Directional decisions

Key ideas

Using Writebook as his example, Fried argues a few directional decisions set a product's whole course, and that choosing one rules out large amounts of later work.

1. 1

   Separate directional decisions from common ones

   Fried writes that building a product involves a thousand ordinary decisions that change a feature or a design, and only a handful that change where the whole product is heading. He says one of the latter shuts something off or opens something up, and settles many later questions at once.

2. 2

   Ask what the product exists to do

   Fried's test is what becomes easy with the product that was hard without it. For Writebook he reasons that there are many tools for writing a book, while putting one online in a simple form takes custom work or a bent blogging platform. That gap pointed to publishing as the center.

3. 3

   Building forces the tradeoff

   Fried says treating writing and publishing as equals once seemed reasonable, but he rejects reasonableness as the measure. Saying a product should do everything well is easy because talk costs nothing, he argues, whereas building forces a choice.

4. 4

   Let the work expose the decision

   Fried recounts that the team was building multi-author change tracking because writing software usually has it. In a design review he decided it would work but would not be useful, and that it would distract from the publishing work. He wrote up his view in the project, and the team kept only a minimal history as a backstop against major mistakes.

5. 5

   Check the call against real requests

   Fried reports that a few weeks after release, change tracking and advanced collaboration had barely been requested. He says he is glad the team explored the idea and more glad it dropped it, and calls publishing the right direction. That is his own early read, a few weeks in.

In Jason’s words

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