Gaurav Misra: recommendation

Transcript context

…So as a leader of a company with people constantly hearing about all the things happening, is there any tools or processes or approaches you've figured out to help people continue, stay focused, not get excited about every shiny new object and actually ship things? I I mean honestly, it's all about incrementality in a way. I think we do aim to ship every week. Our engineering goal is every engineer should ship a marketable product every week. And so what's a marketable product is a product that you can show to users and the user might subscribe or pay for the app just for that or come to the app essentially just for that. And that's why table stakes features, let's say we're talking about word processor or something. If you had auto format or just table stakes stuff like justify alignment or something, no one's going to come to your word processor for justify alignment. You can market that because it's obvious, of course it exists, but if you did something unique that nobody else has done, you can go and show that to people and people will come to your app just for that. And even if your app doesn't have a lot of the obvious stuff, maybe it doesn't have justify alignment, people will jump over that just to use these new tools and new abilities that you might be building and marketing. So we try to do every engineer one marketable feature per week, and a lot of that stuff may not work, but a lot of it does work and we can figure out obviously, where to put in more effort, things that start to work, we double down on those things, build more. People often complain because think about it, in one week where we're shipping, it's not complete, it's MVP, truly. And we slice the hell out of it. We take the design and we cut, cut, cut until we can really say that it's going to be useless if we cut anymore. We get that out and people come in. And if things are going well, people will use it despite all the problems that it might have, and now people will complain and we'll have a list of problems and we know what to do next. That's a starting point essentially. As long as we're shipping one a week, we get a ton of volume of features and products and directions we're releasing, cut a lot of that. What remains expand from there. So it works really well, and it keeps people focused. I love the simplicity of that. I love just how wild that sounds for a lot of companies I imagine. Every engineer ships a marketable feature or product every week.…

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