If you’ve been in the trenches of sofware development long enough, then you’ve seen it happen: a team ships beautiful screens, elegant components, and beautiful layouts… yet the project still drags, stalls, or collapses under its own confusion.
Why? Because shipping code is not the job. Understanding the business is.
For example, a project meant to take a month, stretches into 3. Not neccessarily because the team was incompetent. Not because the tech was impossible. But because the team building the product didn’t truly understand the thing they were building.
The designers didn’t understand the business flow.
The developers didn’t ask enough questions.
And the handoff was basically “Here’s the UI. Figure it out.”
You can probably guess how that ends.
You end up having screens without context. APIs built from Figma instead of documentation. Developers coding features that look right but don’t work right for real users. And the slow, painful realization that everything needs to be rethought.
The turning point happens when the team realizes it and decides not to “fix the code,” but to fix the thinking. They challenge assumptions. They questioned flows. The frontend and backend is rewired with the actual business in mind. And suddenly everything clicked.
That’s what 10x developers do.
10x developers don't just ask “What are we building?” They ask:
- “Why does this exist?”
- “Who is this for?”
- “What problem does this actually solve?”
- “What breaks if we ship this the way it is?”
Because 10x developers understands something most devs miss:
Great software isn’t the sum of its features; it’s the expression of a business model.
And if you don’t understand the business, you can’t possibly build the product.
Personally. here are some lesson carved into stone:
1. A UI handoff is not a project handoff.
Designs do not replace business requirements. Ever!
2. If you don’t understand the business, your code will reflect it. Beautiful bugs are still bugs.
3. Documentation is a necesity.
Developers should not be reverse-engineering intent from mockups.
4. Novel problems require research.
If the domain is new or challenging, curiosity isn’t optional, it’s necessary.
At the end of the day, businesses don’t pay for beautiful UIs or API endpoints.
- They pay for clarity.
- They pay for understanding.
- They pay for UX
- They pay for outcomes.
And that’s why I believe the best developers —the 10x ones— don’t just ship code. They ship the business.
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