William Gill

When Reid Hoffman talks about building a startup, he says it’s like jumping off a cliff, and assembling a plane on the way down. It’s a reference to the fact that when you start building a startup, you set a clock ticking. 
If you can find product-market fit and a viable business before the clock runs out, your startup has a chance of success. If you can’t, then you’re in for a hard crash landing.

That’s why for startup product teams it’s critical to move as fast as you can. The most valuable resource you have is time, so you need to be extremely wise with every hour you and your team spends.

The key to moving fast is not to work harder, but work smarter. It’s not about working weekends, skipping lunch or pulling all-nighters. It’s about making smart choices about how to get things done.
Here are a few ways to think about moving fast.

Stand on the shoulders of giants

Isaac Newton famously said: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

When building a product, don’t be afraid to borrow from solutions that already work. Steal what you can with pride. Look for existing patterns and use them. Don’t waste time re-inventing the wheel, especially not in areas that aren’t key to your differentiation. 

As Picasso said: “Good artists copy, great artists steal”. 

Rethink the constraints

Every project has constraints. For an artist that might be the size of the canvas. For a technology product it might be the business model or the underlying technology. 

But not all constraints are equal. Some are very hard, and others are flexible. 

Look at the constraints you have and ask: which ones are flexible? Which are not even constraints at all?

Can you simplify the task by challenging one of the constraints?

Do the simplest thing first

Alfred Einstein said (approximately): “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

Complexity is the silent killer of products. Complexity is a poison that spreads lethargy and chaos in your startup. The more complex your product, the harder it becomes to maintain. Avoid complexity at all costs.

Always start by doing the simplest thing first. Ask this key question: What is the smallest, simplest thing we can do that will validate our hypothesis and deliver value to our customers? 

Ask for help early 

I’ve seen people (and whole teams) bang their head against a hard problem for days, or weeks, without asking for help. Sometimes it’s a mix of stoic determination and pride; sometimes it’s that feeling of being ever-so-close to cracking the problem… for days and days on end.

Productive people know how to ask for help early. Whatever the issue is that you’re facing, the chances are there are people out there who can help you. Sometimes a point in the right direction is all you need to unblock yourself and save hours or days of wasteful wheel spinning. 

First and foremost, use your colleagues. Don’t be afraid to ask more experienced team members for help early on. It’s not your job to know all the answers; it’s your job to find the answers. There is no shame in asking for help! It’s how great people learn. 

Second, build your network outside of your team. This could be in your company, or outside it. Find the networks, groups or meetups in your area of expertise, and use them.

If you have any questions or would like some more detailed tips, get in touch!

From The Verge:

Twitter has made follower counts appear less prominent on its iOS app by making the font size smaller in a new redesign effort, according to a Twitter spokesperson. The change comes after CEO Jack Dorsey repeatedly said that he wants to rethink how the company could prioritize “meaningful” conversations over numbers like retweets, likes, and follows.

I would absolutely love to know how much design time, discussions, debates, arguments and philosophy went into making this change.

Positioning this as a “de-emphasis” in any meaningful way seems quite a stretch to me.

The attention on followers and volume of attention is the product of a decade of social media’s push on attention, clicks, scrolls and feeds. We’ve been conditioned by years of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram etc to value audience size over quality of conversation.

Wanting to change this is admirable, but it’s going to take more than font sizes. It will mean changing the incentive structures of the products in ways that might hurt growth in the short-term… and that’s still going to be a tough row to hoe for these companies conditioned on growth at all costs.

When we look around and see the absolute domination of companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook, it’s easy to assume that the technology boom is over, and that these companies took all the profits.

But a16z’s Benedict Evans has a different take: he argues that tech is only just getting started.

He calls it “the end of the beginning”… the “beginning” being connecting every person on earth to the internet.

In the next phase, we have a new set of decentralised building blocks – such as machine learning and the blockchain – to power a new wave of tech innovations that could target the trillions dollars worth of market share still not captured by the tech industry.

Health care, housing, finance, retail and more… not to mention politics or social welfare.

Watch his presentation from the annual a16z tech conference, which he originally posted on his blog here.

After that

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I just finished reading The Circle, the dystopian view of a world when the next Facebook completely abolishes privacy once and for all. The scariest thing about the book is how real – how possible – it all seems. The world is a few decisions away from being set on that path.

I read today in The Guardian that companies are starting to microchip employees for real:

The tiny chips, implanted in the flesh between the thumb and forefinger, are similar to those for pets. They enable people to open their front door, access their office or start their car with a wave of their hand, and can also store medical data.

It’s super scary. It’s a precedent that leads to a scary future.

Marty Cagan was in Berlin recently and did a talk about why teams are not truly empowered

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, and what teams might do about that.

He shared his “True Test of Empowered Teams”:

1. The team is staffed with competent people with the necessary range of skills.
2. The team is assigned problems to solve

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, and they are able to decide the best way to solve those problems.
3. The team is accountable for solving the customer or business problem (outcome).

This is a powerful lens to use to look at a team – either one that you’re managing, or one that you’re a part of – and assess the level of true empowerment.

The framework also fits well with the general idea of using OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) as a tool for managing autonomous teams:

1. The team is staffed with competent people with the necessary range of skills (the pre-requisite for any team to be productive and impactful).
2. The team is assigned problems to solve (ie, OBJECTIVES), and they are able to decide the best way to solve those problems.
3. The team is accountable for solving the problem – which you measure with metrics or other measurable outcomes/KPIs (ie, KEY RESULTS).

