Topic
product
- Forget estimates, start with appetite
In the latest issue of Building Blocks, I dove into Shape Up and its idea of setting the appetite for a project. Fundamentally, appetite inverts the question we begin with when planning a project. Instead of starting…
- Conversational Interfaces
Julian Lehr wrote an interesting post recently on the problems with conversational interfaces, with the fitting title "The case against conversational interfaces". Here's Julian: We keep telling ourselves that previou…
- Look Back Less
Jason Fried: A better path is to reflect forward, not backwards. Develop a loose theory while working on what's next. Appreciate there's no certainty to be found, and put all your energy into doing better on an upcomi…
- Kirk
Captain Kirk making the case for “muddling through.”
- Whats The Unit Of Impact
Ryan Singer calls out the different flavors of “impact”, and the need to be able to articulate the purpose for doing something:
- Noise Factors vs. Control Factors
With product design, constraints are your friend. Great products emerge from teams able to differentiate between control and noise factors: things they can control vs. things they can't. Many teams are tempted to wast…
- Process vs. Practice
In product development, you can orient a team toward process or practice. Process is about repeatability, scalability, efficiency, execution. Practice is about creativity, inventiveness, searching for solutions. Choos…
- Simplicity on the Other Side of Complexity
“I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” What a great line from Oliver Wendell Holmes. When you think you're…
- 37signals Live Design Review
This is an interesting look into how an effective team works through the weeds of a product design review. I love how it shows the warts and complexities of even seemingly-simple flow of sending a batch email in an em…
- On Validating Product Ideas
Building new things is an expensive, arduous, and long path, so product builders are always hunting for means to validate new ideas. Chasing ghosts is costly and deadly. The "data-driven" culture we now live in discou…
- Chris Spiek and Ryan Singer on Shape Up
Reading Ryan Singer's Shape Up a few years ago was formative (or re-formative, or something) in my thinking on how product development can and should work. After that it was a rabbit hole on jobs-to-be-done, Bob Moest…
- Notes on Operating Well
Sam Gerstenzang wrote an excellent piece a couple weeks ago with operating lessons for growing companies, driven by his learnings from the product team at Stripe. Personally, I've got a decade or so of experience as a…
- Framing and Shape Up
With Shape Up, the process of "shaping" new product takes investment to really understand and communicate an idea. But in the process, this precedes the "pitch", the step where the team reviews a shaped concept and bu…
- Hard Edges, Soft Middle
Have you had that feeling of being several weeks into a project, and you find yourself wandering around, struggling to wrangle the scope back to what you thought it was when you started? It's an easy trap to fall into…
- Product-led Growth Isn't Incompatible with Sales
Product-led growth has been booming in the B2B software universe, becoming the fashionable way to approach go-to-market in SaaS. I'm a believer in the philosophy, as we've seen companies grow to immense scales and val…
- Small Tools for Shaping
Ryan Singer shows his work through the process of shaping a new feature for a product he's building. This is a great detailed example of a process following the Shape Up philosophy. Looking over the virtual shoulder o…
- On Effectiveness vs. Efficiency
"Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things." — Peter Drucker People throw around these two words pretty indiscriminately in business, usually not making a distinction between them. They…
- The Low-Code IKEA Effect
I linked a few days ago to Packy McCormick's piece Excel Never Dies, which went deep on Microsoft Excel, the springboard for a thousand internet businesses over the last 30 years. "Low-code" techniques in software hav…
- Jobs Clubhouse Does
If you're on the internet and haven't been living under a rock for the last few months, you've heard about the startup Clubhouse and its explosive growth. It launched around the time COVID lockdowns started last year,…
- Enterprises Don't Self Serve
In the wake of Salesforce's acquisition of Slack, there's been a flood of analysis on whether it was a sign of Slack's success or failure to grow as a company. It's funny that we live in a time when a $27bn acquisitio…
- Ben Thompson Interview with John Collison
This week Stripe launched two new major products in their ever-expanding mission to build the economic and financial backbone for the internet. Ben Thompson was one of two (along with the Wall Street Journal) to have…
- Fulcrum Field Day
A fun aspect of working on a business product with a product-led growth strategy that you get to use the your product for in your personal life. I've used Fulcrum for creating personal tracking databases, collecting v…
- Notes on Inspired
I just finished publishing my summary and takeaways from Marty Cagan's Inspired, his collection of ideas on building product teams. A lot of solid fundamentals there for startups, more meat on the bone in this one tha…
- Weekend Reading: Options Over Roadmaps, Ghost, and Spaced Repetition
🛣 Options, Not Roadmaps An option is something you can do but don’t have to do. All our product ideas are exactly that: options we may exercise in some future cycle—or never. Without a roadmap, without a stated plan,…
- Go-to-Market Fit
I recently watched this Mark Roberge session where he had an interesting way of describing the challenge that follows product-market fit. Tons of startup literature is out there talking about p-m fit. And likewise the…
- Weekend Reading: Quarantine Talks
🛠Attitudes, Aptitudes, and Progress Joel Mokyr’s talk on the most recent session of The Torch of Progress series. 🧠How to Be a Neo-Cartesian Cyborg A recent talk from Maggie Appleton on the "building a second brai…
