product development

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Weighing the Business Case for Quality
2 months ago
- The dichotomy between craftsmanship and making money is false; businesses can succeed by investing in quality.
- Stripe's CEO Patrick Collison argues that beauty and care in products drive rational customer trust and success.
- To get a mandate for quality, ask if there is a business case for it in your project or role.
- Products worth doing well are often used frequently, have product-led growth, focus on retention, high customer LTV, and demanding users like developers.
- Examples of craft-centric companies include Linear, Figma, Stripe, Wealthsimple, and Apple.
- Projects with low quality incentives, like internal tools, should be built to minimum standards and shipped.
- To work on quality-driven products, understand the business: customers, purchase drivers, and retention factors.
- When being recruited, ask how UX and quality contribute to business success to ensure alignment.
- Caring about craft isn't enough; customers must reward quality to avoid working uphill.
How to Not Die by a Thousand Cuts. Or, How to Think About Software Quality
2 months ago
- Quality is the experience of process, performing with grace and leaving things better than found.
- Software products are pure concept, infinitely malleable, and require constant maintenance due to changing world.
- Death by a thousand cuts metaphor applies to software: minor cuts (hotfixes, complaints, crashes) accumulate and degrade quality.
- Linear software workflows (Analysis → Product → UX → Dev → QA → Prod) concentrate risk at early stages and delay feedback, compounding debt.
- Quality responsibility belongs to all functions involved in product lifecycle, not just a dedicated QA team.
- Destroying quality includes mislabeling testing as QA, blaming individuals, creating blame culture, and normalizing deviance.
- Creating quality requires designing high-quality organizational systems and culture, co-evolved by stakeholders, without formulaic fixes.
- Perspective is crucial; seeking diverse, challenging viewpoints can improve quality outcomes.
- Constructive suffering is key to improvement—recovering fitness after slacking involves persistent effort and mindset shifts.
- Resources include systems thinking, failure analysis, collaborative practices, and self-improvement materials.
Steering the ship
2 months ago
- The founder started working for himself to avoid being bossed around and does not let customers dictate his work.
- Saying 'yes' too often to feature requests can sink a product; the founder frequently says 'no' to maintain focus.
- User feature requests often lack context and may not benefit the broader user base; understanding the underlying problem is key.
- Examples of 'hard no's' include avoiding automatic machine activation during validation due to technical costs and not becoming a payment provider.
- Feedback is collected over time, and features may be implemented years later when the problem space is fully understood.
- You can build for users without obeying them.
Are we in a GPT-4-style leap that evals can't see?
2 months ago
- The author believes a subtle 'GPT-4 moment' has occurred that current benchmarks fail to capture, with major implications for industries and the economy.
- Chat-based evaluation of LLMs is insufficient; speed of response often matters more than perceived 'quality' for everyday use.
- Gemini 3 Pro excels at design, generating visually appealing prototypes that other models cannot replicate, effectively acting as a midlevel designer.
- Opus 4.5 significantly reduces the need for constant supervision during coding tasks, allowing longer autonomous work with fewer errors.
- These advances together represent an order-of-magnitude improvement in the product development lifecycle, enabling management of a cross-functional squad.
- Current benchmarks focus on knowledge retrieval and isolated pass/fail scenarios, ignoring qualitative factors like design taste and iterative collaboration.
- New benchmarks are needed to capture real-world usage patterns and qualitative aspects, which may explain the disconnect between benchmark scores and economic impact.
XTC discusses Basecamp's Shape-Up
2 months ago
- Shape Up solves problems by giving development teams ownership and trust, removing backlogs, and using 'betting' to manage risk and communication.
- Red flags include fixed 6-week scope, potential demoralization from 'circuit breaker', longer feedback loops, and division between shapers and makers.
- Takeaways from the discussion include trying 'fat pen' design, using 'betting' and 'shaping' terminology, and minimizing Agile ceremony overhead.
Startup School - How to talk to users
2 months ago
