users
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🪑 The missing leg of reliability
After a conversation with Tim Bird about Space-Grade Linux, an idea about reliability emerged. The obvious legs of reliable systems are design and testing. What is less obvious is the third leg: active users. Use, coupled with the ability t…
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🌅 Why optimizing the user release experience early is so important
With Release First, the goal is to optimize the Big Blue Button (make it easy for users to use a release) early. Why is this important? There are many reasons, but the most important is so that users actually use the release and provide nee…
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🔵 The Big Blue Button
In the past days, we’ve been focusing on the Big Green Button, but there is another side of this - what happens after the release? Does the release get used? If not, why not? If a release does not get used, there is little point in releasin…
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🛠️ Do things that don't scale
From Paul Graham’s popular essay Do Things That Don’t Scale: Over-engaging with early users is not just a permissible technique for getting growth rolling. For most successful startups it’s a necessary part of the feedback loop that makes …
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📖 When should you write the user manual?
Most of the time, teams write the user manual at the end of a product development cycle right before the Big 1.0 Release. It is one of those things that is not much fun, and teams subconsciously put it off while fighting bigger fires. But w…
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📝 DDPD - Document Driven Product Development
Building on TDPD and RDPD, Document-driven product development (DDPD) offers another perspective. Ideas: Document the feature from the user’s perspective before implementing anything. Keep the documentation close to the code (same repo, et…
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👥 Who are users?
To get really valuable feedback, we need users. If the product has not been released yet, find someone – external CI system, CEO, beta users, manufacturing people, accountants, your mom … Often, when it leaves the developer’s computer, we f…
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🕊️ Simple to use vs simple to implement
To make something simple to use, often it is not simple to implement. For example, in the SimpleIoT UI, the following line of code is all that is required to add a text input field to a node. No handlers need to be attached, etc. textInput …