The TWIMCO notebook

Field notes.

Useful observations from inside the work.
For people building a better way.

385 notes

Editorial engraving of a sunny rooftop garden where a business owner with a tablet stands at the first planted bed, a developer measures the next bed marked with string, and a project lead with a rolled plan points toward the bare beds ahead.

Fixed price or time and materials? Price the uncertainty, not the project.

Ask three development shops for a quote on the same app and you may get a fixed price, an hourly rate and a question back. Each one is a different bet about who carries the unknowns. Here's how to tell which bet suits the work you actually have.

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Editorial engraving of a bright dispatch office beside a garage bay, where a dispatcher moves a card on a large magnet whiteboard, a technician leans in from the garage holding a part, and the owner photographs the board with his phone.

OperationsField note

Before you replace the dispatch whiteboard, write down everything it does.

Magnets for technicians, columns for the day, a red marker for anything urgent. It looks old-fashioned, and the plan is to replace it with scheduling software. Spend a week noticing what that board quietly does first, or the new system will drop it.

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Editorial engraving of a sunny florist's workroom where the owner with an order pad points from a tablet showing a soft shaded band to a nearly empty bucket of tulips, as her assistant holds a bucket of eucalyptus and a driver wheels in fresh flowers.

AI & judgmentField note

A forecast that gives you one number is hiding the useful part.

"Can the AI just tell me how much to order?" It's the question we hear most from owners looking at demand forecasting. Here's roughly how the conversation goes, and why the answer we give is about ranges, sold-out days and who makes the call.

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Editorial engraving of a busy glass-roofed market hall where a potter discreetly hands a regular customer a small card beside an unused payment terminal, while the market manager with a tablet pauses nearby, watching thoughtfully.

CommerceField note

When people go around your marketplace, they're telling you something.

In the third message, a supplier slips in their mobile number. A week later, a regular customer stops booking through you but still seems to be getting the work done. Here's how to read those signs, and why blocking phone numbers rarely fixes what they mean.

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Editorial engraving of a sunlit commuter tram where passengers hold phones of different ages, including an elderly man squinting at an older phone, while a mobile developer holding a pole and a notebook notices it thoughtfully.

Product & engineeringField note

The old version of your app is still on someone's phone.

Fix a bug on a website and everyone has the fix by lunchtime. Fix the same bug in a mobile app and some of your users will still be running the broken version next spring. Three what-ifs show why it pays to decide your update rules early.

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Editorial engraving of a sunny plaza outside a municipal building where a mother and toddler wait on a bench as her phone glows, a man buys coffee from a cart, and inside the open doors a staff member helps an elderly man at a kiosk.

OperationsField note

Let people wait for the counter somewhere other than the lobby.

At eight in the morning the lobby fills, everyone takes a paper ticket, and nobody dares leave in case their number is called. It doesn't have to work like that. Five principles for letting people wait somewhere better, without losing anyone who doesn't carry a smartphone.

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In a sunny stockroom of a small ceramics shop, a woman with reading glasses compares a phone and an open laptop at a tall counter, a young man in an apron runs a pencil down a printed list with one line circled, and an older man tapes a parcel shut while a row of parcels rolls toward the open door and one has slipped onto a side track.

CommerceField note

Some of your apps can edit your checkout.

One shopper on a Shopify keyboard store pressed Checkout and was quietly sent to a copy of the payment page on another site. He noticed. Most people wouldn't. Here's how to check where your own Checkout button really goes.

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Editorial engraving of a skylit apparel sample room where a woman at a laptop holds up a small care label to the light, a colleague measures a sweater sleeve with a tape and another pins a sample to a dress form.

AI in practiceField note

AI translation gets the sentence right and the size wrong.

Translating a whole catalog with AI now takes an afternoon, and most of it will read fine. Trouble hides in a handful of words: a size, a washing temperature, a returns promise, your own product names. Know which ones, and send only those to a person.

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Editorial engraving of a bright apartment parcel room where a courier with a scanner studies a parcel label, a resident coming down the stairs points toward the right door, and a teenager types on her phone on a step.

CommerceField note

Most delivery problems were typed into the checkout.

A parcel comes back marked "insufficient address" because the apartment number never made it past the checkout form. Nobody did anything wrong, exactly. Seven plain rules keep that address true from the moment it's typed to the moment it's delivered.

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Editorial engraving of a sunny apartment-building entrance where a young woman's phone fails to open the main glass door's lock, while a smiling building manager holds an open side door for her and a courier heads toward it.

Product & engineeringField note

Keep the Google button. Just don't make it the only way in.

