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When “fits and starts” is the most efficient path

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You roll down the windows and wear a helmet when you take your car to the track. This does not make me less terrified of a fiery death. The American Autocross champion was sitting in my passenger seat screaming at me to not let my foot off the pedal until I bounced off the RPM limiter. She was properly intense. I didn't know what I was doing, but it's fun to power through curves in a high-speed tenuously-controlled skid in my Mini Cooper S (plus …

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A Scorecard: Should a decision be fast, or slow?

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We’re constantly told to make decisions quickly, because that speeds up the production and learning loop.

But some decisions really should be made slowly.

How do you know which way to go, with a given decision? Here’s a framework to answer that question.

Brittleness comes from “One Thing”

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We’re tired of hearing how small software companies usually fails.

The data show that the two most common causes are (1) the product just isn’t useful to enough people and (2) problems with the team.

But what about the cohort that dies even though it did sell some copies of software to a few people, and where the founding team isn’t dysfunctional?

I don’t have data for that cohort (tell me if you do!), but informally I see things like the following, which is useful to list because there’s a pattern common to each of them, which furthermore is possible to counteract

The fundamental lesson of the forces governing scaling startups

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Idealistic founders believe they will break the mold when they scale, and not turn into a “typical big company.” By which they mean: Without stupid rules that assume employees are dumb or evil, without everything taking ten times longer than it should, without wall-to-wall meetings, without resorting to hiring anything less than the top 1% of the talent pool, and so on.

Why do they never succeed? What are the fundamental forces that transform organizations at scale?

Strategic Activities for a Company Retreat

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I happened to be sitting on the tarmac, delayed, when a tweet came in asking for some ideas for what to do on a company retreat that would be strategic.

In the confines of six square feet of personal space, I sent a few answers.

These are useful exercises any time!

Change: Damned if you do, damned more if you don’t

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Though inevitable, change is uncomfortable and exhausting. Even we who relish change, who love bragging that “it’s hard but every day is different,” reach a breaking point after years of adaptation and fake-gleefully exclaiming that “failure is how you learn!” Yeah, but all this learning is fricking tiring.

How do you manage change?

I hate MVPs. So do your customers. Make it SLC instead.

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Product teams have been repeating the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) mantra for a decade now, without re-evaluating whether it’s the right way to maximize learning while pleasing the customer.

Well, it’s not the best system. It’s selfish and it hurts customers. We don’t build MVPs at WP Engine.

This is the right way.

Should you invent a new UX?

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Using common metaphors makes your product UI identical to all the others. There’s no personality, no brand, solidifying the notion that this product is “just another tool” rather than a new way of interacting with a computer. Surely technology can be better than that.

But this is an egocentric view. Your customers don’t want to figure out some newfangled damn thing just to navigate a dialog box.

Which way is the right way?