The 5-Minute Startup CTO #31

Product catastrophes, Team cognitive load, Day 1 mindset

Here are your picks for this week:

🥫All roads lead to the Product

Joe Leech on the top 4 Product Catastrophes you may face one day… And how to survive them. I love learning from others’ war stories, and this is well worth a read.

With one caveat: the ‘solutions’ tend to miss a key ingredient, the context. Example: if your existing design is poor, and your company doesn’t have much to lose, replatforming AND redesigning at the same time could well be the best option. So understand your context before jumping to any conclusions.

🔄 Process makes perfect

Is the monolith vs microservices debate still going on? Yes according to Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, and it is the wrong question to answer.

So instead, think about how you want to organise your teams, and support their cognitive limitations. Their new book seems worth adding to your reading list or anti-library.

💡 Idea of the week

The excitement of starting something new, the energy to make it happen and the open mind of ‘everything is possible’. How can you preserve and nurture that ‘Day 1 Mindset’?

Michael Morris suggests a few techniques well worth considering. One more suggestion: give yourself a few hours of quiet in the middle of nature.

Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.
- Jeff Bezos

I hope you enjoyed this

Fabrice

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Hand-picked by Fabrice, a UK-based consulting CTO. Let me know if you need help with your startup!