Articles on Product Development

How a Small Team Iterated Rapidly by Running Up to 12 User Tests Per Week

“Movie time!” My team and I huddled on the couches to watch the latest batch of movies — videos really — of users testing out our product. For several weeks during the most recent product redesign at Quip, we ran tests on UserTesting — a virtual user testing lab that lets you get videos of real people sharing their thoughts as they test out your product. Watching these user videos... (more)

Why’d You Do That?!? An Engineer’s Guide to Debugging User Behavior

“Why isn’t my code doing what I expect?” That’s a question we ask ourselves every day as software engineers, and we’ve built a repertoire of techniques to help us debug code when things go wrong. Tools like breakpoints and strace let us inspect the state of a running system. Assertions and print statements enable us to validate our assumptions about a program’s behavior. Minimal reproducible test cases eliminate distractions so... (more)

What 2 Years Spent Self-Publishing a 77,000-Word Book Taught Me about Shipping Products

Two years ago, when I quit my job at Quora to write my first book full-time, I didn’t really know what I was getting into. I had a romanticized notion that I’d travel around the world for a year, sipping lattes at cafes and happily typing out chapters, and then come back with a book that readers loved and that made a meaningful impact on their lives. Reality followed a... (more)

The Hidden Costs That Engineers Ignore

“It’ll only take me a few hours to implement the feature,” we sometimes say. But after finishing, we find that every few weeks, we’re either fixing a bug with the feature, explaining it to another engineer, or helping answer a question from customer support about how it works. The total investment of time to maintain the feature far exceeds the initial few hours of development. One of the hardest lessons... (more)

“A comprehensive tour of our industry's collective wisdom written with clarity.”

— Jack Heart, Engineering Manager at Asana

“Edmond managed to distill his decade of engineering experience into crystal-clear best practices.”

— Daniel Peng, Senior Staff Engineer at Google

“I wish I had this manual to give my engineers when I was a VP of Engineering at Twitter. This summarizes and presents everything I used to tell my team.”

— Raffi Krikorian, Engineering Director at Uber

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“A comprehensive tour of our industry's collective wisdom written with clarity.”

— Jack Heart, Engineering Manager at Asana

“Edmond managed to distill his decade of engineering experience into crystal-clear best practices.”

— Daniel Peng, Senior Staff Engineer at Google

“I wish I had this manual to give my engineers when I was a VP of Engineering at Twitter. This summarizes and presents everything I used to tell my team.”

— Raffi Krikorian, Engineering Director at Uber

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