Summary
One Sentence Summary
One paragraph Summary
What is the foundational knowledge required for me to learn this?
What do I hope to learn AND take ACTION on after reading this book?
- Applied, systematic, execution and efficient operations of software for practical use
What brought you to reading this book? How did you hear about it?
- My mentor Sutanay recommended it to me. It was his most influential book
What are my assumptions before reading this book?
- This book will teach more the importance of unit testing in software
- I will also understand
- According to Sutanay: “you are [a] very structured thinker and you’ll be amazed by the “supplies” the book brings to you; to let you build a very structured approach to scaling. It will directly influence how we build CashFit”
Reading Comprehension questions from ChatGPT
What ACTIONS/HABITS will I partake after reading this book?
What Questions do I have after reading this book?
What Phrase(s) can I add/validate to my mantras?
Preface
Designing, building, and launching the right software is referred to as shipping in the software industry.
Shipping is finding the right product, working through a complex and ever-changing process, and doing it quickly.
If you can ship, you can make nearly any software business successful, and you can compete with businesses that have deeper pockets because you can get to market faster.
But if you screw it up—by missing your date, by launching a product nobody cares about, or by building a beautiful product that nobody hears about—your team will be grumpy, customers will write to the Big Boss, and best case, you don’t get promoted.
The goal of this book is to provide you with the same simplified, no-BS approach to doing your job—or understanding your team lead’s job.
Shipping is not just project management and convincing engineers to work faster. If your job is shipping software, you must have an extremely broad skill set that ranges from deeply technical to highly creative, and along the way you must provide cogent business insight.
Part One of this book describes a process for shipping that many of the best teams from Amazon and Google use. I work from the beginning—a customer problem—through the details of user experience design, project management, and testing to the end result of launching.
Part Two contains techniques, best practices, and skills that a team lead who’s been asked to ship software needs. While Part One is arranged in the order in which you’ll follow the process, you can read Part Two in whatever order you like, and refer to it when you have a particular challenge.
Part 1: The Shipping Greatness Process
The problem we often face is that developing software features more often than not arrives late, misses the real customer need, or causes you and I to develop another ulcer.
One of the reasons we have these problems is that we don’t know how to put all the pieces of the shipping puzzle together in the right way.
This approach is not sustainable or efficient, which is why the best teams at Amazon don’t work like this.
the path to shipping greatness is composed of only seven straightforward steps that any team lead can follow, and generally results in both success and fun.
- Define the right product
- You won’t achieve greatness if you do a fantastic job shipping crap
- The right product is one that serves a real customer need that many customers share
- Once you have a mission and strategy, your product will be much more clearly defined and much less likely to be crap, because it will conform to a great strategy. You’re already done with step one
- Define your product as clearly and with as much detail as you can handle
- 10 major ways to do this
- writing a press release
- building a living FAQ
- writing the functional spec
- etc
- 10 major ways to do this
- Design the user experience
- Iterate with your design team to build a beautiful, intuitive, and simple user experience.
- Do basic project management
- help your team track their deliverables
- help them say no
- help keep the scope in check
- Start Testing
- product will start getting real
- This is a less creative but very exciting time
- Establish metrics by which you’ll measure greatness
- Your bug count will hit zero and you’ll be ready to measure your launch
- Time to buy the champagne and put it in the fridge
- Launch the product
- Not as simple as just uploading some files to a server
- plan your marketing and PR, and make sure that you go through a launch checklist
Chapter 1. How to build a great Mission and Strategy
SHIPPING IS ABOUT MEETING customer needs well and quickly.
Your mission, therefore, is to solve a customer problem.
Your strategy is your unique approach to meeting a need that a group of people shares.
How to Find the Right Need to Meet
From Larry and Jeff, we can learn that you have to focus on a real customer problem
How to Construct a Great Mission Statement
A great mission statement accomplishes three things beautifully:
- Inspires
- Provides an organizing, directional principle
- Fits on a t-shirt
For me specifically, it’s an objective, but it inspires, uplifts, dignifies, or ennobles.
How to Build the Right Strategy
Your strategy is a rough plan to win over your target customers given the unique assets of your company and the pressure from your competitors.
It’s a paragraph that states how you’re going to make your product more attractive than the competition’s product to a group of customers over the long term.
In short: customers, company, and competition.
It’s not a detailed product description, and it’s not a page of nuanced plans.
Chapter 2. How to Define a Great Product
As this point, you have an understanding of who your customer is and what that customer needs.
You also know what you need to do better and differently than your competition.
Now, you will brainstorm a rough product idea.
There are 10 major steps to the product definition process. Each step builds on the step before.
- Write a press release
- A less-than-one-page document that drives understanding and clarity and follows from your strategy
- Create a living Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document
- This running document collects objections and details that must be addressed
- add Qs and As to it in your “spare” time before and after the release
- Think like a wiki or confluence page
- Make wireframes or flowcharts
- Humans are visual creatures
- describe your product visually
- Write a one-pager or 10-minute pitch deck
- Used to pitch to VCs
- Add application programming interfaces (APIs) to your FAQ
- Draft a rough cut of your APIs in a few hours and refine them over time with the help of your engineering team
- Write the functional specifications document
- known as a product requirements document (PRD, at Google), or marketing requirements document (MRD, at Microsoft)
- It’s the bible that describes in detail how everything will work and why it works like that
- You’ll fill in sections by copying from your press release, FAQ, wireframes, one-pager, and APIs
- Review the product with design and engineering leadership
- The goal of this step is to get buy-in from the individual contributors and solicit their advice so you expose all potential edge cases
- Test the product concept on customers
- Name it, price it, and forecast your revenue
- Pitch your product to the execs
Step 1. Write a Press Release
Chapter 3. How to Build a Great User Experience
The 6 UX questions (really only 2 that matter):
- Can you reduce the number of clicks or taps?
- Is this the simplest solution?
Chapter 4. How to Achieve Project Management Greatness on a Budget
Chapter 5. How to Do a Great Job Testing
the High School Embarrassment Test: am I sure I won’t be embarrassed when an old high school friend sees my product?
The HSET helps ensure that your team is happy.
Chapter 6. How to Measure Greatness
The Three Classes of Metrics You Should Collect
- Progress Toward Goals
- SMART goals
- Business Performance
- profits
- users
- Systems Performance
- Overall health of the product
- Is it slow, where does it underperform?