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Development speed is not a bottleneck

(pawelbrodzinski.substack.com)
191 points flail | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.923s | source
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thenanyu ◴[] No.45138802[source]
It's completely absurd how wrong this article is. Development speed is 100% the bottleneck.

Just to quote one little bit from the piece regarding Google: "In other words, there have been numerous dead ends that they explored, invalidated, and moved on from. There's no knowing up front."

Every time you change your mind or learn something new and you have to make a course correction, there's latency. That latency is just development velocity. The way to find the right answer isn't to think very hard and miraculously come up with the perfect answer. It's to try every goddamn thing that shows promise. The bottleneck for that is 100% development speed.

If you can shrink your iteration time, then there are fewer meetings trying to determine prioritization. There are fewer discussions and bargaining sessions you need to do. Because just developing the variations would be faster than all of the debate. So the amount of time you waste in meetings and deliberation goes down as well.

If you can shrink your iteration time between versions 2 and 3, between versions 3 and 4, etc. The advantage compounds over your competitors. You find promising solutions earlier, which lead to new promising solutions earlier. Over an extended period of time, this is how you build a moat.

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franktankbank ◴[] No.45139814[source]
Feedback from customers is the longest time.
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1. thenanyu ◴[] No.45140598[source]
Get it sooner then! By getting to market faster
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2. franktankbank ◴[] No.45141304[source]
Its one variable in the sum of all the times. You are asserting without much evidence that the bottleneck is the dev turnaround time. I think for a lot of people there's evidence that its dev is about 10% or less of the back and forth. I've sat on my hands for months while requirements have got sorted and no this wasn't something I could just jump into which I'm sure you'd (wrongly) suggest is the right approach. Have you ever been involved in a profitable project?
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3. thenanyu ◴[] No.45142055[source]
The only reason requirements need to be sorted out is because development effort is perceived to be expensive. If you reduce the development effort significantly, then you can just build it instead of talking about building it.
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4. franktankbank ◴[] No.45142364{3}[source]
Sounds like you need a trillion monkeys on typewriters. Easy!