Michael Lopp has been prolific over the years. In 2006, he wrote about shipping software, “Shipping a 1.0 product isn’t going to kill you, but it will try”

I took out three particularly prescient excerpts that resonate with the Foodzie team.

Process:

Process is the means by which your team communicates. Whether this is via a wiki, email, or the hallway, any team larger than one needs to define a means to share information. This is not an argument for specifications, documentation, or a whiteboard filled with do’s and don’ts. You just need to agree how you’re going to share information.

When your second engineer decides, “Yes, I’m going to capture my design decisions in a wiki”. That’s process. When your third engineer starts tracking bugs on that huge whiteboard in the meeting room, that’s process. It doesn’t have to be good, it doesn’t even have to be universally agreed upon on, it just has to be stuck in a place where every can see it.

Release:

At some point, you’re going to need to fake being done. You’re going to need to release something which barely looks like your pitch because you don’t have product until a neutral party stares at something.

Fact #4: You don’t have a company until you have a product

Product is not pitch. Pitch is the three sentence idea which gave you the credibility to hire the people. The people argued about the pitch, they created process to refine and develop the pitch, and that changed it. The pyramid wobbled hither and fro during all of this… maybe it fell completely over and you scrambled to stack those layers up again. Good job, there. You still don’t have product.”

Culture:

The hierarchy I describe is not a model for how to build a great product; it’s a picture that describes the culture of your company. That’s what you’re really building in 1.0. A lasting, interesting culture which, if you’re lucky, continues to produces great products.