Lifehacks: insights from people who build products

The product owner responsibilities a founder takes on when hiring a development team: what the Scrum Guide makes the product owner accountable for, seven responsibilities in practice, what you can delegate and what you can’t, how much of your week it takes, and how to put numbers on the business case before the build.

Seven ways to grow a small or mid-sized business in 2026: a goal with a number, keeping the customers you have, selling more to them, taking back hours with automation, a new sales channel, partners and a steady look at competitors, plus how to check a piece of software pays for itself before you build it.

How to estimate software development cost: five steps, the formula behind every quote and a free estimate tool. A focused MVP with us costs $5,000-15,000.

Part 4 of our customer development guide: how to run a problem interview before you build, with a 40-minute script, a seven-question checklist, the questions that ruin an interview and a simple way to score pain.

Swimlane sizing is a silent, relative way to size a whole backlog fast: cards go into unlabeled lanes from small to large, and numbers come only at the end. The full process, how fast it is, how it compares with planning poker, what it can’t tell you, and how to turn a sized backlog into a budget.

A connected product has three parts that move at different speeds: device, cloud and app. The life cycle from prototype to end of support, the challenge at each stage, and the EU security and reporting rules that now set deadlines for the whole team.

Part 5 of our customer development guide: how a solution interview differs from a problem interview, what to show in 2026, a three-part script, the questions to ask and how many real commitments you need before you build.

Story points explained for 2026: what they measure, three ways to estimate them, story points vs hours, velocity in Jira, what AI estimates change, and how we turn the same user stories into a budget.

How much US startups raise at seed, Series A, B and C in 2026, at what valuations, how long the gap between rounds has become, and a plain method to size your own round from what the product costs to build.

Software development as a service (SDaaS) means an outside company builds and maintains your software, and you pay for the work instead of hiring engineers. Four ways to buy it, 2026 prices, and a team that starts in 3-5 days.

Replacing a development team isn’t always the fix. Check that the team is the problem, choose how much of it to replace, get the code checked by someone who isn’t selling you the rebuild, then decide fix or rebuild part by part. A five-step plan with five takeovers we did.

Nine ways to cut software development costs without cutting quality, with project examples and regional prices from our MVP Price Index, plus four cuts that look cheap and cost more later.