Realization
We’re actually pretty fucking amazing.
Our team has a pretty wild shared educational background. We grew up in Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre’s Startup School. Together, we learned design, and tech, and business (whaetever each of those means independently and jointly). Because our school’s program is cast so widely across disciplines, we - as you probably know by now - are each wildly different. But there’s one thing that threads us together: Imposter Syndrome.
And rightfully so. We each know so much, about so many things. But so much only gets you so far. We never really know everything, about anything. We’re like 80% amazing in all we do.
I share this because as we’ve been building Dub, we (going to throw my co-founder’s into this bucket without their consent) have frequently made a successful leap forward only to look backwards and strongly question our own successful movement. Performance measure and reflection are powerful on a macro scale, but on a micro scale, this is unsustainable.
As I’ve shared a few times, I’m a really shitty developer. I say this because I always have a question and I frequently don’t have a great answer. However, over time (really just the past ~4 months), I’m still asking stupid questions, but I’ve got pretty deep knowledge to answer them with.
This past week, I spent a majority of my time doing a deep dive with Core Data and Combine, two Apple frameworks that are shrouded in mystery (a.k.a Apple’s notoriously lackluster documentation and technical writing from programmers - thrilling). In order to advance my knowledge, I read over 1,300 pages of technical writing and documentation and I feel pretty knowledgeable right now.
Yeah, I learned a bit - some quirks here and there, some performance optimization tricks, etc. But the biggest thing I learned this week was that there actually wasn’t much to learn at all. In building Dub pretty blindly over the past several months (quite frankly we’ve been learning MacOS development as we go), we actually got most things right from pure intuition. From a structural standpoint, Dub is pretty darn amazing.
So, what’s next?
As Anupam hit on in his post this week, our lessons from Pavan’s user research have given us fresh perspectives and exciting paths to push down. With the core product mostly built, we’ll be focusing strongly on delivering Dub to niche communities. As we functionally re-map, we’ll likely adopt a new approach to experimentation (which thus far, has largely been a practice in self-accountability + loose product management). Moving forwards, we hope to more closely match our original vision for experiments: real-world, open product experimentation. We’ve done the building (mostly) and now we can crank the experimentation up to 11.
Next Steps
For the next week, I’ll be taking action on building powerful data pipelines from our revamped, persistent model to the views we already designed for Dub v0.02. This should only take a week - I really really hope this only takes a week.