Making Great Products: A Series
Interesting aspects of product development.
November 30, 2024
Apple Intelligence, so far.
The first big wave of Apple Intelligence features are arriving shortly, with iOS 18.2. For the last month, a beta has been available, offering a peek into this new AI-powered future. I’ve been curious what Apple’s ML teams have been cooking, especially given the industry-leading security and privacy commitments they’ve...
9 min read →
October 31, 2024
The four phases of automated evals for LLM-powered features.
I gave a talk version of this article at the first Infer meetup earlier this month. Let’s say you want to build an LLM-powered app. With a modern model and common-sense prompting, it’s easy to get a demo going with reasonable results. Of course, before going live, you test various...
9 min read →
May 6, 2024
Two of Slack’s original employees, Johnny Rodgers and Ali Rayl, have started writing a delightful newsletter/blog called Building Slack. There are some great passages already.
The clarity of the initial pitch from Stewart:
“You’ll know it’s working when you don’t have to use email at work any more.”
The very high bar for great customer support:
We turned around fixes and adjustments as quickly as we learned about them. We responded to each message personally — often directly from Stewart. This pattern and the fundamental respect that it demonstrated for our customers would become essential to Slack’s early success and eventual longevity.
The impact of Stewart’s famous “We Don’t Sell Saddles Here” memo:
He encouraged us to take personal responsibility not just for the tasks we were assigned, but for our shared mission in the biggest sense. This was operationalized in the early days. We would say “Somebody doesn’t work here.” As in, “Somebody should fix the typing lag in the search input” or “Somebody should follow up with the teams that churned last week.” Nope. It’s our shared responsibility, and you need to do it yourself or chase things down to ensure it’s going to get done.
It’s great. Start at the beginning.
December 30, 2023
The story of a plan: take a break, and get focused.
Last year, I realized it was time to switch things up. In 2010, my co-founder Nigel and I started Steamclock. The vision was to build products for clients, and use those profits to fund our own product development. Which worked! Mostly. We’ve built a client business that’s been growing and...
6 min read →
March 1, 2022
A little story about iterative experimentation.
Recently my team has been putting together some case studies. You know, telling the story of things we’ve built in a more timeless way than a 6-year-old blog post exclaiming “this is launching today, check it out!” with a link that has since become a 404. When it came time...
4 min read →
February 1, 2022
Finishing things requires simplification.
Project management is, roughly, the art of ensuring a team gets what needs to be done, done. Given that, a lot of the focus ends up being on those needs. Checklists, breakdowns, schedules, updates – all focused on the things that need to be done. While that’s all very important,...
2 min read →
September 1, 2021
Coordinating a large product org is hard.
Agilebits recently caused a stir with their announcement that they’ve rewritten 1Password 8 as a cross-platform Electron app, replacing their well-loved native Mac app. The takes came hot and fast. Like many developers, I love and appreciate a well-crafted native UI, and I’ve been somewhat skeptical of the consistent trend...
7 min read →
October 31, 2020
I attempt stop you from making a mistake.
I hear that you’d like to build a new social network. Seems like a good idea, right? Today’s social media is a tire fire, the companies that dominate it rake in billions monthly, and you have a novel concept for a social app that might make people feel less blue,...
8 min read →
January 31, 2019
Apps should be interesting, but not like that.
When launching a product, especially a consumer-oriented one, you want it to be interesting. A novel, bold, or distinctive UI can make an app stand out from the crowd, be memorable, and inspire curiosity. Plus, it’s cool. Luckily, there are a lot of ways you can make an interface interesting....
4 min read →
July 9, 2013
We try to make the best products we can.
“Minimum Viable Product. It’s an interesting term, and I don’t… I’ve never… really thought about it before. We don’t really do Minimum Viable Products, I guess we do Maximum Viable Products.” – Cabel Sasser A Maximum Viable Product is a product that is as good as the market will bear....
4 min read →
July 15, 2011
We make an app feel fast.
At Steam Clock we go to a lot of effort to make sure we ship apps with a high level of polish. Making your app solve the user’s problems well is the first 90% of building a great app. Polishing the hell out of that experience so it’s a joy...
5 min read →