🙏 Points of inspiration for you this week before the summer heat kicks in, starting with ⤵️
Full Newsletter - [https://grocto.substack.com/p/from-brick-phones-to-ai-hidden-complexities]
Article of the Week ⭐
“The hardest part of creating software is everything you can't see. It's the little things that don't seem like a big deal.”- Matt Watson
- Hidden Complexities of Tech Startups (FinTech) Matt Watson, host from Startup Hustle in conversation with Niclas Lilja the founder of Younium dug through the challenges of investing into the unknowns. Building a successful tech startup requires more than just developing innovative features.
Fail to invest in these small issues and they may grind the company’s ability to manoeuver and deliver to a halt. The industry community likes to use the term technical debt for this, though it has nothing to do with the actual code, but rather with the organisation itself.
Drawing from over 20 years of startup experience, they emphasize the importance of planning for the unexpected in software development.
SaaS Billing is Complicated
Younium runs subscriptions. Subscriptions can be deceptively intricate. From different jurisdictions, regulatory challenges, types of banks, all sorts of landing page gizmos and discounts it quickly becomes an unruly beast.
Give the FinTech domains the attention and detail they deserve, and consider the full cost of ownership of such systems. Especially when they are secondary to your business or service offering.
Differences between EU and US culture
A key detail about the Europe that can trip over many local startups is that most countries prefer to use their local, non-english language. From invoices to emails and customer support, localization is the name of the game in fragmented multi-lingual markets like the EU.
EU tech companies trend to focus on local regulatory niches and and unique cases, while the US tech giants tend to favour scale-first to dominant english-speaking or US-compatible markets.
Scale Down—Avoid being “No one” in a big market
Niclas describes their strategic focus on having a laser-sharp and small Ideal Customer Profile. By nail their offering in a small market first they iterated on most impactful problems first, allowing them to price efficiently before scaling.
This Strategy differentiated the company from the commodity-offerings provided by the big players like Stripe and Salesforce who compete on the price-efficiency of super scaling from their packaged, baseline offerings.
Performance: The Need for Speed
Matt is adamant on the appropriate sense of urgency in startups for Product Leadership. Taking a pragmatic approach when it comes to their creed on how to build products (possibly from Kent Beck’s playbook):
Make it work.
Make it right.
Make it fast.
A startup has a much higher appetite for features than capacity. It’s important to focus energies and effort on validation of releases rather than optimisations and over-engineering.
Documentation and Onboarding
External documentation helps collaborators, vendors and business partners to interface and integrate with your product’s APIs.
It's an investment that pays off in the long run by enabling self-service and reducing the time spent on onboarding and support.
Internal documentation helps you onboard engineers simply and stress-free, allowing them to contribute to the product in their first days of joining. There’s a few more bits that wait for you in the full summary ⬇️
Other highlights 👇
✍️ Writing Tips for Improving Your Pull Requests
You’re not going to leave the description field blank, are you?
Jeff Mueller, Principal Engineer at Simple Thread details his experience in combining writing expertise with pull requests that we all love and cherish./s
Here are some of his tips on writing PRs well and still retain most of your energy.
Make it Scannable. Use bulleted lists for executive summaries. Make the first block the reviewer sees vertical and short. Explain the moving parts of the PR, rather than giving context (that can come later).
Speak Plainly. Use plain language, be simple rather than trying to sound smart. When possible, use shorter alternatives for key words, ie. use instead of utilise.
Avoid Adverbs. Words dead words ending with -ly can be dropped or replaced. Help the reader flow through the sentence faster. Like so: Fix slowly loading catalog view → Fix slow load of catalog view
And 2 more that you can check out in the full article ⬇️
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💻Tech Talk!
AWS App Studio promises to generate enterprise apps from a written prompt!
Amazon describes enterprise applications as those with multiple user interface pages, capable of accessing various data sources, performing complex operations like joins and filters, and embedding business logic. These apps are targeted at IT professionals, data engineers, enterprise architects, and product managers. Even those without coding skills but with the necessary company knowledge can leverage this to understand their internal software needs.
Do you think would it be something like PowerApps?
Removing Asymmetry of Information
Deb Liu from Perspectives details her time working with Ancestry to get a colossal feature project running that has been stuck for years. Here’s what she found after digging through the specs and collaborators and went down the rabbit hole:
It turned out that we were all the victims and perpetrators of asymmetrical information. Everyone was earnestly working on this issue from their own perspective, but no one had the full picture, leading to unnecessary roadblocks.
We ended up shipping the feature that had been on hold for years within a few weeks.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
What is Asymmetric Information?
In her words, it is the lack of the bigger picture. As information silos develop around departments and established relationships, entire teams are forced to operate with a constantly incomplete information.
Such silos are caused and entrenched by need-to-know information sharing and behaviour that promotes one-way conversations, where two people in the room speak past each other, each on their own agenda. Deb calls the the dreaded bilateral conversation (bilateral to denote the duality of the agenda, rather than collaboration).
She follows this topic in detail, elaborating on how to break up these silos in her full article 👇
That’s for Today!
Whether you're hustling with your side projects, catching up with the latest technologies, or simply relaxing & recharging, wish you all a lovely day ahead.
See you next week, Ciao 👋
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