My learnings about building products from last year trip to the USA.
Done > perfect
It’s better to make something and ship it than try to make it perfect.
Everything Should Be Made as Simple as Possible, But Not Simpler
Albert Einstain
Learnings from:
Facebook
Piazza
Developer engagement is very important for success
If you think about great product development process you have to engage your developers to think about your product. Some ideas:
– developers should care about customer development
– dogfooding
Learnings from:
Facebook
Quizlet
ClassDojo
Data team is important
When you are thinking about great product development process you have to be data driven or data informed.
Learnings from:
Facebook
Yammer
Remind
BrightBytes
Celebrate learnings (metrics) not shipping
It’s very important to ship a product, but more important are the effects of it.
Learnings from:
Yammer
Separate small and big changes
It’s really easy to make only small improvements or build new features. The hardest part is to remove features from your product. You have to be aware of it. The one idea is to make a review of features and remove unused ones. Idea: 15-20 small changes and 1 big change per quarter. If you build 3 new features you should remove 3 old ones.
Learnings from:
BrightBytes
No DESIGNATED UX PERSON & centralized design
In most companies UX role is distributed to the team: PO, UI designer, developers.
Viral is crucial for USA market
If you are thinking about growth in the USA you have to implement some viral features.
Learnings from:
Yammer
Remind
3 stages of building teams
When you are building new technology or new platform you shouldn’t start from a feature team. You can make a component team. (first stage). Later you can divide the team and move some developers from this component to feature teams (2nd stage) and the third stage is to minimize the core team for this component.
First stage:
separate instance of the team
Second stage:
divide the team, keeping core team quite big
Third team:
minimize core team