1. Building a Great Product
Through Communication
Joe Stump, CEO of Sprint.ly
Friday, February 8, 13

2. About Joe Stump
• Early employee at three
startups ranging from
bootstrapped to venture
funded.
• Angel investor in three
startups.
• Advisor to seven venture
funded startups.
• Cofounder of three venture
funded startups (SimpleGeo,
attachments.me, & Sprint.ly).
• @joestump or joe@stu.mp
Friday, February 8, 13

3. Warring Factions
Friday, February 8, 13

4. Business
PMs Makers
Stakeholders
Faction A Mediators Faction B
Friday, February 8, 13

5. Meetings :( Meetings :(
Business
PMs Makers
Stakeholders
Faction A Mediators Faction B
Friday, February 8, 13

6. Check Your Ego
Friday, February 8, 13

7. EVERYONE IN YOUR
COMPANY IS
CAPABLE OF
HAVING A GREAT
IDEA.
Friday, February 8, 13

8. Quickly
Correctly Cheaply
Friday, February 8, 13

9. YOU CAN’T HAVE
YOUR CAKE AND
EAT IT TOO.
Friday, February 8, 13

10. “Want to increase
innovation? Lower the cost
of failure.”
Joi Ito
Friday, February 8, 13

11. ALLOW ENGINEERS
TO INVEST IN
AUTOMATION &
TESTING.
Friday, February 8, 13

12. Why?
• Iterating on your product is all about
shortening feedback loops
• Continuous deployment allows you to ship
on code commit
• Automated testing allows for aggressive
refactoring with confidence
Friday, February 8, 13

13. Product is Trench Warfare
Friday, February 8, 13

14. PRODUCTS ARE
EITHER DATE-
DRIVEN OR
FEATURE-DRIVEN.
Friday, February 8, 13

15. Non-Blocking Development
(NBD)
1. No sprints, milestones, or dates are tracked by
engineering
2. Items are scored, velocity is tracked
3. Each developer works on an item to
completion in a feature branch
4. Pull request via GitHub for review
5. Feature deployed immediately upon approval
via continuous deployment
Friday, February 8, 13

16. Why is this better?
• Shares reactive qualities of Kanban
• Velocity metrics allow you to do reasonable
capacity planning
• Features ship in real-time as they’re
completed
Friday, February 8, 13

17. Friday, February 8, 13

18. Our tools are broken
• Used as enforcers of messy human process
• Require humans / data entry to ensure it
“represents reality”
• Tools often paradigm-specific; everyone is a
little different
Friday, February 8, 13

19. WE NEED TO MOVE
TO 100%
ASYNCHRONOUS
COMMUNICATION
Friday, February 8, 13

20. Why?
• Look at production operations
management approach of monitor/react
over push/plan
• Hard to be agile when only 10% of the
business is agile
• Globalization is real, workers spread across
regions
Friday, February 8, 13

21. “You can’t ship process.”
VP of Product, Live Nation Labs
Friday, February 8, 13

22. @joestump
Friday, February 8, 13