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Development speed is not a bottleneck

(pawelbrodzinski.substack.com)
191 points flail | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.392s | 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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epolanski ◴[] No.45140412[source]
I don't buy it.

Prototyping was never the issue.

The lessons you're talking about come from stressing applications and their design, which requires users to stress it.

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thenanyu ◴[] No.45140454[source]
So give it to users?
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bob1029 ◴[] No.45140513[source]
There is often a severe opportunity cost associated with experimenting on your customer base.
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1. estimator7292 ◴[] No.45143497[source]
We've been doing this for fifty years, please catch up with the times.