- The author notes that the 2025 perspective is based on 'The Mom Test' by a YC founder.
- Despite founding Pebble and Beeper, the author rarely uses the formal framework from the book.
- Instead, the author builds products they personally want, hoping others with similar preferences will also want them.
The open-source Claude Design alternative has 77k GitHub stars and 1M+ installs
2 months ago
- Open Design was built as an open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Design within eleven days by Tom Huang's team.
- The development process emphasized 'humans write the contracts, agents write the implementation, and validation decides what survives.'
- Key features include BYOK (bring your own key) support for 22 agent CLIs, Apache-2.0 licensing, and a file-first method using DESIGN.md for design systems.
- The initial build cost was around $200, with ongoing expenses focused on top-tier agent subscriptions and minimal infrastructure.
- Open Design achieved over 1 million installs and 77,000 GitHub stars, reversing the typical funnel where installs exceed stars.
- Stars provide credibility, contributors, search visibility, and option value, but do not directly translate to revenue or active users.
- Monetization includes Open Design Cloud for convenience and team workspaces, generating stable positive cash flow without paywalling core features.
- The project distinguishes itself from copies by offering choices, focusing on user ownership, and building in an open, model-agnostic manner.
- Agents can replace headcount in coding, testing, and documentation, but humans remain essential for contracts, security, community, and taste.
- Lessons from ByteDance highlighted the importance of reliability and protocol thinking, while unlearning large-company tendencies to own everything.
- Vibe design focuses on owning files (like DESIGN.md) for long-term project sustainability, unlike vibe coding which prioritizes demos.
- For weekend builders, advice includes writing contracts first, enabling agent self-validation, and focusing on user-owned solutions rather than copying pace or scope.
Show HN: Excalibur. The open-source AI coding agent for product engineers
3 months ago
- Excalibur is an AI coding agent designed for product engineers, covering the entire product cycle: discover, build, verify, and ship.
- It features five core capabilities: time-travel for work runs with immutable event logs, discovery for scoping work items, a web dashboard for task management, support for any AI model provider, and handling the full product cycle beyond just coding.
- The tool ensures safety with approval gates, sandboxed execution, secret protection, isolated branches, redacted prompts, and an inspectable audit trail.
- Excalibur offers multiple workflows and methodologies, including structured features, security-first approaches, and discovery phases, with customizable options via YAML or an SDK.
- It includes both a free open-source core version and an enterprise version with additional features like governance, compliance, team coordination, and scalability for organizations.
A return to two-pizza culture
3 months ago
- The 'two-pizza team' concept at Amazon emphasizes small teams to enhance communication, autonomy, and fast decision-making, reducing bureaucracy and allowing reversible decisions without permission.
- As Amazon grew, organizational complexity increased with more teams, dependencies, and approval cycles, threatening the speed and ownership culture that initially drove success.
- Amazon's 'Working Backwards' product definition process involves writing documents like press releases and FAQs to clarify customer problems, but writing alone may slow idea validation.
- The emergence of coding agents and rapid prototyping, exemplified by the Amazon Quick Desktop team, allows building functional prototypes quickly before extensive writing, compressing idea-to-evaluation time.
- Teams should start with prototyping when uncertain about solutions, use the prototype like customers, learn from gaps, and then write documents based on tangible experience, improving decision quality and ownership.
- Maintaining a 'two-pizza team' culture with clear ownership, autonomy for reversible decisions, short feedback loops, and hiring for end-to-end problem ownership helps combat organizational inertia as products scale.

product development

Weighing the Business Case for Quality

How to Not Die by a Thousand Cuts. Or, How to Think About Software Quality

Steering the ship

Are we in a GPT-4-style leap that evals can't see?

XTC discusses Basecamp's Shape-Up

Startup School - How to talk to users

The open-source Claude Design alternative has 77k GitHub stars and 1M+ installs

Show HN: Excalibur. The open-source AI coding agent for product engineers

A return to two-pizza culture