Last week we've released a new mobile app for our business users (we have a SaaS-enabled Marketplace, so we have apps for those businesses' customers as well). There were no advertisements, no marketing, no previews. We were polishing it quietly, alpha & beta testing it, getting some early feedback in an F&F (friends & family) pilot. And then we've finally released it. Not like we've been super-discreet that we did, we may have hinted it to few people ;P ... so the news spread like fire (our users are not only smart, but also form communities - surprised? there's…
All posts in product development
TL;DR Over the next few years we'll likely see another big shift in software developement industry -> basic app building knowledge will commoditize & another generation of smaller & bigger development centers will pop up. This model is highly inefficient & in majority of cases results in creating crap, but market is unforgiving - demand is just too high, just too crazy. That will be a huge shock for massess of devs who currently rule the market, but are too complacent, too satiated, too happy with just following 1 framework after another & mindlessly accepting concept work of…
TL;DR No org composition is perfect & given forever - things that didn't matter much when you were 10 may suffocate your whole engineering unit when it grows to 30. That's why engineering units should keep evolving - to make sure that local maximum (at some point in time) won't become a global minimum just because a shortsighted decision that has solidified into concrete. Interestingly, it's we, people who often block / slow down such an evolution - we feel (too) comfortable with what we've manage to establish to secure our perimeters ... I've already written at least 1 blog post…
When I was starting my first paid job (as a software developer) success definition was quite simple: deliver pre-defined scope in pre-defined time (budget) & make sure that bugs don't break the general usability (you can call it a loose quality criteria ;>). A lot of things have changed since then: Industry has understood the idea of maintainability & Technical Debt -> plenty have added "serviceable, maintainable, extendable" to their success definition Agile has helped people to switch their way of thinking from project-oriented to product-oriented: industry has learned that not everything can be determined up-front &…
"We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like." Tyler Durden ("Fight Club") I guess I'm getting old & getting old seems to be a bit dangerous for a passionate person with a strong sense of purpose (nobody's perfect ...). My patience & tolerance for tardiness wears off pretty quickly & I'm easily getting sick when confronted with nonsense & uselessness. That's why it gets harder & harder to bear the shape of current software development market as the majority of what gets produced & released…
It just won't, regardless of how hard you try to force him to do it. Nevertheless some still keep trying & IT seems to excel in that idea. Yes, that's another post about scaling in IT, but this time I'm not going to write about overgrown projects (I already did it here), but about overgrown products. The quest Companies spend zillions of local dibs on never-ending unifications, migrations, mergers, consolidations - the goal is to have: one, huge, universal (hell-of-a-)system instead of many one skill-set instead of many one, integrated data perspective on whole business etc. Grow, Grow, Grow.…
Few days ago I've encountered a short quote that had nailed something very important IMHO: "Walt Disney. Steve Jobs. Bill Gates. They were all micromanagers. What is it the the most successful leaders micromanaged? They micromanaged product, they didn't micromanage people." Jim Highsmith, Thoughtworks at ParadigmShift 2014 Simply brilliant. Musk, Bezos, Jobs & their alikes - obsessed with their vision, people who really know what they want & aren't afraid to strive for that, even if it means going down to the tiniest detail (so nothing is left to chance). Undoubtedly they were/are crucial factors in the…