Best lever ever

I was first introduced to the concept of leverage when I was high school, in a physics lesson, the teacher told us the mechanism of hydrophilic breaks, and how a simple push on a “lever” can make the entire car stop, I didn’t think of it much then, till many years later when I read the book “High Output Management” by the legendary Andy Groove (Founder of Intel), he introduced the idea of leverage in management, and how can managers use simple techniques and tasks for a greater outcome, only then I started to look at different things from a leverage point of view and how it’s the secret and explanation of many things in life, like how the rich stay rich, or how China is using technology to control billions of people.

By definition leverage means the exertion of force by means of a lever, in product management I think Slack is the best lever ever. In a startup, you want to know every little thing about your product, in my case the product is a two-sided platform, like a baby in his very first months, he can’t do anything on his own and you want to be as close as possible the entire time and more importantly you want to react to events as fast as possible, and nothing is faster than a notification to your phone or laptop the second anything happens (startup idea? you’re welcome).

In my day to day activities I have to review and follow up on a lot of different things.. new designs, new code commits, tests passing/failing, builds passing/failing, App crashes, bugs, platform analytics, what went wrong? and why?

Thanks to these Slack integrations:

• New designs via Zeplin integration
• New commits via Gitlab integration
• New Crashes via Crashlytics integration
• New builds and test statuses via Jenkins integration
• New bugs via Sentry integration
• New platform activities via custom build bots.

I’m now able to see all of the above from my laptop or my phone instantly, and not just me, all the team members are also able to know instantly once something happens, and do their necessary part.

And before you say it, I think noise is a small price to pay for that big of a lever, don’t you think?