Week 39. OOO edition.
Hey,
I’m out this week, but I didn’t want to leave your inbox empty. Here’s a quick three things worth your time.
Something I read
At Duolingo, we don’t do MVPs—we do V1s. The difference is important: MVPs often have a lower standard of quality and can be used as an excuse to ship subpar work. V1s, on the other hand, are polished. They may not have all the bells and whistles, but they meet our bar. Sometimes this approach takes a little longer, but we refuse to compromise our users’ experience by showing them half-baked ideas.
I came across this handbook earlier this year and enjoyed this part about MVPs vs. V1s. Building an MVP is always a messy middle: what do you include that’s just enough to get an answer? I like the idea of going straight to a V1 instead: riskier and more expensive, but ultimately better suited to your audience.
Something I’m thinking about
In every team I’ve worked with, I’ve seen how easily the importance of context gets overlooked. Tools and dashboards can tell you what’s happening, but not always why. The why lives in conversations, historical data, past learnings, competitors’ moves, and market shifts. This is context, and that’s where you start to truly understand what you’re doing.
The easiest way to get or share it is simple: ask what led us here or tell the short story of how we got to this point.
Something worth remembering
Steve used to say to me – and he used to say this a lot – "Hey Jony, here's a dopey idea." And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room and they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet simple ones, which in their subtlety, their detail, they were utterly profound. And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.
Oldie but goodie. This one comes from Jony Ive’s reflection on Steve Jobs and the fragility of ideas. I like to remember it because it captures something we often forget in our casual day-to-day: every finished idea starts life half-formed and easily dismissed.
This quote is from Jony Ive, Jonathan Ive on Steve Jobs and the fragility of ideas.
Back to regular programming next week.
Alice
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