST. Representing a contractor, I would lay out clearly to my client, what I call "The Trust Framework". So, before taking first payment for the job, If I see symptoms of distrust, I would ask: --- Do you trust us? Is there anything I can provide or do that would help you trust us 100%? I ask that because there are going to be ups and downs, twists and turns along the way. I know I can get us to destination, I am committing to that. The destination is what I wholeheartedly commit to - the route to that destination however, is often filled with surprises. So, do you trust us to get through? If not, let's solve that before we send our first invoice. Because without trust, it's going to be a hard ride for both of us. -- If after this conversation, we end up figuring out that trust doesn't exist - here are some ways to build that trust: a) A demo low-stakes project first / A test of sorts. b) A face-to-face lunch/meeting c) Money Back guarantees (when possible) d) Open to routine Objective Audits (in tech projects that would be Objective Code and Performance Metrics) e) And my favourite, most important way to invoke trust is ditching time sheets. Going away from charging for time, and rather charging for value/output. ( Read more on how to do that with Jonathan Stark) Building trust is often an exercise of aligning incentives with the desired output.

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Oh MAN. I have so many reactions to this @JuliaAngwin op-ed. She really could not have hit my personal bull's eye harder. It's quite good, please go read it. (also nice to see a shout-out for Porsche's Roads app--powered by Mapbox!) You'll be unsurprised to hear me agree that OpenStreetMap is one of the world's essential collaborative data projects and deserves to be recognized for it. I'm in favor of more funding, but it's worth noting that its limited budgets are, to some extent, a conscious choice by the community. But governments could do a better job of releasing their data for and mapping directly in OSM (for example, by mapping road closures in OSM instead of just in a Google-owned proprietary silo--yes, they actually do this). Ms. Angwin's absolutely right that the Google/Waze dominance of the consumer nav app market is nuts. It remains a mystery why regulators didn't pay attention to it at the time. It's great to have learned since that the richest company in history can afford to mount a competing offering for residents of their walled garden. But really: where were competition authorities? Crazy. Regulators are paying more attention to how maps work these days, which is great, if belated. While I agree that there's plenty of room for criticism of app innovation given the space's stagnation, I do feel a need to grudgingly stick up for Google/Waze ETAs. We constantly benchmark our services & competitors' against real-world drives. This is a very hard thing to get perfectly right, but Google's scale/access to data means that in most places they do a good job. While OSM's value can't be overstated, it is worth mentioning that it probably can't meet consumer nav expectations solely on the basis of volunteer mapping. Can OSM data get you from point A to point B? Definitely. But the volunteer mappers who put in data about how many lanes there are, where turn restrictions exist, and tons of other hard-to-map and hard-to-see metadata are few & far between. Most of that work is done by paid mappers working for companies. I'd like to see governments working to get it into OSM, too. But this is a nuance that should be acknowledged if we want more of our navigation experiences to be powered by open data. High-quality nav, to say nothing of ADAS, requires the kind of mapping that, historically, volunteer mappers haven't done for fun. (cont'd in comments) https://lnkd.in/g9YsUe9z

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A product leader that I'm coaching shared some real progress applying my "count the digits" approach (https://lnkd.in/gd2Zierz) with a varied set of internal stakeholder... With 200+ requests/demands from assorted GTM groups, they did some quick spreadsheet math for order-of-magnitude revenue, strategic fit, and grouping-by-theme. That helped sort the 5-digit opportunities ($10k's) from the 7-digit opportunities ($1M's) so that the group could put real thought and energy into the top 20-ish items. One tool of many tools to get us out of the "let's review every backlog item in detail" slog, and spending time where it matters. [NDA, can't reveal company name. But happy to chat about *your* situation.]

