That’s how much one click was worth to the people selling things on the internet.

Most of us who build tools for people at work don’t think about clicks that way. We think about how the screen looks, and the people paying for our choices one click at a time are usually too polite to send us the bill.

A clean screen is always the better design.

I believe that one more than most people. My taste today is usually minimal, down to owning three or four pairs of shoes, so when a control isn’t used often my instinct is to tuck it away and keep the page calm.

So when we shipped new filters on the orders table in the product I work on, with a more compact layout people can customize, the checkboxes to select orders were hidden behind a Select button. You click once to see them, and then you pick.

On a screen someone uses all day, every control I hide is a click they pay for.

Twelve minutes

I posted the release in our Slack team channel at 2:32. At 2:44, a director who works in that table all day asked if the checkboxes could just be there by default, because the old view always had select all on screen and ours added one click. The message came with an apology and an offer to let me tell him to kick rocks.

That part stayed with me. The person who’d pay for that click every time felt he had to apologize for mentioning it.

My first idea was a compromise: turn the Select button into Select All, so one click selects everything and you uncheck what you don’t want. He didn’t want the button at all. He wanted the checkboxes to always be there, the way they already are in another table in the same product. Our product owner agreed we had some horizontal space, and at 2:55 he said he’d open a ticket.

Twenty-three minutes from release to ticket.

I wrote back that I actually prefer the opposite, but since they’re the heavy users, it made sense to keep it one click away. Then our product owner said it better than I could: our users lean very maximalist, and “they want all of the buttons everywhere”. My answer was that my preference isn’t always what’s best for the company, and that this felt like building software for the New York Stock Exchange.

I’ve started calling this the click tax: whoever needs a hidden control pays a click for it, and the ones who need it most are the people who live in that screen.

So build whatever the heavy users ask for.

No. Two people in a Slack thread aren’t all of our users, even when they’re the ones closest to them. What tipped it wasn’t the thread, but it was who was in it: the person who hears from the accounts all day, asking for the click back twelve minutes after release, before any customer had the chance. When the complaint arrives faster than the customers, the question is already answered.

Amazon got a patent for saving people one click. The person who answers for our customers all day apologized for asking for theirs.

One commit a week. Pass it on.

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What AI did, what I did

Claude turned the notes I wrote after that thread into a first draft, found the Amazon patent and checked the dates against the sources.

It couldn’t tell me whether my taste should lose this one. That came from twelve minutes of Slack.

What I checked myself: the timestamps and who said what, straight from the thread. Every minute in this post is the real one.

From my week

I published the story of my first computer this week: a Pentium III that a nonprofit in my hometown lent to families who couldn’t buy one, and the paper I signed promising to give it back. Writing it in English, for people who weren’t there, felt stranger than I expected.

Keep committing,
Eder

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

There’s no evidence Henry Ford ever said that. The line only gets tied to him decades after he died.

His real story is the opposite. Ford launched the Model T in 1908 and kept it largely unchanged for nearly 19 years. Meanwhile, General Motors rolled out a new model every year, in colors other than black. By early 1927, Chevrolet was outselling Ford. That May, Ford shut down its plants for six months to replace the Model T.

Ford didn’t lose because he ignored what people said, but because he ignored what they did.

That’s the core of the book The Mom Test, by Rob Fitzpatrick. People lie about the future to be nice. So you don’t ask “would you use this?”. You ask about the past: the last time it happened, what they did, what it cost them.

Talking to users is the product manager’s job

Plenty of engineers think so. Users are product’s problem. Ours is the ticket.

But a ticket is a user’s problem secondhand, already filtered. Building only from tickets is asking “would you use this?” through a middleman.

The usual way engineers try to grow into product has the same flaw. Ask for the title and wait. Post a demo and count the reactions. Both are opinions about the future, and Fitzpatrick has a name for that kind of feedback: compliments.

Compliments feel like progress. And commitments are progress.

Receipts, not requests

I’ve been at Automatiq since 2022, working remotely from Brazil on a team that builds automation for ticket resellers. I started on the frontend, and I’m still there. But more and more of my work has moved toward product: analytics, dashboards, web vitals, NPS surveys, and the people who actually use what we build.

So I stopped collecting opinions about my career and started collecting evidence:

• We put real user monitoring on every page of our product, so we see where people actually wait instead of guessing.

• We track NPS, so what users feel is a number I can point to, not a guess.

• Before we migrated our legacy screens, I audited all of them, so the plan started from what exists.

• We talk to users directly whenever we can. I don’t always love it, but it’s one of the parts of the job I value most.

None of it came with a new title. All of it is product engineering.

I call it receipts over requests: don’t ask for the job, show you’ve been doing it.

The catch is: receipts nobody sees are a diary. They have to land where decisions happen: a short doc, a five-minute demo, a Slack thread, a planning meeting, a roadmap review. And it's usually slow. AI can build the dashboard in an afternoon, but it can't make users show up any faster.

