(2024-01-21) Backlog Size Is Inversely Proportional To How Often You Talk To Customers

Backlog size is inversely proportional to how often you talk to customers. ..every spare hour has been poured into a venture I started providing event and ticket management services for comics. It’s been relatively successful with tens of thousands of tickets sold

This post is a collection of some of the learnings from this time

Replace planning time with talking to customers

Instead of spending time planning and concocting roadmaps, replace that activity by talking to current or potential customers on how their lives can be improved. (compelling)

There is no point to having a large backlog because the bigger the backlog, the higher the unvalidated assumptions, and the lower the chance that it creates any customer value.

Planning time is best used focusing on how to build the feature, not what to build. The what should come directly from the customer

Reduce time spent on UI design; focus on technical component design instead

Get a basic UI out the door which uses your current understanding of how a customer might use the app. By following the basics, it’ll be 60% right and that’s all you need. You can hone the rest through customer feedback. (the bootstrap bar)

Implementing that feedback depends on how well-designed your UI code is, and focusing on good component design instead of wireframe/visual designs is time well spent.

Small components and low-level reusability are key in UIs that are easy to change.

Keeping technical debt low

How you think people use your app is different than how they use it

I use PostHog’s session replay feature and am amazed watching videos of how customers use the product

Implement account spoofing

the ability for an admin user to use the app as if they were a specific production user

You may not be able to do all write operations while spoofing (e.g., updating payment methods), but most operations are read, and even the write ones are reversible.

Page one (home page, dashboard) real estate is critical to a seamless experience

Running various types of experiments on what the engagement numbers here are is well worth the time.

Your customer is your most important marketer

Even though NPS has its criticisms, I’ve found it a good metric to indicate whether customers feel strongly enough about your product to stake their own reputation on it.

MVPs are pointless if you’re not going to iterate on them.