The Qualified Answer

Send a text message to the show! You measure your systems with averages, your board deck is full of "AI," and you barely open your IDE anymore. Three things worth a second look — because each one is a signal, and the signal matters more than the noise. In this solo episode, Simon makes the case for measuring at the tail instead of the mean (and why the 99th percentile is usually where th...

Send a text message to the show! For most of three decades, "good code" had a definition. Then ChatGPT launched, and within months the canonical principles of software engineering — KISS, DRY, YAGNI, the lot — collapsed in value almost overnight. Simon Raik-Allen, CTO at Mindset Health and a former Monash AI researcher who spent a decade building simulators to teach machines how to code,...

Send a text message to the show! You can run a perfect dashboard and still be making bad calls. The numbers say everything's fine - but you haven't spoken to anyone close to the work in weeks. In this solo episode, Simon unpacks the three people-shaped foundations of good leadership decisions: how you get people to care when there's no ROI line for it, why culture has to be lived ra...

Send a text message to the show! What if the whole business went fast together? You've spent two years getting product and engineering shipping multiple times a day. Releases are fast and of high quality. Then you notice the company isn't actually moving any faster. Herry Wiputra spent seven and a half years at hipages tackling that exact problem. After accelerating product and engineeri...

Send a text message to the show! You wired up a service, did the mental arithmetic, moved on. Then the bill arrived and it wasn't $20, $50, or even $100. It was thousands. In this solo episode, Simon Elisha walks through his own recent bill shock and what it forced him to confront: the difference between intending to monitor a system and actually building the feedback loop that does it for yo...

Send a text message to the show! Guest: David Broeren                                                                                                                                                                                   In 2011, David walked into his first delivery manager role and inherited a problem with no easy exit. A major Australian bank's business banking platform had been...

Send a text message to the show! Imagine spending millions of dollars and months of preparation on a revolutionary e-commerce platform, only to launch to absolute crickets. In the inaugural episode of The Qualified Answer , host Simon Elisha takes us back to the dot-com boom to dissect a spectacular B2B reverse auction failure—and explains why the hard lessons learned then are repeating themselves...

Send a text message to the show! Every honest answer in technology comes with conditions. The Qualified Answer is a decisions podcast for senior technology leaders - the ones who own the call, and the ones who execute it. Each episode is either a decision case - a senior leader walks you through one real call they had to make, what they chose, what they traded away, and what they wish they'd...