Jared Gerstenzang, an Imgur veteran, writes on startups, product lessons, management, and developer tools businesses.
HN commenters pass along his Imgur management lessons among recommended reading on being a good boss.
Firstly disclaimer. I'm not a back-end developer, and we are building https://lowdefy.com, and considering if we are positioning our product correctly. The recent post about RethinkDB [1] got me thinking.
Also, considering advice from [2]:
- Build tools for a specific set of developers who don’t have the skills to build the tools they need.
This, and feedback from a few initial users have us asking ourselves if our target audience for Lowdefy is correct. With internal tools, we are directly targeting. mid-sized and larger companies, and currently our product is not yet packaged to serve their minimum requirements out of the box.
When we introduced Lowdefy to data analysts, backend devs, etc. they immediately responded very positively with a sense of empowerment - now they can get stuff on the web without learning html, css, js, etc. The complexity to do basic stuff on the web has not changed much since 2015 [3]
If we framed Lowdefy towards backend-devs / data scientists / analysts, would this be a better audience which resonates more with our value offering?
- Lowdefy makes building web UIs as simple as writing a query.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26443406
[2] - https://medium.com/@gerstenzang/developer-tools-why-it-s-hard-to-build-a-big-business-423436993f1c
[3] - https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2016-d3a717dd577f
These are just a few pieces I've liked recently.
http://firstround.com/review/radical-candor-the-surprising-secret-to-being-a-good-boss/
https://medium.com/@gerstenzang/21-management-things-i-learned-at-imgur-7abb72bdf8bf
https://hbr.org/2015/11/how-company-culture-shapes-employee-motivation
https://getlighthouse.com/blog/company-growth-everything-breaks-25-employees/