“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are.” – Steve Jobs, Apple

Everyone talks about the ‘talent drought’ with engineers and designers but I would argue that talented product visionaries are very rare to come across these days. A recent article about Facebook highlighted, “while it has no problem hiring brilliant engineers out of top schools like Harvard and Standford, it’s found it difficult to find product people who can be “mini-CEOs” and get things done.”

I agree 110%. A good product person will be one of the biggest value adds to any company. What would Apple be without Steve Jobs? Or Facebook without Chris Cox? Or Foursquare without Alex Rainert? Or Kickstarter without Charles Adler? Or Airbnb without Joe Gebbia? The list can go on forever.

Much like Fred Wilson’s post on “what a CEO does“, the Head of Product for any company is responsible for three major things:

1) Setting the overall product strategy and vision.
2) Coming up with simple and creative solutions to the most complex problems.
3) Getting things done and shipping product by saying no to 99% of feature ideas.

Each team is setup differently, so your head of product can have a great design, technology, or product management background, but at the end of the day, his/her main focus is to make sure the ship is steering in the right direction. (Keep in mind that your Head of Product is NOT your Product Manager. Product management is one small snippet of the overall responsibility.)

For our team at Skillshare, I lead the product on the design side, and Malcolm (our CTO) leads the product on the technology side. We meet in the middle when it comes to higher level product strategy and vision. I can’t stress how much time & money we’ve saved by laying down a solid foundation for our product. You can have the best developers/engineers/designers/marketers/biz dev gurus/operations folks in the world but if your product sucks, none of that matters.

The biggest cost to a startup is time, not money.  Most start-ups fail not because the technology doesn’t work, but because they are creating the wrong product for the wrong market.

Like Frank Lucas says, “I sell a product that’s better than the competition at a price that’s less than the competition.” The same holds true for startups. Who can argue with a good product? A good product will always sell regardless of the environment. And for that reason, I will always take a valuable product person that can act as a mini-CEO and gets things done over 5 engineers any day of the week.

couldn't agree more

Flickr is somewhat unique in that it uses a code repository with no branches; everything is checked into head, and head is pushed to production several times a day. This works well for bug fixes that we want to go out immediately, but presents a problem when we’re working on a new feature that takes several months to complete. How do we solve that problem? With flags and flippers!

Feature Flags

Flags allow us to restrict features to certain environments, while still using the same code base on all servers. In our code, we’ll write something like this:

if ($cfg.enable_unicorn_polo) {
    // do something new and amazing here.
}
else {
    // do the current boring stuff.
}

We can then set the value of $cfg.enable_unicorn_polo on each environment (false for production, true for dev, etc.). This has the additional benefit of making new feature launches extremely easy: Instead of having to copy a bunch of new code over to the production servers, we simply change a single false to true, which enables the code that has already been on the servers for months.

Feature Flippers

Flags allows us to enable features on a per environment basis, but what if we wanted to be more granular and enable features on a per user basis? For that we use feature flippers. These allow us to turn on features that we are actively developing without being affected by the changes other developers are making. It also lets us turn individual features on and off for testing.

Here is what the Feature Flip page looks like:

Continuously Integrating

Feature flags and flippers mean we don’t have to do merges, and that all code (no matter how far it is from being released) is integrated as soon as it is committed. Deploys become smaller and more frequent; this leads to bugs that are easier to fix, since we can catch them earlier and the amount of changed code is minimized.

This style of development isn’t all rainbows and sunshine. We have to restrict it to the development team because occasionally things go horribly wrong; it’s easy to imagine code that’s in development going awry and corrupting all your data. Also, after launching a feature, we have to go back in the code base and remove the old version (maintaining separate versions of all features on Flickr would be a nightmare). But overall, we find it helps us develop new features faster and with fewer bugs.

Design and marketing are way more important than engineering for consumer Internet companies, argues angel investor Dave McClure

Over the past five years I've consulted with and/or invested in about 50 startups. I've gotten to know a lot of entrepreneurs and a fair number of the venture capital and angel investors who are backing these companies, most of which are in the consumer Internet field. And guess what? Probably more than half of the startups, and more than 90% of the investors, have no clue what they are doing when it comes to user experience and online marketing.

So what, right? Surely design and marketing aren't that important? Investors don't have to be experts in every field. After all, you don't expect every football coach to be an ex-football player.

Well, actually, yes I do.

Symphonies of Code

Design and marketing aren't just as important as engineering: They are way more important. Here are the two main reasons why:

1. Addictive User Experience (Design) and Scalable Distribution Methods (Marketing) are the most critical components of success in consumer Internet startups, not Pure Engineering Talent.

We have this image of space-age whiz kids such as The Woz [Steve Wozniak], Bill Gates, and Bill Joy, who could disassemble and reassemble a transistor radio, a toaster oven, or a mainframe computer, and who grew up writing symphonies of code and wondrous applications before they even lost their virginity.

Those guys were studs. They were god-like, and for their businesses—building computers or advanced software or operating systems—that kind of horsepower matters. It's the same, perhaps, for companies such as Google (GOOG), PayPal, Facebook, or Mozilla. You need a lot of geek to build search engines, or Web browsers, or fraud systems, or serious CAD software, or the movies that Pixar puts together.

But how much tech does it take to create most basic input-output forms for consumer Internet software, when so much of the underlying infrastructure has been built into the operating system and browser platform?

Visual Imagery and Copywriting

It's actually pretty easy to write a Web-friendly app or Web site these days. But it's still incredibly difficult to create visually appealing interfaces and, beyond that, to design them in ways that are compelling and engaging, drive calls to action, and are measurably adept at getting more customers to use your products. Figuring out game mechanics and activation, designing reinforcement schedules, visual imagery, landing page tests, and copywriting—all this is not trivial.

And if you have some success with your design, you still have to chase the scalable, predictable, profitable channels of customer acquisition … otherwise known as marketing. These days, most marketing isn't traditional PR and product placement. It's a very technically intensive discipline filled with SEO, SEM, social platforms, e-mail, widgets, social media, viral marketing, blogging, video, user-generated content, etc., etc. It's a traditional marketing person's worst nightmare—tens if not hundreds of potential marketing channels and campaigns with unknown costs, techniques, and payoff.