Noah Weiss: belief

Transcript context

…That usually sounds nice in theory, but I often imagine you get to that final step and the founder is like, "What the hell is this? This is not at all what I was hoping it be." Is there an example of that, that comes to mind where you maybe went through that and then it's just like, "No. That did not work out the way we expected" and if not, no problem. Yeah. I mean I think that does happen. The ship is maybe ... the end of the year is the level of engagement and often that last level of engagement, that's where there's actually the most rapid refinement that you're doing. I think what's important there is that hopefully you're refining in code and you're not still at static design mocks because using the software is so different than looking at what the software will visually appear. I think what we would wind up doing with Stewart at Slack, for example, is we would get the entire development team, engineers design product, user research and Stewart together in a room and we almost do a bug bash together. The idea was like, "We're doing it all together. We're trying to make the best product possible, making great softwares really messy and we're all trying to clean up the mess together." Sometimes you might find things like, "Okay. This entry point really isn't working, maybe we have to move this entry point. That's maybe a bigger change." But I think often what you'd find is just all those bits of polish and refinement and doing the little delightful things that might otherwise be missing to raise that craft bar and doing a real collective way so it doesn't just feel like the team says. "We want to ship." The founder says, "No, it's not ready." Ideally as a group you're saying, We want to get it to a bar that's going to delight our users and here's the gap from where we are today to what we want to shift." I think that mentality winds up being a lot more constructive, but that's not always easy to do. You talked about creating these principles, which is an awesome approach of just creating guardrails for the team so they think the way the founder and the head of product think. What are some examples of principles you have and had early on maybe at Foursquare or Slack?…

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