Item — HN Reader

Development speed has been a bottleneck in every major product development effort that I have been involved in. From a realtime medical data collection application where president and VP are drumming their fingers on the desk waiting for development to be finished.

Writing a compiler at Sycor, there were teams waiting for us to finish our development. We were successful, being about an order of magnitude faster than the effort we replaced.

And just because google cancels products doesn't suggest anything about development speed.

If I were an LLM advocate (having much fun currently with gemini), I would let the criticism roll and make book using LLMs.

1 comments

Oh, I agree that in many companies, internally, we create perceptions that development is, indeed, THE bottleneck.

VP of Product put all the pressure on dev teams to deliver all the features against the specs. Then they release the new product/new version with plenty of fanfare.

And then literally no one measures which parts have actually delivered any value. I'd bet a big part of that code added no value, so it's a pure waste. Some other parts were actually harmful. They frustrated users, drove key metrics down, or have you. They are worse than waste.

But no one cared to check. Good product people, and there are scarcely few of them, would follow up with validation on what worked and what did not. They would argue against "major" releases whenever possible.

And seriously, if Amazon can avoid major releases, almost anyone could.

Suddenly, we might flip the script and have a VP of Product not asking "when will it be done?" but rather trying to figure out what the next most sensible experiments are.

Disagree. My experience is that it is a measurable fact and not a created perception.

And few of us can usefully compare what we do with what amazon google Facebook or other giants do.

Good luck on flipping their script. Meanwhile I’ll be over here making book