- Synthetic A Priori
Basecamp's Ryan Singer has been doing this solo podcast on a lot of his favored topics, centered around product design. But he also branches into adjacent, related areas of systems, research, user experiences, and mor…
- A Nomenclature for Low-Code Users
The low-code "market" isn't really a market. Rather, I see it as an attribute of a software product, an implementation factor in how a product works. A product providing low-code capability says nothing about its inte…
- Fulcrum's Report Builder
After about 6-8 months of forging, shaping, research, design, and engineering, we've launched the Fulcrum Report Builder. One of the key use cases with Fulcrum has always been using the platform to design your own dat…
- Roam I and Roam E
A neat concept demo from Dhrumil Shah showing possible enhancements for Roam Research. He calls them "Roam-I" and "Roam-E": Roam-I — for reusing old knowledge Roam-E — collaboration Most of this is user interface on t…
- The Idea Maze
I ran across this set of lecture notes from Balaji Srinivasan's "startup engineering" course. He proposes this format for thinking about the phases a company moves through — from idea to profits: An idea is not a mock…
- The No-Code Misnomer
I liked this newsletter post from Aron Korenblit on the no-code movement. The name overstates the problem as being with "code" in workflows, when the problem is really deeper than that: How we feel about code —and why…
- Continuous Discovery
It's common practice now in software development to do "continuous integration" — a constant reintegration of newly-written code with the master application to continuously run regression and unit tests, making the pr…
- Balancing Power and Usability
This is another one from the archives, written for the Fulcrum blog back in 2016. Engineering is the art of building things within constraints. If you have no constraints, you aren't really doing engineering. Whether…
- Don’t Let the Backlog Drive Your Product
As we’ve started to adopt a process similar to Basecamp’s, we’ve been revisiting how we think about “backlogs” — the list of ideas and various requests we could work on in the product roadmap. I liked this piece from…
- Kevin Kwok on Social Acquisition Loops
An interesting article from Kevin Kwok on Superhuman’s (the email client) user acquisition cycle. An ultimate example of the product-led growth model. Good observations here on what they’re doing differently in having…
- Introducing Fulcrum Views
Bryan wrote this up about the latest major release of Fulcrum, which added Views to the Editor tool. This is a cool feature that allows users doing QA and data analysis to save sets of columns and filters, akin to how…
- What is a Product?
What definition do we mean when we talk about product? Like being a "product company" or working in "product management"? A few things spring to my mind — creating something for use by a customer that can be packaged…
- Weekend Reading: Intellectual Humility, Scoping, and Gboard
🛤 Missing the Light at the End of the Tunnel Honest postmortems are insightful to get the inside backstory on what happened behind the scenes with a company. In this one, Jason Crawford goes into what went wrong with…
- Writing Shape Up
This is a cool little background post from Ryan Singer explaining the origins and his process behind Shape Up, a web book about product development. One of the things he did when getting started (with no solid idea of…
- Why Complexity Sells
Evolution has a mysterious and amazing way of driving relentlessly toward simplicity and specialization: Evolution figured outs its version of simplification. It (if you can imagine it talking) says, “Get all that use…
- Weekend Reading: Terrain Mesh, Designing on a Deadline, and Bookshelves
🏔 MARTINI: Real-Time RTIN Terrain Mesh Some cool work from Vladimir Agafonkin on a library for RTIN mesh generation, with an interactive notebook to experiment with it on Observable: An RTIN mesh consists of only rig…
- Shipping the Right Product
This is one from the archives, originally written for the Fulcrum blog back in early 2017. I thought I'd resurface it here since I've been thinking more about continual evolution of our product process. I liked it bac…
- On Retention
Earlier this year at SaaStr Annual, we spent 3 days with 20,000 people in the SaaS market, hearing about best practices from the best in the business, from all over the world. If I had to take away a single overarchin…
- Shape Up
Ryan Singer and the Basecamp team just released their new ebook on product development, called Shape Up, made available for free online. Me and some of our team here have already dug into it and are finding some inter…
- Running in Circles
Basecamp's Ryan Singer articulates well the struggles with adopting and truly getting value out of an agile workflow. The core problem most teams face isn't that they're bad at estimating time to completion, it's that…
- Wireframing with Moqups
Wireframing is a critical technique in product development. Most everyone in software does a good bit of it for communicating requirements to development teams and making iterative changes. For me, the process of wire…
- Entering Product Development: Geodexy
I started with the first post in this series back in January, describing my own entrance into product development and management. When I joined the company we were in the very early stages of building a data collectio…
- The VP Product Role
Since I'm big on self-improvement and always looking for ways to get better at my professional craft, I was intrigued by this post from Marty Cagan from several years back. A post with a title the same as mine got me…
- Launching Annotations
This was a long time in the making. We’ve launched our latest big feature in Fulcrum: photo annotations. This feature was an interesting thing to take on. Rather than doing it the quick and dirty way, we did it right…