The Product-Minded Engineer

Part II. Deliver

As a product-minded engineer, when you’re headed toward delivering a major release, obsess over the question of how you’re going to get users to validate that your product does what it should.

Popular social media firms are lucky in this regard. They have large, forgiving user bases and extremely powerful software distribution mechanisms—news feeds. They can rapidly ship experimental products and, whether they are polls, game invites, events, groups, videos, or stories, they can distribute them with their feed to a small percentage of users, get feedback and metrics, and perform A/B tests.

On the other end of the spectrum, self-driving car startups are unlucky. They must iterate for years before shipping anything to customers. They hire professionals to mind their cars while collecting data until they achieve beyond human levels of reliability—in other words, they must avoid fatal accidents on more than 99.999999% of the miles they drive.

These approaches have very little in common. The one shared aspect is that they are all validating their products.

Tip

Validate your product with users.

Validating your product with users results in answering important open concerns about it and also discovering problems you didn’t think of.

These next two chapters encompass some of the most cost-effective ways to iteratively delivery and refine software products based on user validation.

Before you ship, through the lessons in Chapter 4 you’ll expose your product to early pressure ...