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The Tao of HashiCorp
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Why I Strive to be a 0.1x Engineer
- Summarized by Pauli
- Dont measure effectiveness of productive effort by dividing rate of output with units of input
- Negative input doesn't equal negative output
- Focus on the feature with most value
- https://xkcd.com/619/
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Hyvän tuotteistuksen 7 tunnusta
- Summarized by Mikko
- 7 steps
- Solve the problem (You need a customer with problem or otherwise there is no business.)
- Give an outrageous promise or at least strong one. Promise first then think about how you keep the promise.
- Give a warranty that show you have attitude
- Give something concrete
- Make the pricing easy
- Naming - good name gives customer good associations
- Make it difficult to compare competitors directly
- Ossi: ongelma, jonka ratkaisulle on nimi; taattu lupaus, helppo hintalappu, ..., profit
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How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days
- Summarized by Mauri
- Direct rip:
- Setup: Rapid is a State of Mind
- Embrace the Possibility of Failure - it Encourages Creative Risk Taking
- Enforce Short Development Cycles (More Time != More Quality)
- Constrain Creativity to Make You Want it Even More
- Gather a Kickass Team and an Objective Advisor – Mindset is as Important as Talent
- Develop in Parallel for Maximum Splatter
- Design: Creativity and the Myth of Brainstorming
- Formal Brainstorming Has a 0% Success Rate
- Gather Concept Art and Music to Create an Emotional Target
- Simulate in Your Head – Pre-Prototype the Prototype
- Development: Nobody Knows How You Made it, and Nobody Cares
- Build the Toy First
- If You Can Get Away With it, Fake it
- Cut Your Losses and "Learn When to Shoot Your Baby in the Crib"
- Heavy Theming Will Not Salvage Bad Design (or "You Can't Polish a Turd")
- But Overall Aesthetic Matters! Apply a Healthy Spread of Art, Sound, and Music
- Nobody Cares About Your Great Engineering
- General Gameplay: Sensual Lessons in Juicy Fun
- Complexity is Not Necessary for Fun
- Create a Sense of Ownership to Keep 'em Crawling Back for More
- "Experimental" Does Not Mean "Complex"
- Build Toward a Well Defined Goal
- Make it Juicy!
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When the solution is the problem
- Summary by Mauri
- Every act of design is an intervention, not a solution
- Design can be harmful: Unforeseen consequences and complications -> like surgery
- Avoid Law Of Instrument: Does this problem benefit from hammering?
- Is it a nail in the first place?
- Ask yourself:
- Could this be replaced by a lo-tech/no-tech equivalent
- Is it more troublesome then the situation it fixes?
- Is it fixing the problem or a gross oversimplification?
- How to prevent:
- Less is more, value not doing things
- Extravention -> REMOVAL might be an improvement
- Document also what you haven't done
- Keep creating, expect surprises
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Don’t do what your users say …
- Summarized by Pauli
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The Lean Startup: Innovation Through Experimentation
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3 strategies to achieve web start-up success
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Guy Kawasaki: The Top 10 Mistakes of Entrepreneurs
- Summarized by Kasper
- 1 hour 23 mins long video
- Mistake no. 1. Multiplying big numbers by 1 percent
- You take large market and multiple it by small number "How hard could that be"
- Mistake no. 2. Scaling too soon
- Hiring too many Rock Stars too early
- Mistake no 3. Partnering
- "Partnering is ..." :D
- "Partnerships mean nothing"
- Mistake no 4. PROTOTYPE not a pitch
- The key is not the pitch. The key is prototype
- When you show up with the prototype you can actually deliver product
- Prototype not a pitch. okay?
- Mistake no 5. Using too many slides and too small font
- Optimal amount of slides is 10
- Optimal time in only 20mins
- Optimal font size is 30
- 10-20-30
- He tells this in ~every public appearance he does.. I guess this is important :D
- Mistake no 6. Doing things serially
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Steve Jobs Solved the Innovators Dilemma
- Summarized by Aleksi
- Innovator’s Dilemma: "As the title states, the innovator’s ‘dilemma’ comes from the idea that businesses or organizations will reject innovations based on the fact that customers cannot currently use them, thus allowing these ideas with great potential to go to waste."
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
- Steve Jobs
- biography: http://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1451648537
- one of his favorite books (Innovator’s Dilemma): https://hbr.org/product/innovator-s-dilemma-when-new-technologies-cause-gr/an/5851-HBK-ENG
- at the heart of the Innovator’s Dilemma: the pursuit of profit -> lead companies all the way to the top of their markets only to fall straight off the edge of a cliff after getting there.
- exile from apple -> descriped one fundamental root cause of Apple’s problems (let profitability outweigh passion)
- The products, not the profits, should be the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money and it did not end well (Apple was only three months away from bankruptcy).
- When Jobs returned to Apple, He was determined to solve the Innovator’s Dilemma. A former Apple product manager: “You have the privilege of working for the company that’s making the coolest products in the world. Shut up and do your job, and you might get to stay.”
