It’s so easy to chase busy work that feels like real work, get praised to be in meetings, write fancy docs, ship code, fight self inflicted incidents, work late nights and weekends.
The thing that ultimately matters is adding value to customers. Understanding what they want to get done and removing enough friction that they’d rather pay to your product than go to a competitor or do it themselves.
Surely docs and meetings are necessary but you have to ask yourself “how does this add value to the customer? Can we have avoided this and still achieved the same outcome?” Ask that week over week.
I spent 2 years of my life working insanely hard but at the end, customers didn’t really get value out of it and it was a dud. Then I spent another 6 months deprecating and killing the feature. It was a very hard lesson.
It’s so easy to chase busy work that feels like real work, get praised to be in meetings, write fancy docs, ship code, fight self inflicted incidents, work late nights and weekends.
The thing that ultimately matters is adding value to customers. Understanding what they want to get done and removing enough friction that they’d rather pay to your product than go to a competitor or do it themselves.
Surely docs and meetings are necessary but you have to ask yourself “how does this add value to the customer? Can we have avoided this and still achieved the same outcome?” Ask that week over week.
I spent 2 years of my life working insanely hard but at the end, customers didn’t really get value out of it and it was a dud. Then I spent another 6 months deprecating and killing the feature. It was a very hard lesson.