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

Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 101 posts

Re: Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings

#71

Post by irjne »

alephnerd wrote: post #50
pwarner wrote: post #3

I work at a less innovative place, and I see out product managers coming with prototypes, at least solid mock ups rather than just a jira. They socialize it with potential users, they iterate, they find missing requirements, it's pretty powerful. The net result is we're building better features faster.

Can confirm this in my portco's and a couple other peers (one of whom previously founded a major threat intel platform). If you have product-minded Engineers and engineering-minded PMs, you can merge the two into a single function and remove much of the friction surrounding requirements, prototyping, and launching MVPs. A couple of these products are already being deployed by F100 security teams as we speak. I also k…

[flagged]

Re: Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings

#72

Post by alephnerd »

irjne wrote: post #69
alephnerd wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most early stage companies are now doing the same thing as well. It's basically a re-invention of the "build fast and test" model that was the norm amongst startups in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Yes it led to some degree of tech debt, but it also made it easier to experiment, validate, and identify good and bad workflows. At least in my network, we don't think AI will replace all workers and we strongly believe…

The build fast and test model was nonsense to begin with. Ultimately it’s a way of saying “I have no vision so I just want to quickly throw a bunch of shit on the wall and see what sticks”.

How is it nonsense? Vision doesn't matter - customer feedback matters.

You start off with a hypothesis (X will solve Y's problem by doing ...), you build a prototype, and then you start testing with multiple Ys. Based on that feedback, you then tweak your initial hypothesis or you scrap it and pivot.

The whole point of engineering is to build tools that solve a specific class of problems for the buyer.

Re: Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings

#73

Post by skeeter2020 »

irjne wrote: post #68
Esophagus4 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Google tried this a while ago (flattening the org). It didn’t work, so they went back to having managers.

It only works if the person at the top is a real visionary. And you’re talking about a handful of people on earth who have this frankly.

I think the charisma at the top masks what's happening internally though. I've never experienced - or learned post factum - of a mesiah leader who didn't have at least one amazing administrator operating in their shadow. Does Dorsey have this?

Re: Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings

#74

Post by irjne »

alephnerd wrote: post #72
irjne wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The build fast and test model was nonsense to begin with. Ultimately it’s a way of saying “I have no vision so I just want to quickly throw a bunch of shit on the wall and see what sticks”.

How is it nonsense? Vision doesn't matter - customer feedback matters. You start off with a hypothesis (X will solve Y's problem by doing ...), you build a prototype, and then you start testing with multiple Ys. Based on that feedback, you then tweak your initial hypothesis or you scrap it and pivot. The whole point of engineering is to build tools that solve a specific class of problems for the buyer.

[dead]

Re: Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings

#75

Post by skeeter2020 »

loteck wrote: post #61

Since the crux of this seems to be about replacing middle managers, what do people think prevents AI from successfully managing 140 direct reports on day to day operations on behalf of a lone CEO? I'm reading "it doesn't work," but that sounds like more of a potential opportunity to me than a truism.

My take: a HUGE part of the day-to-day job is human aspects and social interaction; if you could get AI to cover this off (and IMO you can't and don't want to) why even have employees? There are way more efficient and cost-effective ways to get technical work executed.

Re: Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings

#76

Post by skeeter2020 »

lvl155 wrote: post #42

Prototypes of what? What new products came out of Block in the past six years since pandemic? This makes it sound like Block is a place of innovations when it’s just a rent seeking enterprise.

"CEO pushes incremental gain as huge disruption that proves prior controversial decision correct" - I need AI to tighten my headline.

IME people good PMs already did this WITH slide decks, then tools like Balsamiq, and now AI tools, so it's made the process easier? quicker? people spend as much time but go further down actual implementation? Unfortunately I assume the last, which is too bad, but there doesn't seem to be a much story here.

Re: Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings

#77

Post by skeeter2020 »

just_once wrote: post #22

I'm not sure what the flex is here. Is the idea that prototypes give the Permission Granter more fidelity into a proposal and therefore can make better decisions? Whereas before, with Slide Decks, the Permission Granter couldn't experience certain things and therefore couldn't make as good decisions to grant permissions? So in effect this remains a billionaire figure speaking from their own perspective and we're supp…

it's easier for the 6-layers-removed CEO to convince themselves that "it's pretty much done" when seeing a shaky prototype vs. a powerpoint.

Re: Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings

#78

Post by iainctduncan »

And this is better how exactly? If you're running a business, do you not want to catch employees mistakes as early as possible? Most ideas are crap. I'd way rather they get elimated after someone spent an hour making slides than a day vibecoding a prototype.

And then there is the problem that vibecoding is addictive so the more one has done of it on the prototype, the worse one's judgement of whether it's actually something worth building...

Re: Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings

#79

Post by paradox460 »

bigtex wrote: post #59
torben-friis wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've come to realize a lot of business trends can be reduced to "higher ups are now convinced that x is not actually necessary". See "we don't need managers" (flat orgs), "we don't need infra" (DevOps philosophy), "we don't need QA" (devs handling testing), "we don't need product" (product engineering), "we don't need frontend devs" (no code generators) and of course all the AI related workforce reduction. To me, it…

What is funny is the Adobe executive who proved that yearly employee review process is no longer needed over a decade ago but for some reason the trend never caught on across the corporate world. Seems that some trends just don’t catch on for some reason.

Getting rid of sadistic reviews of underlings? And take aways their fun? What's wrong with you?!

Re: Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings

#80

Post by wenc »

pwarner wrote: post #3

I work at a less innovative place, and I see out product managers coming with prototypes, at least solid mock ups rather than just a jira. They socialize it with potential users, they iterate, they find missing requirements, it's pretty powerful. The net result is we're building better features faster.

We need to match the tool to the uncertainty we're facing.

The "just prototype it" thinking addresses "feasibility uncertainty". It surfaces blind spots and helps people tangibly reason about what the product looks like. It's a great exploratory tool for incremental ideas.

But it doesn't address the the larger uncertainty that startups are faced with: "market uncertainty" (or pmf). It doesn't answer "should we be building in this the first place?" That's where writing as a tool of thought is most powerful -- it helps you crystallize what problem we're actually solving.

The "just prototype it" culture (which is being promoted these days because Claude Code makes it easy) risks answering the wrong question, or at least the right question but in the wrong order. You end up with organizations that are incredibly fast at building things that no one should have built.

Ironically sometimes you need to start from a lower resolution (i.e. writing a doc). Prototyping too early is premature optimization.

Post reply on HN