Ford didn't need anyone to tell him what people wanted. The answer was parked on his own street, with a Chevrolet badge on it. He just looked too late.

The title is always the last thing to arrive.

What AI did, what I did

Writing has always been my thing, and I don’t want to lose that. My rule is simple: I write and Claude reviews. This one bent the rule.

Claude found the Ford story, shaped the post into STORY, the writing framework I use now, and dropped it into my Notion content queue. It also got the most important line wrong: it wrote that Ford “never said” it, when the honest version is that there’s no evidence he did. Checking that, and deciding what I could actually sign, was mine.

From my week

I'm reading The Mom Test. This whole post started on one of its pages.

Keep committing,
Eder

15 projects, one afternoon, one score sheet

ShellHacks, the biggest hackathon in Florida, had 294 projects and 62 judges. Each team got three minutes to demo and two minutes of questions. Then each judge scored the project from 1 to 5 on completion, originality, learning, design, and technical depth. I logged every table I judged: the stack, the AI tools, the scores, the soft skills, the presentation.

Ten of my fifteen teams used Claude. Nine used Gemini for the APIs. Eight used Codex. After the fifth table, the tool column stopped telling me anything, because the scores that moved were somewhere else. Design had my lowest average, 3.47, and my four highest-scored projects all got a 4 or 5 on it. One team lost their internet and showed screenshots instead of a live demo. The idea was good, and it still finished last on my sheet.

Judges score how fast they understand you

Five minutes per team sounds like plenty until you’re on Table 11. At that point you are not evaluating ideas anymore; you are evaluating what you can verify before the timer runs out.

A live demo is the fastest proof that something works. A clear screen is the fastest proof that the team knows what matters. That’s why completion and design did most of the sorting on my sheet, even though the rubric weighs all five dimensions the same.

When building gets cheap, being understood gets expensive.

I see the same thing outside hackathons: in a pull request someone reviews between meetings, or a dashboard someone opens for ten seconds before making a decision.

One limit: these are fifteen projects scored by one judge, me. It’s a floor report, not a study. The project I scored highest, a 4.6 out of 5, did win a sponsor prize from a different panel, so at least my sheet wasn’t alone.

What AI did, what I did

Between tables I talked to Grok Bot, and it turned my voice notes into a table with stack, tools, scores and averages. It logged one table number wrong and marked a model as unknown when the team didn’t say which one. It could count which tools showed up. It couldn’t tell me which demo was honest or which screen made sense. That part was mine, one table at a time.

The model is free. Being understood never was, though.

Keep committing,
Eder

I opened a doc. Copied. Pasted into 15Five. 15 minutes, done.

Not because I’m more organized. I mean, I am. But that’s not the point. I just stopped trusting my memory years ago.

I've been doing this since 2021. Every year since then, promoted. Every single one. Not saying this guarantees anything. But something’s working. I did it wrong at first, though. I only tracked numbers. PRs merged, tickets closed, bugs fixed. Thought volume meant value. It doesn’t. Managers don’t care that you closed 42 tickets. They care about money. Did you make money or save money? That’s the whole game. Everything else is noise. And I agree with that.

So now my Notion doc looks like this:

• TL;DR at the top. Semester highlights, impact only.

• Then Projects split into Features and Fixes. Date, what changed, link to PR.

• I also track Courses, Books, and stuff I did outside work, like blog posts.

• And Investments in my own growth (actual dollars, because I take this seriously).

10 minutes a week. Feels pointless in the moment. Then January comes and everyone’s panicking, and you’re just... done.

The real shift was how I write the summaries.

I used to write “shipped invoicing feature.” Now I write “shipped invoicing automation that cut 3 hours of manual work per week from ops.”

First one is a task. Second one is dollars. Dollars get remembered in budget meetings.

If you can’t connect what you did to revenue or savings, keep asking why it mattered until you hit money. Usually takes two or three whys

In 2023, I was diagnosed with Asperger’s. Lot of things made sense after that.

I like systems. Like routine. Like doing the same thing every week the same way. Most people find that tedious. My brain finds it necessary.

I used to think this was a limitation. Now I see it differently. The thing that makes me “too rigid” is the same thing that means I never show up to a review empty-handed.

Three phases so far:

1. 2021 to 2024, manual. One doc per semester, wrote everything by hand.

2. 2024 to 2026, Google Sheets. Added charts, consolidated years.

3. Now, 2026 forward, AI-assisted. Exploring agents that document through conversation. Goal is to make this invisible.

Also started pulling tasks from company's OKRs directly. So I’m not just doing work. I’m doing work leadership already said matters. Then documenting that I did it.

10 minutes a week sounds like overhead.

Then January comes. Everyone’s reconstructing their year from memory. You open a doc, and you’re done.

Some people call that discipline. It’s not. It’s just writing things down because you won’t remember. Trust me.

Keep committing,
Eder