Building Software With My Sons
Techzad is a technology studio run by two brothers and their dad. I am the dad. After decades of delivering technology programs inside large institutions, I now spend my days building products with the two people I once taught to ride bicycles. It is the most rewarding professional arrangement I have ever been part of, and occasionally the most humbling.
What changes when the team is family
- Feedback arrives without packaging. In a large organization, honest feedback travels through layers of diplomacy and often arrives too late to help. At our table, if an idea is weak, I hear about it before I finish describing it. It stings for a second and saves us weeks.
- There is no handoff. The person who promised the work is the person doing the work, and everyone’s name is on the door. Accountability is not a process we follow; it is the dinner conversation.
- Experience and novelty argue productively. I bring the scar tissue of enterprise delivery: governance, risk, the long list of ways projects quietly fail. My sons bring fluency in tools that did not exist five years ago. We disagree often, and the product is better each time we do.
What stays the same
Ironically, the fundamentals I relied on inside billion-dollar programs are the same ones that matter in a three-person studio. Understand the problem before proposing the solution. Make commitments you can keep, and communicate early when you cannot. Care about the small details, because the customer always finds them.
The technology changes at a remarkable pace. The craft, in practice, barely changes at all.
The real return
People sometimes ask whether working with family is risky, and I understand the question. My experience has been the opposite. Trust is the most expensive thing to build in any team, and we started with a lifetime of it already banked.
I spent thirty years building systems for organizations. Building them with my sons is better. What matters most was never the software: it is the people you build it with.