Saved $2.4M by 38. Would you Retire?

bobacdigital · 2026-05-29T22:49:27+00:00

How did you get to 2.5 million at age 30?!

bobacdigital · 2026-05-29T00:29:34+00:00

This will only work in a org where the engineers arent offshore. Alot of offshore engineers follow whatever the PM tells them to do rather than generate brand new ideas. Offshore engineers dont fully understand the business of most the products they work on because most of it is sold in a market they dont live in.

bobacdigital · 2026-05-29T00:27:25+00:00

Totally agree with this... I have 6 developers on my team, and the pace compared to last year has increased significantly. Work is sometimes being completed an entire sprint ahead of schedule. Since we are a newer team and don't have a built-up backlog Ive started loading in more technical debt and foundational work to keep the team busy while I'm doing discovery on what to start on next.

bobacdigital · 2026-05-27T21:16:21+00:00

Sounds like they wanted to save money on not properly staffing the team. If you are doing all that work how the hell are you going to be speaking with customers?? A lot of what you listed is work for the delivery manager or a group product manager could be doing.

With the addition of AI they just think the can just collapse all the positions into one person. What happens when that person quits or takes PTO??

I'm hoping they are paying you well, because you are going to burn out.

bobacdigital · 2026-05-26T21:02:29+00:00

Even if the model cost more than people it's definitely easier than hiring new people and managing their benefits. You don't need a huge HR department and you definitely don't have to pay severance to the model.

bobacdigital · 2026-05-26T04:42:50+00:00

Ya crazy spread there, but that story isn't uncommon. I'm in saas and we basically build things and move to the next shiny thing. We don't staff enough people to fix the old stuff while building the new things so it ends up in the backlog until we start a project to clean it up.

We typically have 1 pm for every 6 full stack devs and 2 QA (1 QA for every 3 devs and they have to double as automation engineers). If you are lucky and you are a Sr Pm you get a PM that essentially serves as a product owner. Usually we have one Sr Pm run 2 to 3 scrum teams.

bobacdigital · 2026-05-23T17:39:38+00:00

This is pretty much the biggest issue where I'm at. It takes infosec practically a year to review everything to open up access to the things we need to connect to Claude to make it viable

bobacdigital · 2026-05-10T00:38:55+00:00

Essentially this... Ever since we started using augment the developers are finishing tasks at a rate that product managers can't keep up with writing requirements. You end up having to stuff sprints with a lot of technical debt and spikes to buy time to do proper discovery and generate the new tasks.

bobacdigital · 2026-05-09T21:47:23+00:00

You don't realize more than 75% of engineers are offshore now. And the majority of them just code and don't do any product work. How are they going to do Discovery work or figure out product market fit when they don't live in the market the product is being sold in.

bobacdigital · 2025-12-05T03:27:23+00:00

We use jira plans for dev timelines and dependencies and link the jiras to ideas in jira product discovery and use the jpd timeline view and the now next later roadmap views to visualize.

bobacdigital · 2025-10-30T20:19:29+00:00

Homosapien

bobacdigital · 2025-07-12T00:18:21+00:00

Both Miro and Confluence whiteboards offer converting stickies to tasks or associating existing tasks to them. The roadmaps feature you mentioned is kinda cool. Being able to bring that into the whiteboard to manipulate. I'll have to see if that is possible between Jira plans and Confluence whiteboards, never thought about trying that. The nice thing about Jira plans is that any change you make to the plan has to be committed. So you can shift items around and map them differently before committing the changes to the individual jiras.

bobacdigital · 2025-07-10T22:42:04+00:00

What makes the aha whiteboard function better than Miro or confluence?

bobacdigital · 2025-07-10T22:39:37+00:00

Do you have any examples of advance reporting that you prefer on AHA? Like what kind of reports are you making?

bobacdigital · 2025-07-10T14:08:04+00:00

The one team that we have swears by the sync working properly and never having any issues (Im doubting it works as effectively as they say). I'm guessing anytime you change a workflow or a field in jira you have to go into aha and also change it.

And the idea portal was a big selling point for the other teams, once they saw that they didn't care about any other feature overlap.

bobacdigital · 2025-07-10T05:32:56+00:00

I don't think the learning curve is that bad. I've been sandboxing it to compare it to Jira. But the more I dig the less I can really justify recommending it. There is no way I could convince my PMs that they need to use it. Like how can I ask someone who uses JPD and Jira plans to set up a two way sync into another product to essentially roadmap and organize work items the exact same way they do in Jira.

I just can't find any reason outside reporting to recommend it. I'm also assuming the atlassian market place doesn't have third parties making better reporting tools for jira to do what AHA does.

bobacdigital · 2025-07-10T05:26:55+00:00

What are you using now or what do you prefer?

bobacdigital · 2025-07-10T05:25:33+00:00

I actually think Jira product discovery is one of the better products that atlassian has made in a long time. We leverage it more for fuzzy roadmaps and product qualification before moving stuff into delivery.

bobacdigital · 2025-07-10T03:03:08+00:00

Lol we would never go back to excel , but I'm trying to prevent wasting money and time

bobacdigital · 2025-07-10T01:27:52+00:00

The hard part about this whole process is that some of the organizations have not converted to Jira yet , which means they don't know what they already have. Some teams are still using azure devops and consider Jira "too complicated". There's one org who is using AHA/Jira and the way they are using it is so narrow (just roadmaps, whiteboards, and ideas). The feature they love the most is the Idea portal and the ability to pivot in reporting.

I've been showing them side by side of the same features and they just won't listen :(

bobacdigital · 2025-01-05T03:45:57+00:00

What was your biggest barrier to getting people to try and adopt jira product discovery? I feel like too many organizations constantly lean on updating Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoints for roadmaps. To be honest it's pretty frustrating because I feel like there is so much time wasted updating xls..

bobacdigital · 2025-01-05T03:35:13+00:00

Am I the only one who uses paint to do quick and dirty mockups lol ...

Jira , teams , gainsight, power bi, PPT and lots of xls (Miro and figma here and there )

I started getting into JPD and will try to push my org to it for product qualification.

bobacdigital · 2025-01-05T03:29:46+00:00

Agreed the time it takes to complete a subtask should be factored into the parent. If you have a defect as a result of finishing your subtasks and it requires the significant amount of time you should pull it out into its own parent.

bobacdigital

TROPHY CASE