How We Build Things at YPlan
We’ve built an amazing variety of products here at YPlan. Everything from much-loved, 5-star rated customer apps and a cutting-edge website, to internal systems, tools and integrations with arcane APIs. All of this has only been possible because of our top team.
We have a set of guiding principles that help our team to do it all quickly and efficiently. We refer to them when making decisions and building our products — hopefully they’ll be helpful for you too:
Every day counts. We’re a startup — this means that our main goal is discovering a product our customers love, use and can’t live without. As a startup we’re firmly in this “discovery” mode and hence we are constantly racing against the clock. Every day we should strive to build things that help us learn, directing us on the path to product and customer discovery. Hence everyone in the team thinks about their daily and weekly goals, and makes sure every day counts.
Small steps > big launches. We’re always trying to break things down into smaller pieces which deliver value to our customers. We ship them out in small steps instead of doing it in large batches. This helps us to learn faster (see above), add value to our customers as early as possible, and allows us to figure out which things are not that important. Therefore we push back on complexity, and always try to reduce scope and simplify things until they’re as simple as possible (but not simpler).
Focus on resilience. We know that we’re likely to change things as we keep going forward and learn new things. The goal isn’t to solve all possible future problems now, but rather to not carelessly do things that make those future problems unnecessarily harder. Therefore our systems are built in such a way that they can be changed, improved, augmented and adapted by the original author as well as other team members. We’re advocating code reviews and tests. We’re smart about picking tools appropriate for our situation and team size. What may be appropriate at Google or a company with three engineers may not be appropriate at YPlan.
Focus on simplicity. We’re not striving to be 100% perfect/optimal in pure algorithmic sense. Instead we’re pushing back on complexity (again) and settle down on solutions which may not be perfect, but instead are easily understood and adaptive. We’re excited by problems we’re solving rather than new shiny tools to solve them with. If possible we prefer a small number of well-known tools to help us solve problems. If it works we keep doing it, if it doesn’t work we change it.
Focus on quality. We’re known for exceptional product quality and polish. We keep high-quality standards (from the codebase to the final customer-facing products) and hold ourselves to them. We are our own customers first and foremost, and always think about all X’s (CX, DX, UX and UI).
