Are you building the right thing?

From experience, I know how easy it can be to over-engineer a feature nobody actually wants, or succumb to the sunk-cost fallacy and continue down the wrong product path for too long. To counteract these mistakes, you need to build a habit of constantly questioning your decisions – of keeping the bigger picture in mind. […]

Designing at the right level of abstraction

As SharpestMinds matures as a company, good design is becoming increasingly important. For most of the company’s lifetime, we embraced a design-on-the-fly, just-make-it-work attitude. Without much more than a text or verbal description, we would simultaneously plan, implement, and design new features for our web-app. This approach worked well enough while we iterated towards product/market […]

The Lean Habit

A framework for building habits from the ground up Joining an early-stage startup was a turning point in my life. I joined SharpestMinds two years ago as a relatively ignorant PhD dropout. But, since then, I’ve gotten a crash course in startup culture and best practices and, in an effort to keep up with the […]

Rework (highlights)

My Kindle highlights from Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson Why don’t we just call plans what they really are: guesses. Start referring to your business plans as business guesses, your financial plans as financial guesses, and your strategic plans as strategic guesses. Now you can stop worrying about them as much. They […]