Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Things we've learned about building products

newsletter.posthog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 121 posts

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#101

Post by gwbas1c »

> Rely on trust and feedback, not process

Process is important when work is handed off from one team to another team. Any company with a non-trivial product will have a non-trivial team size; and thus it'll need to standardize how people hand off work.

It doesn't have to be onerous: The best processes are simply establishing boundaries so lazy people don't throw their work over to the next person. (IE, "I won't work on a bug without steps to reproduce and an unedited tracelog that captures the failure" is a good boundary.)

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#103

Post by ungreased0675 »

Maybe a hot take, but I think it’s better to build a successful startup with developers of average skill, intellect, and competence. You don’t need to obsess over finding genius level savants, unless the startup is a serious deep tech company. SaaS products will be fine with normal developers. Set up a process so you’re iterating and learning quickly, and it will be ok.

I’d be surprised if any startup failures were due to a dev team not being absolutely cracked. It’s always something like poor sales, PMF, refusal to pivot, lack of focus, etc.

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#104

Post by samstave »

simonw wrote: post #32
kevmo314 wrote: post #4

This list mentions A/B testing a few times and it's worth noting that A/B testing is great but it's not free. I've seen a nontrivial number of smart engineers get bogged down in wanting to A/B test everything that they spend more time building and maintaining the experiment framework than actually shipping more product and then realizing the A/B testing was useless because they only had a few hundred data points. Dat…

I think A/B testing is one of the most expensive ways of getting feedback on a product feature. - You have to make good decisions about what you're going to test - You have to build the feature twice - You have to establish a statistically robust tracking mechanism. Using a vendor helps here, but you still need to correctly integrate with them. - You have to test both versions of the feature AND the tracking and test…

The other issue with A/B is the imbued bias that comes from [TEAM] on [THING]

Meaning TEAM A has a want, and TEAM B has a want.. and its not about best feature its about "I told you so"

AB testing is great for sussing out use-flow-patterns, but oft may be used for ego (design team) testing...

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#105

Post by samstave »

light_triad wrote: post #36
simonw wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think A/B testing is one of the most expensive ways of getting feedback on a product feature. - You have to make good decisions about what you're going to test - You have to build the feature twice - You have to establish a statistically robust tracking mechanism. Using a vendor helps here, but you still need to correctly integrate with them. - You have to test both versions of the feature AND the tracking and test…

Some teams think they can A/B test their way to a great product. It can become a socially acceptable mechanism to avoid having opinions and reduce friction. Steve Blank's quote about validating assumptions: "Lean was designed to inform the founders’ vision while they operated frugally at speed. It was not built as a focus group for consensus for those without deep convictions" Is the Lean Startup Dead? (2018) https:/…

[flagged]

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#106

Post by geoffpado »

yCombLinks wrote: post #95
fdlaks wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally think there are more efficient ways to get a high signal to noise ratio on if you are going to be a good hire or not without having the candidate invest almost 9 hours into an interview process, but that’s just me

A 9 hour investment to make a decision that will strongly affect 50% of your waking life for years or decades doesn't seem like a big ask.

It's not that it's a 9-hour investment. It's that for someone looking for a new job, it's 9 hours * N jobs they're applying to. That adds up quick.

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#107

Post by throw16180339 »

andrewmutz wrote: post #66
fdlaks wrote: post #52

Wow. 900 applications down to 10 "SuperDay" participants down to 4 hires. All to work at.... posthog. What a depressing statistic. This felt like a humble brag to help make their point about hiring good talent and how many people want to be a hogger (or whatever they call people that work there) but this just really highlights how brutal the job market is. Yes the market is also flooded with unqualified applicants an…

> Let me know when you're on par with Google in terms of revenue or benefits or prestige Do you really choose your employer based on their revenue? or prestige??

It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money. - Albert Camus

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#108

Post by throw16180339 »

mannyv wrote: post #55
abc-1 wrote: post #9

There are companies out there that probably do none of these things and are x1000 more successful from a revenue or market cap perspective. Seems like the biggest successes are simply being at the right place at the right time and not being a complete idiot. Nobody wants to hear that though.

Salespeople are what make a successful company, from a revenue point of view. There's only one company that I know of that's been successful at that level without sales: Atlassian. Everyone else has salespeople. If you if you don't have salespeople then you need to make a product that works and fulfills user needs. And it has to be good enough for word of mouth...which is where posthog's experience comes in.

Does JetBrains have sales people? I'm not sure how big the company is, but they've been around for 25 years and the founders are billionaires.

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#109

Post by SR2Z »

fdlaks wrote: post #71
andrewmutz wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let me know when you're on par with Google in terms of revenue or benefits or prestige Do you really choose your employer based on their revenue? or prestige??

If I’m going to sit through 9 hours of interviews to maybe get an offer, then yes absolutely. I’m not going to work my rear end off for 4 years to get 0.5% of potentially nothing and go through your dog and pony show of an interview cycle

And 0.5% is generous, to boot - after dilution and share classing and options expiring you would probably be better off just working a big tech job.

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#110

Post by niteshpant »

sibeliuss wrote: post #56
fdlaks wrote: post #52

Wow. 900 applications down to 10 "SuperDay" participants down to 4 hires. All to work at.... posthog. What a depressing statistic. This felt like a humble brag to help make their point about hiring good talent and how many people want to be a hogger (or whatever they call people that work there) but this just really highlights how brutal the job market is. Yes the market is also flooded with unqualified applicants an…

Having attended a SuperDay, I can hands down state that their interview process is the best I've ever had (didn't get the job tho, which was probably for the best at this phase of life). Designed to perfectly lift signal and minimize noise, for what they're trying to achieve. Don't change a thing PostHog.

what was the process like? What made it so good? Asking because I'm trying to build out a process as well
Post reply on HN