Lounge S3: Designers

Since it’s the topic du jour on the purple app…

What’s the right balance between “ship and iterate” and “build something great first”?

weird internet kid. helping Creators with /seemore. yapping on /okbanger. curating in /creators and /cameron. dev + veteran + HBS. 
seemore.tv/cameron 🫡

“Ship then iterate” is necessary, but not sufficient. 

It’s a tactical device to maximize the rate of change of learning. 

The entire point is to get good enough, fast enough, and in small enough chunks that by the time you actually do something important for users you’re capable of doing a good job…

The other big challenge is putting in the hard work to iterate

You can ship something major every week, but if you don’t shape your shipping based on real, hard to parse insights from how users are/aren’t getting value from then you’re just flailing about w code  

(that’s me more often than I’d like tbh)

If you don’t do this hard learning work, shipping fast + iterating is a ton of wasted energy

If you don’t already have incredible insight, any attempt at building something great is doomed. 

Shipping fast + iterating well is how you bridge the gap between today and actually building something great.

I’d argue that every example of “ship fast bad” that I’ve seen on FC is in reality an attempt to “build something great” in too few iterations without user feedback rather than shipping too early. 

The product launching with the team claiming it as “fully formed” is the entire problem

The other big…

How did you learn to take better shots on goal?

Most teams move too slowly. So that’s why the advice is useful.

They rationalize moving slowly with “we have a higher quality bar”.

Startups = maximizing shots on goal

If you’re not doing a venture-backed startup, build however you want.