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Get Real Notes and Quotes
GettingRealBy37SignalsFullText
Getting Real is about skipping all the stuff that
represents real (charts, graphs, boxes, arrows, schematics,
wireframes, etc.) and actually building the real thing.
Getting Real starts with the interface, the real screens that
people are going to use. It begins with what the customer
actually experiences and builds backwards from there.This lets
you get the interface right before you get the software wrong.
Getting Real is about iterations and lowering the
cost of change. Getting Real is all about launching,
tweaking, and constantly improving which makes
it a perfect approach for web-based software.
The benefits of Getting Real - Getting Real delivers better results because it forces you to deal with the actual problems you’re trying to solve instead of your ideas about those problems. It forces you to deal with reality.
Why you should underdo your competition
Once you iterate quickly and react on customer feedback, you
will establish a customer connection.
- Build Less
- What’s Your Problem?
- Fund Yourself
- Fix Time and Budget, Flex Scope
- Have an Enemy
- It Shouldn’t be a Chore
Conventional wisdom says that to beat your competitors you
need to one-up them.
This sort of one-upping Cold War mentality is a dead-end. It’s
an expensive, defensive, and paranoid way of building products.
Defensive, paranoid companies can’t think ahead, they can only
think behind. They don’t lead, they follow.
Do less than your competitors to beat them. Solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to everyone else. Instead of one upping, try one-downing. Instead of outdoing, try underdoing.
- Less features
- Less options/preferences
- Less people and corporate structure
- Less meetings and abstractions
- Less promises
What’s Your Problem?
Build software for yourself - When you solve your own problem, you create a tool that you’re passionate about. And passion is key. Passion means you’ll truly use it and care about it. And that’s the best way to get others to feel passionate about it too.
"Scratching your own itch."
As the designer or developer of a new application, you’re faced with hundreds of micro-decisions each and every day: blue or green? One table or two? Static or dynamic? Abort or recover? How do we make these decisions?
If it’s something we recognize as being important, we might ask. The rest, we guess.
And all that guessing builds up a kind of debt in our applications – an interconnected web of assumptions.
As a developer, I hate this. The knowledge of all these small-scale timebombs in the applications I write adds to my stress. Open Source developers, scratching their own itches, don’t suffer this. Because they are their own users, they know the correct answers to 90% of the decisions they have to make.
I think this is one of the reasons folks come home after a hard day of coding and then work on open source: It’s relaxing.
–Dave Thomas, The Pragmatic Programmers
Born out of necessity
Constraints force creativity
Run on limited resources and you’ll be forced to reckon with
constraints earlier and more intensely. And that’s a good thing.
Constraints drive innovation.