The deadline doom loop - by James Hawkins Here’s how the loop plays out: Phase 1: “We’re gonna make it!” 👍 Phase 2: “Are we gonna make it?” 🤷 Phase 3: “We’re not gonna make it!” 🥵 Phase 4: “We (sort of) made it.” 😵💫 Phase 5: “We’re gonna make it this time!” 🙏 Principles for escaping the doom loop The alternative, an approach that helps us ship faster, relies on a few key principles:...
Building Bluesky: a Distributed Social Network (Real-World Engineering Challenges) Rapid growth. The product went from zero to 5 million users in around 12 months after announcing an invite-only beta. Small team. Bluesky was built with a small team of 3 engineers during the first year, and with 12 software engineers at the time of publication.
The Tyranny of the Marginal User - by Ivan Vendrov How is it possible that software gets worse, not better, over time, despite billions of dollars of R&D and rapid progress in tooling and AI? What evil force, more powerful than Innovation and Progress, is at work here? … I call this force the Tyranny of the Marginal User. … a company with a billion-user product doesn’t actually care about its billion existing users....
How to Change the World: Guy’s Golden Touch “How can I get people to evangelize my product?” The short answer is called “Guy’s Golden Touch.” You might think this means, “Whatever Guy touches turns to gold.” If only this were true. The actual definition is, “Whatever is gold, Guy touches.” “What are the characteristics of a great product?” Think: DICEE Deep . A great product is deep. It doesn’t run out of features and functionality after a few weeks of use....
Understanding the Job (by University of Phoenix ) The jobs-to-be-done framework is a tool for evaluating the circumstances that arise in customers’ lives. (…) they often buy things because they find themselves with a problem that they need to solve. With an understanding of the “job” for which customers find themselves “hiring” a product or service, companies can more accurately develop and market products well-tailored to what customers are already trying to do....
(…) 3 different types of products out there: In the first case, we have something like purchasing food. Immediately that hamburger has a lot of value (you’re hungry right?) but after you eat it, the value is largely gone. In the second case, there are products that deliver the same amount of value to you every day. A newspaper subscription is a great example of this. Every day it shows up at your door and you get the same value from it each time....
“The illusion of choice.”