3.2.1 - Atomic Scaling: Live Product
Hey,
Happy 3-2-1 Thursday!
Today, let's dive into Live Product.
In games we stopped talking about launches years ago. A product is not finished when it ships; that is the day it starts learning. The same mindset is the fastest way for a small team to out-build a big one. Here are 3 ideas, 2 quotes, and 1 question to consider this week.
3 Ideas
I.
It’s Alive: Live product is very similar to the concept of Agile. You launch your product early, collect data from users, and keep improving it. The difference is where the truth lives: not in the backlog, but in the behaviour of the people using it this week. Ship the smallest thing that lets a real user do a real job, then watch what they do with it. Every week you delay a launch is a week of data you will never get back.
II.
Match delivery and production: Match a dynamic synergy between live operations and releases, ensuring integration and continuous enhancement of the user experience. In practice that means one team owning both the roadmap and the dashboard. When the people who build the feature also watch the numbers it moves, the next release designs itself. Split those two and you get features nobody asked for and metrics nobody acts on.
III.
Dynamic Features: Introduce features that can evolve and adapt based on user interactions and preferences, providing a personalized and responsive experience that evolves over time. Remote configuration, feature flags and segment-level defaults let a three-person team run experiments that used to need a department. Change the product for ten percent of users on Tuesday, read the result on Thursday, roll it out on Friday.
2 Quotes
I.
"Every product we ship is just version 1.0. We never stop learning, and we never stop improving. Our products are live, and we're always making them better."
- Reid Hoffman, Co-founder of LinkedIn
II.
"Our philosophy is that we are always going to be a work in progress. We're always going to be shipping. We never consider the job to be done."
- Mark Zuckerberg, Co-founder and CEO of Facebook
1 Question
Do you have an updated set of metrics to check every week to see if your direction is going well? If not, start this week: pick five numbers, put them on one screen, and open it every Monday before you open your inbox.