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

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

YOU CAN FREQUENTLY ASSESS the quality of a team by the quality of their metrics. Metrics are the lifeblood of a team lead because everything in your job is a negotiation, and metrics provide a rational foundation for discussion. If you don’t back up your statements with metrics, you’ll sound like Animal the Muppet. You also need metrics because you

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.

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

As you think about your company, customers, and competition, pay special attention to how your product will serve your customers better than the competition’s product in the long term. This is the one time in the shipping process in which it’s OK to think about competition, so revel in it! You need to think hard about the long term, because if you

teams.

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.