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We just had a RIF at Impartner Software. To those of my colleagues who were affected, I'm so sorry. If I haven't reached out to you already, I may not know that you were affected, so please reach out to me. I'm good for any of the items in my list below, as well as resume help if you could use it. For everyone else, resharing one of my previous posts about how you can help those searching for a new job: 1. Like, comment on, and/or reshare any posts they've made about being open to new work. Any of these actions will further the reach of their initial post, as your network will now see those, too. 2. Endorse their skills. On the skill section of their profile, click the endorse button for any skills you can personally attest to. This lets people looking at their profile see not only that this person claims to have the skill, but that others will vouch for them having that skill as well. 3. Write them a recommendation. For anyone you worked closely with, it's easy to write up a recommendation that they can accept and display on their profile page. LinkedIn recommendations aren't expected to be long...usually just a few lines/paragraph long....so you can do this in just a few minutes. Do this by going to their profile and selecting either More > Recommend from the top of the screen or by selecting Recommend [Name] directly from the Recommendations section at the bottom. 4. Let people leverage your network. With getting a new job, it's often about who you know. LinkedIn makes it easy for people applying to a new job to find out who they know that already works at that employer, or who used to work there, or who knows someone who works there, etc. Let your network know that you are willing to make introductions if there is someone they want to connect to--and then of course, follow through, if they do make that request. 5. Connect to all the people you know. This one is a bit indirect and benefits you too, but by connecting to all the people you know on LinkedIn, this helps you in later job searches, but also helps your laid-off coworkers now in knowing who you might be able to help connect them to. 6. Pass on their information to recruiters. If a recruiter reaches out to you about a position you're not interested in, but one of your former coworkers might be, respond and redirect them to that person. What did I miss? Add your thoughts, comments, or other suggestions in the comments. #jobsearch #layoffs #techjobs #linkedin

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One of the things that I've come to strongly value in my time at Roundtrip is our leadership's recognition of the need to balance work and family obligations, and trust that I'll get that balance right. RTO mandates come with hard costs - not being home when the school bus drops off means that I'd have to sign up for an after-school program. My local YMCA is likely the most cost-effective option, at $138 a week. Add to that the 10 weeks during the summer where we'd need full-day care at $250 a week, and we're looking at $7500 a year. My guess is that my numbers here are at the low end as well - for those of us who have kids that aren't school age yet, these numbers likely double or more. Between that, commuting expenses, and the time spent going back and forth to an office, it's hard not to look at RTO as anything other than a five-figure pay cut.

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This made me chuckle. And I’m super fortunate that my Dev partners are active participants in the feature design and definition, so in my experience this really applies to the entire team, not just the Dev team. We’ve all underestimated the complexity of features, but this is why a good UX/UI team is so helpful! That research is invaluable! Some things we’ve done to get feedback: - monitor those logs…daily! - watch for drop-offs at unexpected points of the flow - solid research going into the feature - prototyping!! - A/B testing - exit surveys What else do you do to gather feedback? #digital #productmanagement #product #productleadership #UX #UI

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Ticket velocity isn't the *only* measure of an engineering team's effectiveness. At a high level, the best engineering organizations can predictably deliver against the priorities set forth by the business. That involves proper monitoring (through metrics) and coaching by effective managers. Here's a few non-velocity metrics I use to measure my organization: - Tenure of the team. - Platform uptime. - Number of critical issues in the last 8wks. - Automated code coverage percentages. - *Employee* vs customer detected bugs. - Number of requirements missed during project planning. Read more about my leadership style here: https://lnkd.in/geP2m7DJ #metrics #engineeringeffectiveness #team #leadership #software #tech #startup #management #dora #space #agile #projectmanagement #podcast

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Here’s a data visualisation which is impressive

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I’m honored to kick off this series with none other than Barry Jones a fractional CTO with 22+ years of experience, to tackle a topic that so many teams struggle with: Why software estimation is broken. Episode: https://lnkd.in/gF5H29Sb In this episode, Barry breaks down: Why story points often do more harm than good The confusion and misalignment they create between teams and stakeholders A smarter way to approach estimation by focusing on task breakdowns and measuring queues instead. If you’re a CTO, developer, or product manager, you’ll benefit from Barry’s practical tips for improving your development process and avoiding the common pitfalls of traditional estimation methods. Check it out and let me know your thoughts!

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