Software engineers don’t go to product managers to understand how to build a software application. But when engineers start sharing their knowledge about product, there is often something in those words. Especially when the authors have left a footprint in the tech industry.
Joel Spolsky on the Worst Possible Strategic Mistake
Joel Spolsky is one of the co-founders of Stack Overflow. Although he has hardly posted on “Joel on Software” for years, there are several timeless articles worth reading. One of them is “Things You Should Never Do, Part I” from 2000. It is about a specific strategic mistake in the tech industry and why the cause lies in the rule of thumb that code is harder to read than to write.
„The Only Thing That Matters“ From Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen is a software engineer and co-founder of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm a16z. In the 1990s he co-developed the browser pioneers Mosaic and Netscape. The essence of his article is that achieving product-market fit is “the only thing that matters” – even before the team or the product itself.
„A Big Ball of Mud“
A Big Ball of Mud is a software application that has no recognizable architecture: “haphazardly structured, sprawling, sloppy, duct-tape-and-baling-wire, spaghetti-code jungle”. Product managers should ask themselves to what extent they are indirectly responsible for this kind of anti-pattern through time pressure for quick results, feature creep or a lack of product vision. Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder coined the term in 1999 (large PDF).
When Paul Graham Recommends to “Do Things That Don’t Scale”
Paul Graham, a computer scientist and co-founder of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, emphasizes the importance of focusing on labor-intensive, unscalable tasks in the early stages of a startup or product. Like manually recruiting users or even assembling hardware yourself. Automation can always come later. These early, manual efforts “That Don’t Scale” often instill principles that stay even after the scaling phase, like a relentless focus on customer acquisition.
Patterns in “Super Successful Companies”
Sam Altman is a co-founder of OpenAI, software engineer, entrepreneur and investor. Many of the thoughts he wrote down in 2014 focus on founders in the early stages of a startup. However, as you read the article, it quickly becomes clear that these insights seem to be applicable to any phase and size of a company aiming to build a great product.
When Martin Fowler Recommends Feeling Pain in Agile Software Development
Martin Fowler helped to create the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. In 2008, he described a central characteristic of agile software development in under 200 words: Identifying problems early and thus having more time to solve them. In contrast to waterfall, where problems are postponed until they are very painful to solve. This approach is almost universally applicable in agile development, whether in 2008 or today.