Inspiring ideas are rarely incremental

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Issue #254: Severance, subtweets, and sauce
By Harris Sockel

A few years ago, I was on a team at Medium that had a pretty big goal: completely rebuild our onboarding experience. For context, “onboarding” is a pretty critical piece of Medium (and most consumer apps): It’s the moment when you select topics you’re interested in after creating an account. We use those selections to select story recommendations.

I vividly remember our team gathering around a designer’s laptop, peering over his shoulder as he demo-ed a mock-up of an animated card-sorting system, wherein brand new users would swipe through a few sample stories, Tinder-style, on various topics. Our algorithm would use those swipes to design a personalized feed.

This was 1000% different from what we had at the time (a list of topics to choose from). We didn’t end up shipping the swipes, but the design process symbolized something important to me: Inspiring ideas are rarely incremental.

Last week, I came across a story by engineering VP Arjun Shah that expands on this idea. Shah questions established tech industry wisdom around “minimum viable products,” the idea that releasing a rudimentary prototype is better than sinking time into a fully realized experience that may never pay off. “The most vibrant success stories,” he argues, come from teams “thinking in maximums” — asking themselves “What’s the biggest impact we could have?” rather than “What’s the smallest thing we could ship by the end of Q1?” Shah lists a few examples, like Dropbox’s obsession with flawless syncing across devices (which took them over a year to build — they spent the time because they knew it would set them apart) or Notion’s founders sequestering themselves in Kyoto to rebuild their first failed app from the ground-up (this also took a year, and put them on a path to a $10 billion valuation).

He includes an important caveat: Incremental improvements and MVPs definitely have their place in successful teams. Small tweaks and testable prototypes make up the majority of our day-to-day work. But, at the extreme, he believes, MVP-type thinking can “end up fetishizing half-finished work, encouraging builders to show something — anything — instead of grappling with deeper engineering or a fundamental understanding of problems.”

It’s a contrarian take, but I thought it was worth sharing because it made me think. I’m curious: What were some of the most effective teams you’ve ever been part of, and what were they aiming to do?

🔗 A smattering of links…

• For all Severance-heads reading this: I rediscovered an ode to American office parks, written by a former IBM design researcher. She traces the history of these giant isolated office spaces back to the 1950s, when “CEOs realized… horizontal architecture immersed in a park-like buffer lent big business a sheen of wholesome goodness.” (Caroline Sinders)
• For etymology nerds, here’s a list of 36 anachronisms (old words that have taken on new meanings): dial, footage, and subtweet. (English In Progress)
• A list of mistakes most of us make in difficult conversations, written by an executive who’s fired her fair share of employees. Mistake #1: dropping hints instead of saying the thing. (She once spent 45 minutes building up to firing someone… by which point the person thought they were getting a promotion.) (Kara Stern)
• From the archive: sins of the Average American Mom. (Caroline Beaulieu)
• I am weirdly pumped for these stamps. Goodnight, Mail. (Jason Kottke)

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Where does that je ne sais quoi that makes a dish memorable come from? A deft mix of sweet and savory. Miso in caramel. Soy sauce in chocolate. Redcurrant jelly in sauces and stews. The key is not to use salt or sugar, but to deploy salty or sweet condiments that contain nuance.

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