Zoelle Egner: evaluation

Transcript context

…Oh, these are great lessons. Okay. What else do you tell? I think my last learning was really about the power of having a laughably small MVP for something. By the end of this, we were covering the entire United States. We had an API, we had custom software on the front end, this whole behemoth of stuff that we got to in four months or something. In the beginning it was truly, basically, a spreadsheet, and phones, and that was it. Even that, for the first few weeks while we were getting the rest of the infrastructure really going, not only had tremendous impact at one of the most important parts in the pandemic, but also gave us so much information about we actually needed to build that was going to be helpful. And I remember having all of these assumptions about what was going to be necessary to manage this coalition of people to make sure that we had really good data quality. Because one of the most important things you can do if you're trying to be a trusted source of truth is actually have the correct information. Sounds trivial, it's not at all at that scale. And I was totally wrong about all my assumptions. I thought we were going to have to have totally different types of oversight. I thought we were going to have totally different tooling. And it turned out we could do something way lighter weight that would allow us to move much faster as the regulatory landscape kept changing, as all the rule making at individual places kept changing. And that agility, that willingness to do just the smallest possible thing is obviously a little bit of a trope in the industry. People talk about it a lot, but it's never been driven home to me so much, because we're talking about something that had incredibly high stakes as people's health, and we're still able to do it in that context. So if we could do it there, you can imagine that the applications of that in other industries are just tremendous. So yeah, if you're listening to this, and you were thinking maybe you needed to add more stuff, I bet you could prune. And it's nice to have the forcing function where the world is changing so quickly and the team's probably small, where you are forced to build small. Which I think is why this reminder is so important. Oftentimes you have more resources, and you end up building more just because you can. And yeah, what you're saying is oftentimes, "It'll shoot you in the foot."…

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