0-to-1 engineering is full of uncertainty, and teams often confuse motion with progress. This talk is about how senior engineers turn chaos into momentum by building for learning instead of just building for features. I’ll share practical tools for reducing risk, choosing the right first version, and creating clarity without burning out.

Early-stage projects rarely fail because of bad code. They fail because teams build too much before they understand what really matters. In ambiguous environments, engineers often optimize for activity instead of learning, which leads to fragile systems and exhausted teams.

In this talk, I’ll share stories from building products from scratch, including mistakes where we overbuilt and moments where small experiments unlocked clarity. We’ll explore a practical execution loop: turning unclear ideas into testable hypotheses, designing the smallest version that produces real signal, and using that signal to guide the next decision.

Along the way, we’ll cover how to protect engineering time when everything feels urgent, how to avoid over-designing systems too early, and how to make tradeoffs visible so teams can move faster with less regret. Attendees will leave with a concrete playbook for the first phase of a system or product and a new way to think about engineering as a learning engine, not just a delivery machine.