Use Ordered Lists
“I’ve been sitting here for 30 minutes just laughing at the unordered list on the whiteboard. You know you shouldn’t use those.”
I was a month into trying to be a “product” person, half an hour into my first meeting with @sippey, and I felt like I was doing everything wrong.
Because, well, I was.
“Unordered lists make all the prioritization implicit. What’s the #1 objective on that board right now? Now go ask your CTO. Do you think they’ll agree?”
Mark didn’t agree. And Grace, our first engineering hire, was working on something completely different.
“When teams make their plans for the quarter, they’ll rank them in order of priority. And then two weeks later, they’ll come back and say ‘well, we got #4 done.’
Why’d they do #4? Maybe they feel like they needed a quick win for the team. Maybe they just thought it was easy.
If needing a quick win for the team or doing something easy is the most important thing, then we should make it the #1 priority. Otherwise, we should do the most important thing!
Prioritization conversations are hard no matter what, trust me. But if you use ordered lists, you force them to happen upfront — before anyone dives in. Never use unordered lists. It will save you time and many hard conversations.”
I helped start Clef a year and a half after writing my first line of code. The first Python I ever wrote was a prototype of the original Clef API. Then I spent two years learning what it took to build a resilient, secure, performant, service-oriented architecture that is scaling to power logins on 70,000+ sites right now.
Now I’m doing something much harder: learning how to run a product team.
It’s far away the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Some days I feel so aimless I want to cry.
But more and more, I have those magical days where I feel like I know what I’m doing. Like I can see the future and can chart the path that takes us there. I’ll never capture the million small things that are changing in the way I think, but I hope I can capture some of the larger ones.
Lesson #1: use ordered lists.
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