Barbra Gago: evaluation

Transcript context

…Last topic I want to spend a little time on is something that I know you're really passionate about, which is this idea of creating opinionated software that has clear opinions about how you should be using it and how you should be doing your work. And so maybe as a first question, just what is opinionated software? What's important about it? Opinionated software is basically software platforms that essentially have either best practices or maybe some rules integrated into the system. You have systems that you can customize any which way and however you want and then you have other systems that enforce a certain way of behaving or doing work, as you said. And so I think probably a pretty well known example for your audience especially is Atlassian really building tools for agile workflows and agile teams. And Greenhouse is another example from a recruiting perspective in terms of what we called structured recruiting. There was a very specific way to create a pipeline, build an interview kit, and all of that was important because it made recruiting better and more transparent and obviously less bias and all of those things. So it's principled, I would say. It's anchored in some values. And because of those values, there will be certain rules that are built in that you can't really work around. Do you have any advice for when it makes sense to be very opinionated about how you make people use your product and do the thing they're trying to do versus just optimize for flexibility?…

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