💡Inspired

The expensive mistakes are made before any code is written. A product team's first job is discovery: finding out cheaply whether an idea is valuable to customers, usable by them, feasible to build and viable for the business, and only then delivering it. Teams that are handed a list of features to ship are not doing product work at all, whatever their titles say.

• A re-read, second edition, started six days after the launch to check what I had skipped. Finished on 29 March, the day of the partial eclipse.
• First read in 2019, when I underlined everything. This time I underlined four things.
• It is a book of short chapters by a man who has seen every way a product team can be reduced to taking orders. Useful, and a little pleased with itself.
• What I had skipped in 📂 Exceptions Inbox general availability: I tested whether people wanted it and whether we could build it. I did not test hard enough whether it would survive our own Sales calendar.
• The quote I keep with it is 🏛️ Ada Lovelace's, from 1843: 💬 The Analytical Engine has no pretensions. A delivery team is in the engine's position. It will build whatever it is told to build, so somebody has to find out what is worth ordering.
• The picture for doing that came six months later, from Torres: 🧩 Opportunity solution tree.