Guide to product development : YC Startup Library | Y Combinator

Before Justin.tv grew into Twitch and Socialcam we spent years with a broken understanding of how to build product. We had meandering product meetings where we didn’t write down our decisions. We didn’t carefully spec new products so team members often had slightly different ideas about what we were building. We always wanted to build fully formed products instead of MVPs. And we rarely spec’d the analytics for new products so we often didn’t know how they were performing post-launch. Development cycles often ran months. We were sick of the new feature by the time we launched them so we didn’t iterate. Our product roadmap was so long that team members weren’t excited to brainstorm new products because it was unclear if they would ever be built. And most horribly, product decisions were made exclusively by the founders in a non-transparent process. Things were a mess. In this post I’m going to cover product development cycle fundamentals that I learned to help solve all of the problems

saved by

• Zi T