🚀 Launch early, land often! 🛬
The most critical ingredient in building great products is the feedback loop.
The sooner you can build something that you can get to the hands of a potential user the better.
Even with two decades of experience in building things, I’m often wrong about some aspects of the thing I’m building. I used to be surprised about it, later upset about it, but now I accept and expect it.
Back in my early days at Google, I had the honor to work with Alberto Savoia, the person who gave pretotyping its name. If you have not hear of it check out: https://www.pretotyping.org/
Pretotyping changed my life. I use it at work, and personal life all the time. I haven’t done a single home construction project without employing pretotyping techniques first to validate my ideas and assumptions. Blue painters tape to sketch out a construction project FTW!
The goal with pretotyping is to launch even before you have a product and start collecting feedback even sooner than the first prototype exists.
Feedback helps you focus on the right “it”, weed out nonsensical features, and build a product that people want to use.
To get the feedback you need to launch something. It could be as much as describing a hypothetical product to a friend. That’s a perfectly valid pretotype.
Later you can build a prototype and give a demo. More feedback will come.
Demo often, especially to individuals and small groups. Note their questions. Make sure you can answer them with ease in the future or better - improve the product so that the question doesn’t even need to be asked in the future because the answer is obvious!
As your demos improve, extend and increase the size of the audience. By the time you go “public”, you should understand all the questions that people might ask, and have clear and simple answers to them.
You now go GA, and you keep on pushing updates and landing all of them. No major regressions, no clunky poorly integrated features. You’ve got telemetry and feedback channels in place to know when you messed up, and ability to rollback or rollforward as needed.
The more often you push to prod the sooner you learn if the changes you made are any good. Pushing to prod daily is great, even more often — eg on every commit — is better but requires more discipline and might not always be the most pragmatic choice. It all depends…
But the point is that reducing the time or latency between an idea and feedback, and hyper optimizing for the frequency and quality of the feedback loop is how you build great things.
🚀 Launch early, land often! 🛬
PS: liked this post? Check out “Landings over launches”: https://njump.me/note1pkf0d552j6hf6v7v9q0d8nmncg8t62jk2ewyvvdhyc59lnejhcpqytwze3
Igor Minar
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2024-08-10 05:29:48
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wss://njump.mePublished at
2024-08-10 05:29:48Event JSON
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"content": "🚀 Launch early, land often! 🛬\n\nThe most critical ingredient in building great products is the feedback loop.\n\nThe sooner you can build something that you can get to the hands of a potential user the better.\n\nEven with two decades of experience in building things, I’m often wrong about some aspects of the thing I’m building. I used to be surprised about it, later upset about it, but now I accept and expect it.\n\nBack in my early days at Google, I had the honor to work with Alberto Savoia, the person who gave pretotyping its name. If you have not hear of it check out: https://www.pretotyping.org/\n\nPretotyping changed my life. I use it at work, and personal life all the time. I haven’t done a single home construction project without employing pretotyping techniques first to validate my ideas and assumptions. Blue painters tape to sketch out a construction project FTW!\n\nThe goal with pretotyping is to launch even before you have a product and start collecting feedback even sooner than the first prototype exists.\n\nFeedback helps you focus on the right “it”, weed out nonsensical features, and build a product that people want to use.\n\nTo get the feedback you need to launch something. It could be as much as describing a hypothetical product to a friend. That’s a perfectly valid pretotype.\n\nLater you can build a prototype and give a demo. More feedback will come.\n\nDemo often, especially to individuals and small groups. Note their questions. Make sure you can answer them with ease in the future or better - improve the product so that the question doesn’t even need to be asked in the future because the answer is obvious!\n\nAs your demos improve, extend and increase the size of the audience. By the time you go “public”, you should understand all the questions that people might ask, and have clear and simple answers to them.\n\nYou now go GA, and you keep on pushing updates and landing all of them. No major regressions, no clunky poorly integrated features. You’ve got telemetry and feedback channels in place to know when you messed up, and ability to rollback or rollforward as needed.\n\nThe more often you push to prod the sooner you learn if the changes you made are any good. Pushing to prod daily is great, even more often — eg on every commit — is better but requires more discipline and might not always be the most pragmatic choice. It all depends…\n\nBut the point is that reducing the time or latency between an idea and feedback, and hyper optimizing for the frequency and quality of the feedback loop is how you build great things.\n\n🚀 Launch early, land often! 🛬\n\nPS: liked this post? Check out “Landings over launches”: https://njump.me/note1pkf0d552j6hf6v7v9q0d8nmncg8t62jk2ewyvvdhyc59lnejhcpqytwze3\n",
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