How to Ship Fast

Advice for small teams searching for product market fit


  1. Avoid side quests
    If you aren’t writing code or talking to users, it’s a side quest. People will rope you into a lot of these so learn to decline them politely.

  2. Remove bureaucracy
    Your team should have a maker’s schedule1 and one short standup daily. Don’t cargo-cult into big company things like sprint planning and writing product specs.

  3. Hire fewer people
    Speed is a startup’s only advantage and you lose it with each hire. Your team should be exceptionally talented, painfully small and be able to ship. 2

  4. Hire people who can ship fast
    Find people who enjoy solving user problems and move with urgency, even when no one is watching. These aren’t teachable skills so make sure someone has it before you hire them.

  5. Optimize your tools for speed
    The primary goal of your tech stack is to help your team ship quickly. Avoid novelty and premature optimizations. A new hire should be able to fix a bug and deploy it to users on their first day.

  1. Maker’s schedule, manager’s schedule . ↩

  2. Shipping roles are engineering and design. Founders should do product, sales, recruiting and management, augmenting with contractors if necessary. ↩

· engineering