Lessons Learned
building a product
RedEyeWFM
- RedEye's second product
- Started dev January 2016
- Product vision is enormous
- Huge problem we're solving
- Lot's of markets
Me
- Graduated 2014 - Computer Science
- Digital Agency Web Dev
- RedEye Software Dev
- RedEye Product Manager
Side-projects:
In the beginning (2016)
- 2 senior backend dev
- 1 front-end web 👋
- 1 mobile
Now a team of ~15 (including some non-dev)
On-paper experience might mean jackshit
- Really quite easy to stay employed 👏
- Experience should lead to soft skills
- Problem solving, team work, communication ++++
Choose the right tech
- Really hard to get right, test and fail first
- But "I saw it posted at #1 on HN last night" is never a good justification
- "Yeah but MySQL is not webscale"
- "PHP can't handle serious internet traffic"
Microservices are hard
- API Gateway in front of a bunch of servers
- Shared authentication
- Fragmented data
- Networking
- Deployment?
- Versioning & Testing
- Monitoring & Logging
- Replicating prod issues on dev
All of this and we're not really even talking about features...
But, decoupled Architecture Pays Off
- Built an MVP:
- Java Backend + SPA + iOS App
- Threw away Backend
- Minimal change to SPA + App
And quality-of-life development is awesome
- Continuous Delivery (auto deploy)
- Speeding up build times
- Making developer experience nicer
These things make you more productive, helps with small team, big product
Some tech stack choices come with pre-requisites
Pre-reqs such as:
- Experience
- Money
- Time
- # of Staff
...most startups don' t have much of these
tl;dr: Keep it simple!
Make the product more valuable without making it more complicated
- product
- tech
- ux
Ways I help the team
- Insulate them from business bullshit
- Give them time and breathing space
- Meetings suck