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Balancing Shipping and Planning, by Tommi Forsstrom of Teachable
Created
Nov 2, 2020 12:26 PM
Media Type
Videos
Lesson Type
Startups
Project
Property
Created by Rishabh Srivastava, Founder of Loki.ai
This summary was largely done for my own note-taking, sharing it just in case it adds more value to other people.
I have no affiliation whatsoever with anyone in this note. This is a summary largely taken for my own reference, and may contain errors :)

Context

Source URL:
Why is it important: Contains actionable advice on balancing the cadence between shipping and planning

Keywords

Shipping, Product Management

Summary

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Highlights

 
Studying histories (specially failures) in tech helps you understand the link between bad early choices and future dystopias much better – so that you don't repeat them in the future ==> pattern recognition is important
 
Scaling journey: Real-change is incremental, gradual, and frustrating. It doesn't happen with the flick of a switch. Early stages of a company is all hustle, grind, experimentation. Every idea is worth testing, every customer is worth talking to. In adolescent (post product-market fit), you have to start making more measured choices. The cost of failure creeps up
 
But you don't want to push out that raw instinct and hustle too fast. It doesn't scale, but brings you insights you need to scale
 
Don't measure cost of a feature based on how long it takes to build a feature. It's only about 5%. Complexity and maintenance accounts for the bulk of the costs. Often, when systems are huge, any small change to them has exponentially increasing costs. This is why when companies are big, they try to outsource everything
 
You HAVE to get the balance between perfect scalability and using the fastest possible way to build something right. Don't go to the extreme. Every decision you make regarding your architecture should strive for optionality and choice, instead of being focused on one narrow thing
 
Being execution-heavy and shipping all the time is NOT a good idea, even though it makes you feel good in the moment. Shipping is important, and you should absolutely ship to learn. But take you time to decide WHAT you want to ship. Nothing is more anti-thetical to change and good outcomes as shipping the wrong thing
 
Shipping fast and shipping a lot should not be an excuse to ship shit. If you're just shipping to learn, make sure that you have a way out so that you're not tied into that thing you committed to
 
Getting things in front of real people is absolutely critical. But if we define "ship" as making things as part of the canonical of your product, it's probably not a good idea