- solution to Innovator’s Dilemma: Profit was viewed as necessary, but not sufficient
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The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code
- Summarized by Mikko, Ossi
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Do things that don't scale
- Summarized by Aleksi
- Startups take off because the founders make them take off not just because they happen to take off
- ..."Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going".
- You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get users.
- "Great, we'll send you a link" vs. "Right then, give me your laptop"
- measure progress by weekly growth rate.
- start with manual recruiting and switch to less manual methods.
- Almost all startups are fragile initially.
- It's harmless if reporters and know-it-alls dismiss your startup. They always get things wrong.
- It's even ok if investors dismiss your startup; they'll change their minds when they see growth.
- The big danger is that you'll dismiss your startup yourself
- Even Bill Gates made that mistake. He returned to Harvard for the fall semester after starting Microsoft.
- He didn't stay long, but he wouldn't have returned at all if he'd realized Microsoft was going to be even a fraction of the size it turned out to be.
- You should take extraordinary measures not just to acquire users, but also to make them happy. E.g. hand-written thank you notes.
- Why teach startups this?
- Customer service is not part of the training of engineers.
- founders worry it won't scale.
- "I was trying to think of a phrase to convey how extreme your attention to users should be, and I realized Steve Jobs had already done it: insanely great (experience of being user)"
- The product is just one component of that. "The feedback you get from engaging directly with your earliest users will be the best you ever get."
- Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on a deliberately narrow market (e.g. Facebook did).
- Among companies, the best early adopters are usually other startups.
- Things that don't scale:
- minimum order -> assembly themselves might be a better idea. For example: hardware startups.
- "There's a more extreme variant where you don't just use your software, but are your software".
- When you only have a small number of users, you can sometimes get away with doing by hand things that you plan to automate later.
- This lets you launch faster, and when you do finally automate yourself out of the loop, you'll know exactly what to build because you'll have muscle memory from doing it yourself
- Initial tactic that usually doesn't work: the Big Launch.
- The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars.
- Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the company going.
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Doing continuous delivery? Focus first on reducing release cycle times
- Example of testing: How SQLite Is Tested
- The Falling and the Rising Rain
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Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful by Gabriel Weinberg
- Summarized by Marko
- Inspired by Charlier Munger
- As Munger says, “80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly‑wise person.”
- Mental Models for (with some picks)
- Explaining
- Hanlon’s Razor — “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by carelessness.”
- Occam’s Razor — “Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.”
- Cognitive Biases — “Tendencies to think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgments.”
- Modeling
- Pareto principle — “for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.”,
- Brainstorming
- Crowdsourcing — “The process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, especially an online community, rather than from employees or suppliers.”
- Experimenting
- Order of Magnitude — “An order-of-magnitude estimate of a variable whose precise value is unknown is an estimate rounded to the nearest power of ten.”
- Interpreting
- Deciding
- Opportunity Cost — “The value of the best alternative forgone where, given limited resources, a choice needs to be made between several mutually exclusive alternatives. Assuming the best choice is made, it is the ‘cost’ incurred by not enjoying the benefit that would have been had by taking the second best available choice.”
- Sunk Cost — “A cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered.”
- Reasoning
- Straw Man — “Giving the impression of refuting an opponent’s argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not advanced by that opponent.”
- Negotiating
- Mitigating
- Managing
- Developing
- Technical Debt — “A concept in programming that reflects the extra development work that arises when code that is easy to implement in the short run is used instead of applying the best overall solution.”
- Binary Search — “A search algorithm that finds the position of a target value within a sorted array. It compares the target value to the middle element of the array; if they are unequal, the half in which the target cannot lie is eliminated and the search continues on the remaining half until it is successful.”
- Divide and Conquer — “Recursively breaking down a problem into two or more sub-problems of the same or related type, until these become simple enough to be solved directly. The solutions to the sub-problems are then combined to give a solution to the original problem.”
- Business
- Minimum Viable Product — “A product with just enough features to gather validated learning about the product and its continued development.”
- Influencing
- Marketing
- Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) — “A disinformation strategy used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics and propaganda. FUD is generally a strategy to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information and a manifestation of the appeal to fear.”
- Competing
- Creative Destruction — “Process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”
- Strategizing
- Network Effect — “The effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. When a network effect is present, the value of a product or service is dependent on the number of others using it.”
- Military
- Mutually Assured Destruction — “In which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two or more opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender. It is based on the theory of deterrence, which holds that the threat of using strong weapons against the enemy prevents.”
- Sports
- Market Failure
- Political Failure
- Investing
- Learning
- Productivity
- Nature
- Philosophy
- Internet
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EXTRA (by Ossi): Productisation scorecard:
- Is there a problem to solve?
- Your product has promise to solve the problem?
- Is the product concrete (something to touch, taste, feel)?
- With simple pricing?