There’s a long-standing joke in civilian IT that any project sooner or later turns into a struggle with legacy code, endless approvals, and a calendar filled with sonnets and status meetings. Large companies spend years building processes that are supposed to make development predictable, but often slow it down so much that months pass from the appearance of an idea to its implementation. Ukrainian miltech today lives in a different reality. When a product is tested not in a focus group, but in real combat conditions, and a request from the military can come in the evening with a requirement to receive a solution the next day, the usual corporate rules begin to work differently. That is why defense technology companies are gradually forming their own development culture — faster, tougher, and much less tolerant of processes for the sake of processes. dev.ua spoke with representatives of SKIFTECH, Himera, BlueBird, DevDroid, WIY LLC, The Fourth Law, and Odd Systems to understand how modern defense tech teams actually work, whether they need Scrum and PM, how they use AI, and why combining hardware and software remains one of the industry’s most difficult engineering challenges.