Building Products in Early Stage Teams

Building the first iterations of new products requires the right balance of velocity and quality. Early stage teams need to focus on speed and iteration to find product-market fit and build a sustainable business. Here are some of the best practices and lessons I learned from building products in early stage teams.

On Competition

Conventional wisdom tells founders it’s better to be a small fish in an ocean as opposed to a big fish in a tiny pond. For me, the thought of starting a new business when well-funded competition existed was daunting. Recently, I’ve changed my mind on this. Let’s explore why competition is an important indicator, and when it makes sense to enter a market with powerful incumbents vs. developing a new market....Startups

Adding Context: The First Weeks

You might have been wondering why my publishing cadence has shifted back to the initial bi-weekly schedule instead of the weekly posts you’re used to. There are multiple reasons, the main one being that I’m working hard on Anzu, the new company I’m founding. As with all startups, there’s a lot to do, but most interestingly, there’s a lot that shouldn’t be done right now....Anzu

Indirection is the antithesis of velocity

When working on projects in the past, I’ve always wondered about the perfect time to lock down interfaces. In the first steps of building an idea, you’re not quite sure what data you need to exchange yet and which operations should be exposed via APIs. Perhaps you don’t even know which transport protocol you want to use (e.g. whether you want a REST API or GraphQL)....Systems Architecture, Engineering Management

Betting on Delightful Products

When you’re building your first product, you need something going for it. Especially if you’re not solving a completely unsolved problem (read: customers would accept anything, no matter the lack of polish), you need to offer an experience that beats the existing solution....Product Development, Startups, Anzu

Observations on Successful Companies

When I think about “successful” companies in the SaaS space, there is a group that quickly comes to mind. Irrespective of revenue numbers, or knowledge about internal processes, some teams keep on delivering and people notice. In the following, I’ll go over some products I’ve been using and enjoying over the past years, and the reasons that I think helped their success....Startups, Product Development

Anzu Behind the Scenes: Why Resource Management Wasn’t It

This post is the first part of the Behind the Scenes series on building the first iteration of Anzu. While we keep on building and improving the next iteration of Anzu, I felt it would be useful to write down what went well with the first iteration, and what didn’t, so this series focuses on both product and technical achievements made over the course of the past twelve months....Engineering Management, Anzu, Anzu: Behind the Scenes, Product Development

The Complexity of Building Software in 2022

Usually, we go through our day focusing on things at work, side projects, or whatever it is that we spend our time on. We don’t even think about why it is that we choose certain tools, services, and architectural decisions over others....Systems Architecture

Built it, but nobody came

Like most engineers, I tend to have a bias towards action. Getting started and building things is what I really enjoy, so naturally, I start a lot of side projects. Over time, I've tried to limit those to specific problems I've had myself, building on Paul Graham's famous essay...Evergreen, Product Development

Product Versioning for Fast-Moving Teams

Recently, I’ve gotten to wrap my head around versioning again. If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you might remember that I wrote a post about API versioning in mid-2021. Back then, I focused on versioning API-first developer products. This problem was relatively contained, we used a single versioning scheme to keep systems running for older clients while deploying a breaking change....Systems Architecture, CI/CD

Versioning Features for Sustainable Product Evolution

When you're working on a product that is constantly evolving, adding, deprecating, and deleting features not only has to be communicated with your customers in advance, but often you have to maintain multiple versions....Evergreen, Systems Architecture, Product Development

When Velocity Implies Simplicity

Building products is hard. You have to think about the problem you want to solve, the customer you want to delight, design a product through multiple iterations and improve continuously....Product Development, Evergreen

Finding The First Iteration

tl;dr: Stop overengineering, think of the first iteration of a feature, build it, ship it, get feedback, and improve it....Product Development, Evergreen, Engineering Management

Starting Lasting Side Projects

Your life gets so radically better after you ship something - Patrick McKenzie...Evergreen

Ship Early and Ship Often

Deciding how and when to ship a new feature can be a sensitive topic. Nobody wants to break production and upset customers. And still, deploying to production tens to hundreds of times a day has become common for a lot of companies. In this post, I want to explore how shipping early and shipping often can radically improve your team's velocity while reducing the risks associated with delaying releases to the point of having to ship an uncomfortably high amount of work at once....Evergreen, Engineering Management, Product Development

Measuring Velocity: The Case for Electron

I spent the last weeks getting started on a minor side project, which I eventually want to use as a simple macOS application. I didn't require any fancy distribution paths through the Mac App Store, but sharing with friends and perhaps making the application available for being downloaded, would be great to have....Node.js, Electron

The Lifecycle of Side Projects: Planning & Early Stages

Too many times I have found myself at a point of developing a side project, where I had lost all the joy I initially felt while coming up with ideas, drafts, designs and potentially even prototypes — just because too much time had passed since the first steps. And that's not even taking into account the weeks of procrastination after buying a fancy domain and before starting actual work. If this resonates with you, maybe I can share some knowledge on how I'm trying to avoid this habit by changing my mindset about how I work on projects and products without ending up switching to some other activity that's more fun. Ideally, everybody should see their level of enjoyment and progress going from 📉 to 📈 by adopting the following ideas....Evergreen, Product Development