Question 1

What are the key takeaways from Nan Yu's episode on Lenny's Podcast?

Accepted Answer

1. Speed and quality are not a trade-off -- the most skilled practitioners move fastest. Aim to have a workable prototype within the first 10% of your time budget to validate key hypotheses early. 2. Protect IC workflows above all else. Say no to customization features requested by middle managers for reporting that degrade the daily experience of individual contributors. 3. Go beyond goals and jobs-to-be-done by finding the emotional hooks in your users' workflows. In competitive markets, the low-hanging goal-oriented opportunities are already taken. 4. Explore extreme versions of product ideas along specific attributes before settling on the balanced solution. The biggest risk is not seeing the right option because you never expanded the search space. 5. B2B software teaches companies how to work, not just solves problems. When building opinionated tools, find consensus among high-performing teams and encode those best practices as default features.

Question 2

What does Nan Yu say about speed-vs-quality and iteration?

Accepted Answer

"People talk about this as if there were a trade-off almost in a naive way because when they think about speed, the thing they over index on is rushing or being sloppy, and what they should be indexing on is being really competent or being like an expert. If you look at people who are at the pinnacle of their craft, you can basically tell how good the output is going to be of their work product by how fast they're going." - Nan Yu "Speed... What it really looks like is you have some rough time budget for how long you think something's going to take, and by the time 10% of it has passed, you have a workable solution. It's not like, 'Oh, at the halfway point, we have something that is maybe a candidate that we can play around with.' It's like, no, no, no. After week one you have something that works that tests some kind of key hypothesis internally." - Nan Yu "We don't have any expectation that the first version of it is going to be great. That is not in the cards. The first version of it is our best guess in the general direction of what we want to actually ship in the end. So, no one feels like they have to be a perfectionist and get everything all sanded down and really in tip-top shape. It just has to work and get the job done and validate or invalidate our major assumptions." - Nan Yu

Question 3

What are Nan Yu's views on speed-vs-quality, iteration, user-advocacy?

Accepted Answer

Nan Yu: "People talk about this as if there were a trade-off almost in a naive way because when they think about speed, the thing they over index on is rushing or being sloppy, and what they should be indexing on is being really competent or being like an expert. If you look at people who are at the pinnacle of their craft, you can basically tell how good the output is going to be of their work product by how fast they're going." Nan Yu: "Speed... What it really looks like is you have some rough time budget for how long you think something's going to take, and by the time 10% of it has passed, you have a workable solution. It's not like, 'Oh, at the halfway point, we have something that is maybe a candidate that we can play around with.' It's like, no, no, no. After week one you have something that works that tests some kind of key hypothesis internally."

Nan Yu

Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product)

TRANSCRIPT

Nan Yu

Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product)

Nan Yu

Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product)

TRANSCRIPT

Nan Yu

Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product)