Basically this is a recipe for using OKRs to drive empowered teams:

Objective = problem to solve
Accountability = measurable outcome

You can use this framework while evaluating the teams in your company. It could also be used as a tool in a retrospective: the team can each provide a rating, say out of ten, to the extent that they feel they are empowered, measuring each of these three trajectories, and you can track this self-evaluation over time to monitor the trend.

You can watch a recording of the talk here.

I have always believed that the best place to start when designing a new feature or product flow is with a pen and a piece of paper. I think if you go to quickly to screen/UI design, it’s harder to take a step back to focus on the actual user problem. Instead

, you immediately start thinking about pixels and your thinking is by default limited to your current UI.

I just came across these printable sheets for wire-framing by hand. It’s been put together as a side project by Pasquale Vitiello.

You can choose Mobile devices, tablets, desktops

, or even just plan grids.

CNBC posted an article last week that really resonated with me.

From their article:

A recent study from Stripe and Harris Poll found that 61 percent of C-suite executives believe access to developer talent is a threat to the success of their business. Perhaps more surprisingly — as we mark a decade after the financial crisis — this threat was even ranked above capital constraints.

I’ve been working on recruiting for FATMAP for the past few months. Whether for internal positions, or freelance, not only are qualified engineers more and more difficult to find, it is increasingly they who are alone dictating the terms of their employment.

When I first started recruiting engineers back in the early 2000s, engineers applied for a position. The employer set the terms of the employment. Now, it is increasingly the engineers who set the terms.

It’s no longer companies interviewing candidates. It’s candidates interviewing companies. Companies must convince the employee, rather than the other way around.

This is of course great for employees. But when I look at the candidates coming through, sometimes I worry that this generation of developers are being conditioned by the extremely employee-friendly environment to respond to the wrong incentives.

With so much competition for engineers, is there less incentive for engineers to focus on doing great work and developing themselves…?

There are so many companies with so much capital

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, which leads to so much competition for engineers, and when the demand for something goes up, so does the price. That price is being borne out not just in salary, but in an expectation of perks and other benefits.

At FATMAP, we place a lot of focus on finding the right people for the team. We look for missionaries rather than mercenaries. We want people to be in it for the mission; people who share our values but most importantly who believe in our company and want to share in our success.

We believe that building the most talented team of missionaries is the key to success. We’re not climbing on the mercenary engineer treadmill.

I only hope that the next generation of new software engineers follow incentives to build great products that customers love and that make a difference – and don’t just chase the big money and free snacks.

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From TechCrunch:

Branch

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, the deep-linking startup backed by Andy Rubin’s Playground Ventures

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, will enter the unicorn club with an upcoming funding round.

The four-year-old company, which helps brands create links between websites and mobile apps, has authorized the sale of $129 million in Series D shares, according to sources and confirmed by PitchBook, which tracks venture capital deals. The infusion of capital values the company at roughly $1 billion.

I remember seeing a talk from these guys when they were brand new at the (now defunct) Where 2.0 conference in 2014. Back then, deep linking was novel and new, and was not widely supported by the mobile platforms.

We use Branch at FATMAP, and I can say it’s a very easy way to get deep links set up across a range of content types in a mobile app.

That they are now worth a billion dollars is on one hand a bit odd: they are basically packaging platform functionality in an SDK and charging app developers for it. There is nothing particularly unique or defensible with what they are doing, and it’s nothing a medium or bigger sized app developer can’t build on their own.

On the other hand, it’s a signal of the health of the app development platform industry. I have to wonder what their exit strategy is though. An obvious potential acquirer would be Google, while would buy it for the data, or Microsoft, who would buy it for the developers and make it part of their overall developer platform.

Either way, they are now a rather expensive acquisition.

From ZDNEt:

A team of security researchers behind a popular mobile firewall app say they’ve identified tens of iOS apps that are collecting location data from iPhone users, data they later pass on to monetization firms.

In all cases, researchers say, the collection occurs via packaged tracking code monetization firms provide to developers to embed in their respective apps.

The only surprising thing about this is that there are only “tens”, not hundreds, or thousands.

Back when I was at Nokia/HERE Maps, I was managing a product with several million active users. I was contacted nearly daily by advertising or data monetisation companies, offering us easy money to just add their small SDK to our codebase…

These companies make an offer for developers that’s easy to accept… spend a few hours implementing their SDK, and forget about it… and in exchange, receive “free money” for every active user. These companies are especially interested in apps that collect or handle location information.

I do have some sympathy with the developers who accept the bargain… the app business is a brutal

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, hard one, and when you’re trying to turn a profit, a few extra cents per MAU for essentially no effort can seem like a great deal… but you’re selling your customers’ privacy, and in the long run that’s going to backfire.

My advice to app developers is to reject the seemingly free money, and stay focussed on building great value for your customers, and building your monetisation model around that. Going for the easy money might make your ARPU look momentarily better, but it’s not what your customers are paying for.

I came across this quote in a fantasy novel* I was reading:

“Strategy is just a fancy word for a special kind of common sense, the ability to see options, to make them where there were none. It’s not about knowing the rules. It’s about knowing how to break them.”

When it comes to building Product, there are thousands of frameworks, books and ways of looking at strategy. But at the end of the day, no framework will replace the ability to see… to be able to look at your situation, at the strategic context of your product, and see your options.

Frameworks can help you organise and explain what you see, and sometimes even deduce or discover things you might not have otherwise seen. But the strongest Product people I know use a strong combination of instinct and pattern recognition to see their strategic options and deduce the right way forward.

* The novel is called “A Conjuring of Light“, and it’s part of the Darker Shade of Magic series by V. E. Schwab.