Scoping & Cutting

"A lot of jargon that I like to use to emphasize what we should be striving for is building a minimum lovable product and then building a lovable product and then building an absolutely lovable product. So I took that jargon with me in the company name."

"It's really this Wizard of Oz experience. We don't have to build anything. I coordinated with a bunch of interns and we were able to validate some of the value prop and conversion rates that we would expect in a subscription service."

"I really love using the deadline trap and it makes you focused... It removes all the theoretical discussions that people have and things like that."

"we had a rule in the HubSpot product... that every time you added what we thought of as a knob or dial, called a feature, you had to take one out somewhere else. That's a net amount of... it just at least forces you to think about it"

"Build the scooter, not the axle. So if you're trying to build the minimum viable product for a car, don't build just the wheels and the axle, build the scooter first. And then from there, you build the bicycle, and the motorcycle, and then the car."

"MVP is simply for whatever the hypothesis is that we're trying to test, what is the most efficient way to get the validation we need about whether a hypothesis is true or not?"

"The first tip is, write out the list of features that are necessary in your MVP. Cut it in half and cut it in half again and build that. Honestly, if you just do that, that's really not that bad."

"We really resist the urge to do the big V1. And I think this is, I shared the streak goal example, where, a lot of times when we're exploring something we will say, okay, well, that's cool, how do we strip away a bunch of stuff and figure out what our core hypothesis is? And then, just ship that thing first as a V1."

"We instead have appetites. And our appetite for any individual feature is no more than six weeks. Essentially that's our budget we're willing to spend. I'm only willing to spend six weeks in any feature. So we have to figure out the simplest, most effective version of that to get that done within six weeks and get it done by two people."

"If we say we're going to give it six weeks and we give it seven or eight or nine or 10, then we're not really giving it six weeks, we're giving it 10, then we don't really have a system... If there's any work that's left over that's still on the left side of the hill, meaning we're still pushing it up, we don't know how we're going to do it and we're at our time limit, it almost certainly dies."

"And they did get it done, and they got it done through subtracting. They streamlined the experience. They took out steps that people were getting stuck on. They made things easier. They did the kinds of things that are rarely celebrated in the way that traditional feature launches were celebrated, but because they had this clear, impactful, specific sense of what success looks like, they were able to take on that work themselves"

"Try to decompose your redesign if you can't decompose it to one factor at a time, to a small set of factors at a time. And learn from these smaller changes what works and what doesn't. ... Do them in smaller increments, learn from, it's called OFAT one-factor-at-a-time. Do one factor, learn from it, and adjust."

"We’re going to go the other way around and we’re going to say, what is the maximum amount of time we’re willing to go before we actually finish something? How do we come up with a idea that’s going to work in the amount of time that the business is interested in spending?"

"The second piece is this work that we call shaping and the shaping work is, how do we actually take this fixed amount of time that we’ve given for ourselves and vary the scope? How do we come up with a idea, some version of this that’s going to work in the amount of time that the business is interested in spending?"

"If a project is not on track to actually finish after the six weeks, we’re just going to cancel it and rethink... we’re not going to keep reinvesting in something that we don’t understand. So, let’s take this out of build mode and bring this back into shaping mode."

"Depending on what the user wants, we might be able to restrict the possible actions of the agent ahead of time, so it can't possibly do anything malicious... CAMEL would look at my prompt... and say, 'Hey, it looks like this prompt doesn't need any permissions other than write and send email.'"

"Instead of making the estimate an output of planning, you make the time box or an appetite the input, and you say, 'We want to solve X problem and we're willing to invest six weeks solving that problem.'"

"The power of having a laughably small MVP for something... In the beginning it was truly, basically, a spreadsheet, and phones, and that was it. Even that... not only had tremendous impact... but also gave us so much information about we actually needed to build that was going to be helpful."

"We added into our product process a notion that we might pivot or cut from stuff that we put on our roadmap because it felt like once it was on the roadmap, it had to be done, and that's just not smart."