Proton's "Don't sign in with Google" campaign is aimed at consumers, and it's back in people's feeds. If you own an app, the better question is what happens to a customer whose Google account stops working tomorrow.

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Editorial engraving of a sunlit noodle-restaurant counter where the owner keeps one hand on his own paper sales ledger while holding a tablet of abstract bars away from him, a cook chopping behind him and another restaurant visible across the street.

Buying softwareField note

Ask whose sales data your pricing tool learned from.

A lawsuit filed this month says McDonald's pricing software pooled private sales data from restaurants that are supposed to compete. Whatever the court decides, anyone shopping for pricing software now has a sharper first question to ask.

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CommerceField note

Count the logins that can reach your customers.

On Tuesday, ASOS customers got a push alert from the ASOS app saying ASOS had been hacked. The attackers sent it. They got in through one login to a marketing tool, not the store itself. If you run a store, here's how to find your own version of that login.

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In a bright, skylit loft office with white brick walls, a grey-haired woman in a mustard cardigan pulls the cable from a laptop on a standing desk set apart from the rest, a bearded colleague reads a single printed page, and a young woman at a separate desk works on another laptop beside an opened cardboard box and a cup of tea.

Product & engineeringField note

When a package goes bad, the obvious first move can hurt.

This week a poisoned JavaScript package came with a trap. Revoke the key it stole, and it wipes the computer it's on. If your site or store runs on JavaScript, here's what to sort out now and what to do first next time.

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Editorial engraving of a newly moved boutique with a skylight and moving crates, where the owner hangs a blank sign from a step ladder, a support teammate with a headset types at a crate counter, and a long-time customer holds up a gift card and phone.

Buying softwareField note

The morning after the store moves, customers find what the project didn't test.

Launch night went fine. The new storefront is faster and the team is proud of it. Then the support inbox opens at 8:15 the next morning, and the messages are about passwords, missing store credit and an old newsletter link, none of which were on the launch plan.

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Editorial engraving of a bright meeting nook where an account manager highlights one passage on a long ribbon of printed transcript beside a laptop showing a short summary, as a colleague with a headset leans in to point at it.

AI & judgmentField note

The AI summary dropped the one thing the customer said twice.

"Customer happy, wants to renew, send quote." It reads well, it's mostly true, and it leaves out the condition the whole renewal depends on. Reading one call against its summary, line by line, shows what to ask these tools for and what a person still has to check.

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In a sunny upstairs office, a grey-haired man plugs a small terracotta drive into a fresh laptop while an older laptop sits closed beside it, and a young woman in a denim jacket holds a checklist and glances up at the wall clock, timing the rebuild, with an open wooden box on the table and a colleague on a phone call by the window.

OperationsField note

Rebuild somewhere else once, before you have to.

A Japanese cloud provider just told hundreds of customers their data probably can't be recovered, and that the only way back is a backup they kept themselves. Do you have one? Has anyone ever rebuilt from it?

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Editorial engraving of a bright candle shop back room where a packer assembles gift boxes from three bins, the candle bin nearly empty, as a colleague with a tablet glances at it and raises a hand to pause, while another carries finished boxes.

CommerceField note

A gift set is three promises sold as one.

When the candle sells out on its own, the holiday set that contains it often keeps selling. Bundles look like one product on the storefront and behave like several in the warehouse, and peak season is when that difference gets expensive.

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CommerceField note

Before a limited drop, decide who should end up with it.

Target's overnight Pokémon card drop went sideways again. If you sell anything in short runs, the real question isn't how fast your checkout is. It's who you want holding the box when it's over.

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Editorial engraving of a bright office reception where a retiring man holding a box with a plant hands a laptop and keys to an operations manager with a clipboard, while an IT technician on the staircase carries devices and nods.

OperationsField note

When someone leaves, the risk is in the accounts nobody listed.

Disabling a departing colleague's email takes a minute. Finding the vendor portal they logged into, the report that runs under their name and the subscription they paid for on expenses takes much longer, and it usually happens after something stops working.

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Editorial engraving of a skylit community center lobby where a young father with a baby in a carrier uses a tablet on a stand while a caseworker gestures warmly toward an open doorway to a staffed desk with paper forms.

Product & engineeringField note

A screener that tells people they don't qualify had better be right.

A few questions up front can save an applicant hours and save your staff a pile of applications that were never going to pass. It will also be wrong sometimes, and one kind of wrong is far more expensive than the other because nobody ever sees it.

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A good place to begin.

A familiar problem? Let’s look closer.

Tell us where you want to go. We’ll find the first thing worth changing.

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