Varun Srinivasan pfp
Varun Srinivasan
@v
How to ship fast as a small company looking for product-market fit 1. Avoid side quests. If you aren't coding, selling or talking to users, it's a side quest. 2. Eliminate process. Don't cargo cult your team into sprint planning, offsites or recurring 1:1s. Gather once a day, talk about what to ship and ship it. 3. Hire people who love to ship fast all the time. Most people cannot do this correctly or do not enjoy doing it. 4. Don't hire people who can't ship. It's temping to get an ea, bd rep or community manager to offload work. This usually just creates more work for you. 5. Have a simple and fast tech stack. A new hire should be able to write a feature in a day and deploy it to users in 30 minutes.
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Varun Srinivasan pfp
Varun Srinivasan
@v
A few people have asked about how we ship as fast as we do. This is the rough essence of it.
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Colin pfp
Colin
@colin
Gather once a day meaning daily sync standups? Curious why that vs strict async daily discussion on Slack?
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Walleteer 🎩 pfp
Walleteer 🎩
@walleteer.eth
DWR Deploy Without Restraint
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jj 🛟 pfp
jj 🛟
@jj
The hardest challenge having run 150+ eng teams is scaling this. At some point the problem isn’t are your engineers good, you cross a dunbars number and people are essentially strangers. You are basically throwing stranger together and asking them to work well. When that happens that’s when you start needing process because people don’t know how to talk to each other. Keeping process lightweight so that people remember it and will do it will be important. Culture is just really hard to scale unless you hire slowly over time and have really good retention. Then constantly removing process will be another battle because processes, policies and other BS starts creeping in and getting a life of its own. Engineers just love complexity or they think it’ll let them stand out. The best engineers I’ve worked with will be able to explain and execute highly complex systems but make it self evident and make it seem super simple.
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pol pfp
pol
@polmaire.eth
*edit from @dwr.eth* 1. Avoid side requests. If you aren't coding, selling, talking to users or casting in the /europoooooor channel, it's a side quest.
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welter pfp
welter
@fun
couldn't agree more, i gotta print this cast out and put it on my wall
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Ryan pfp
Ryan
@ryansmith
I was a 1:1 maxi for a while but I don't think I'd carry that process forward with IS or any other future company. Talk when you need to. Make it expedient and effective. Move on.
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jj 🛟 pfp
jj 🛟
@jj
My biggest thing is hyper optimize your team for end to end iteration. Be able to ship, then have customers give feedback. The more iteration cycles you have the higher likelihood you will have PMF. I’ve experienced too much where Eng ships fast but go nowhere because they don’t listen to customers or can’t close the end to end loop. Shipping fast is just a given and default - no doubt hard to maintain and scale. Building a product that people love are die hard fans is like catching lightning in a bottle.
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vrypan |--o--| pfp
vrypan |--o--|
@vrypan.eth
Missionaries or mercenaries?
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Iggy pfp
Iggy
@iggy
You said 3 things are critical: shipping, talking to users and selling But it sounded like you only want to hire people that are really good at shipping and primarily focus on that How do you make sure you’re spending enough time selling and talking to users? Are you happy with how much time/ resources are allocated to this vs shipping?
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Murdo pfp
Murdo
@murdo
Should any of this change after finding product-market fit? What’s the crux of finding fit that means these things should change?
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Ivy pfp
Ivy
@ivy
2 is really really really important!!!!!!
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casslin.eth pfp
casslin.eth
@casslineth
@cast2save #shipfast
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jj 🛟 pfp
jj 🛟
@jj
My rule and expectation is that engineers are committing code everyday. And they ship features their first week no matter how small and that trends up in impact and scales up over time.
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William Mougayar pfp
William Mougayar
@wmougayar
You just described the ethos of a startup that abides by agile programming…😃
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Ashira 🎩🫂🍖🍔💃🏼 pfp
Ashira 🎩🫂🍖🍔💃🏼
@ashira
Not side questing is hell for an ADHDer.. sometimes it’s a super power to be able to side quest so much and sometimes it’s the worst thing ever..
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ns pfp
ns
@nickysap
goated advice
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BFG 🎩↑🌱 pfp
BFG 🎩↑🌱
@bfg
it's a great list 🙏 - I say it takes a lot of skill and brains to ship fast and not mess up the product with non-essential features in the mid-to-long term. That's why it's so impressive what you guys have done so far with FC And love the side-quest analogy!
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amosnena🎩🎭💜Ⓜ️ pfp
amosnena🎩🎭💜Ⓜ️
@amosnena
A good approach centered on agility and efficiency.
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