Shipping Greatness: Practical lessons on building and launching outstanding software, learned on the job at Google and Amazon

APIs can be very useful but can also backfire because the engineers you work with may feel that APIs are their territory. Be careful — feel out the team first. If they understand that the idea behind you writing APIs is so that high-level management can agree on which teams will own which data, and which interfaces must be maintained as part of you

I honestly believe Eric Schmidt both espoused and lived to this principle. I heard him say, “Thank you for ignoring me; that’s why we hired you.” Sadly, he said this about someone else — I didn’t have the guts to ignore Eric because he was really much, much smarter than I.

THE USER EXPERIENCE IS not just what your product looks like, it’s how it works, too.

Your strategy is a rough plan to win over your target customers given the unique assets of your company and the pressure from your competitors. That’s it.

This strategy accomplishes what I need it to accomplish. It speaks to the type of product IMDb is going to offer and why the company is uniquely positioned to provide this service. It speaks to competition and how IMDb will be different, and justifies why IMDb should target a specific segment. It’s brief and to the point. It’s not excessively speci

The goal of adding APIs to your product description is to explain how your team will interface with other teams. APIs can also explain how external developers might work with your systems and what kind of data you’ll store.

It’s important not to say, “Make the login button less prominent.” We also didn’t say, “Move the ‘What’s your favorite team?’ promo up to the top.” Rather, we empowered the design team to make a collection of optimizations based on our prioritized business objectives, which we clearly stated.

If you’ve uncovered a big problem that many users share, you’ve completed the most important step of your product definition process. More important, you’re on the road to helping a lot of people in a meaningful way! These criteria — real, big, and shared — probably seem obvious, but more often than not, teams ignore them. They also form the corner

The best “eng managers” are those who have been promoted into the role because they love their teams, understand people, know how to ship, and want to build brilliant products. The worst are those frustrated engineers who only wanted more control and more money. You know who you are. Cut it out.