Move Fast vs. Build Quality

So one, for example, excellence and speed. There's always a question around that. "Hey, would you rather ship faster, or would you rather ship better?" In my opinion, when you have to make a choice, think more and ship better. Most experiments should be thought experiments.

Which are the products where you decide speed is more important versus which are the products where you have to say excellence is what's important?" I think that gives me a good understanding of their frameworks and why they're just saying what, and then we go back into concrete examples where they chose one versus the other, and then take it from ...

So that you can actually get the overall speed up and you have to have the right balance between addressing tech debt quality but also pushing these forward.

Brand wants to create a way for marketing to stay on track, not ship marketing assets that are totally off brand. Marketing wants to really quickly do bulk creation of assets. You could try to pack all of that in Figma Design, but it would be complex for the marketing use case and it would add complexity on the brand use case.

Once a year at least, someone still writes to me and says that we should have used a different term for MVP, that the misconceptions around MVP are driven by the choice of the term. And I always write them back and say like, "Please tell me the better term and popularize it and I'll use it. It's a great idea.

... click. So they launched this thing, it had 0% signups and they're like, "It's a catastrophe. We made the wrong value prop." It's like, how do you know? From one experiment you can never know. You have to be willing to do a series of experiments. Again, the logic of MVP is just, products take time to build.

We would have an idea in the morning, come up with some sort of functional prototype, recruit a bunch of people that are legitimately good prospective users, but have zero skin in the game, ship fast so people can start playing with it. In the afternoon, we're already running pretty full scale experiment.

I think we all kind of have intuition that there's just different audiences, right? And so if you know that kind of fundamentally, then the question is how do you package up the story the right way so that the audience is ready to receive it? And I think this can differ by the type of creator or the founder, whoever's posting it, and of course the ...

I'll say one final learning on this, again, you talk about friction, and good and bad friction, we thought once we built a goal picker screen, where you could pick between different streak lengths, we were like, oh, well, let's recommend that users do a harder goal, thinking that okay, well, a harder goal is going to be better retention, and we'll ...

You're not designing for a whole system, you're designing for something much simpler. And so, getting everybody to think that way, allows us to end up shipping faster, shipping simpler, designing faster, getting faster approval, getting insight, and then doing what I talked about with streak goal, being able to run iteration after iteration after i...

The SAFe image has gotten bigger and bigger over time. I think, what is this? Version six. I do know a lot of people who worked on SAFe, so I know a lot of trainers and I've worked with companies. The first time I was introduced to SAFe was when I was working with a bank back in 2015.

In a lot of organizations, the people who buy SAFe, they have not run large scale technology organizations before, or they're new to this way of working so they adopt SAFe and they hope it works because it looks like a nice plan, like we said, to go out and do things.

People talk about this as if there were a trade-off because when they think about speed, the thing they over-index on is rushing or being sloppy. What they should be indexing on is being really competent.

First question I want to get into is something that I think you see and the team at Linear sees that a lot of people don't see, which is that there's not actually a trade-off between speed and quality. I think a lot of people think this is just an innate fact and something I've heard you talk about is that's not actually true.

You need to have a beginner's mind on this type of stuff. So I think this is more true than ever, looking for people that respond and move quickly and think just faster and move faster. I think the fastest speed of learning, those types of companies are the ones that I want to bet on. I think those will end up surviving and thriving.

I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. Sometimes experience could be a crutch, especially in this world where the grounds are shifting so fast with AI.