Baby steps and why it's more important

than your code skills

@ramonvictor

Front-End Engineer at

@ramonvictor

Recife, PE - Brazil

First of all, why this subject?

What this presentation is *not* going to be about?

What do I mean by “baby steps”?

Changing the mindset

But, does changing the process

mean we’ll be working on the right things?

Let’s talk about real business impact

My experience with failures

In the past I couldn’t explain why we failed, because…

• The idea was nice;

• We had an amazing Engineering team;

• Good dev. infrastructure;

• The team mastered Agile development techniques;

• Design process dream.

So, what was wrong?

Today, I have a few hypothesis about the why…

Here’s the main reason:

We forgot about business!

If I could go back in time, what would I try to do differently?

I wouldn’t take too long to launch the first MVP and validate the business impact

1

I would suggest reducing the technical team and investing more on customer service

2

I would not invest time refactoring the code to scale a platform that has no users

3

I would use measurement tools in our favor to make better business decisions

4

Believe me, it’s not a big deal

Failing fast!

From @jseiden - Lean UX: http://www.slideshare.net/jseiden/2013-oct-15-continuous-learning-and-delivery-dpm-summit-2013-seiden

Taking the evaluation step seriously!

Taking the evaluation step seriously!A/B test everything you can!

Taking the evaluation step seriously!A/B test everything you can!

Source: http://blog.booking.com/hamburger-menu.html

Base Variant

VS

Taking the evaluation step seriously!

Some tools that might help:

Learning with other people’s mistakes

We focused on building prototypes to validate that our vision was technically feasible. Instead, we should have released something.

Source: https://medium.com/inside-wattage/well-we-failed-77e795e16ecf

“

Conclusion

Don’t try to take a step bigger than your company can

Think big

…but start small

It doesn’t matter how awesome the technology you’re using is, your product should be solving a real business/user need.

And never forget!

Dank u wel! ;)

@ramonvictor