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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
Replying to
@ejames_c
Of course, experienced product people like John and Edo have been saying this for years. Sample thread:
Quote Tweet
Edo van Royen
@edo
Maybe instead, we should go slower. Maybe we should spend more time on strategy, discovery and creating context for our teams. Maybe better decisions on what to build, will achieve 10X of the impact without burning anyone out. Just maybe.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
This was a surprisingly hard idea for me to learn because of my past experiences. In my last company, we had very straight forward development because we were building point of sales systems, and we were behind our competitors. In that scenario, shipping cadence was everything.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
What this looked like: for the first three years, we just built whatever our customers asked us to build. We got to ~$4.5m annual revenue this way. Sure, we exercised *some* product judgment, but it was usually clear what to build next.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
A lot of the uncertainty in those early years was mostly the go-to-market motion, and learning to deal with fierce competition. But once we got to feature parity, and tried building genuinely new features, suddenly shipping cadence wasn’t that important.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
What’s notable about this post? Well, John outlines a number of product team setups and mistakes that he’s seen from real world setups. But the one thing that leapt out at me was the team setup that took *learning* into account. That hit me like a ton of bricks.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
Think about it: let’s say that you shipped five features in two months. Well done. Clap yourself on the back, post about it on social media. But were those features the RIGHT features? Did you have enough time to learn from changed user behaviour? Did they inform future cycles?
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
This is, by the way, the workflow implied by Team A in the diagram below. It’s clear that they have a ship and learning cycle lined up. If you ship too much, at some point you’re going to overwhelm your product org’s learning capability. A lot of energy, much of it wasted.
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KimSia Sim (I tweet business & software stuff)
@KimStacks
Replying to
@ejames_c
When you say “clear A has both shipping n learning” I go 🤔 both A n B have the same columns The columns headers sound like shipping related The only indication (n the original article says as well) of learning is the 1/4 number of cards in A Seems to me learning is implicit
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
Replying to
@KimStacks
It doesn’t have to be more explicit if you can see it. I’ve shown this board to a number of friends over the past few months. The more experienced folk tend to notice the learning implications; the less experienced ones tend to not even know the implication was there.
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