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Listen on iTunes and Watch onĀ Youtube.āTo build a good product, youāve got to embrace change. When you have a product and you change something about the product, thereās really only three outcomes. Itās going to get better, itās going to get worse, or itās going to stay the same.āāāāDaneĀ LyonsOn this special edition episode, Hacker Noon Founder & CEO David Smooke guest hosts to discuss the process of making great products with newly hired interim CTO Dane Lyons. Dane is the founder of v1labs & Knowtify, and he is one of the best product mindsĀ around.Full Transcript:
David Smooke: Hello and welcome to the Hacker Noon and Podcast. I am your guest host today, David Smooke, founder and CEO of Hacker Noon, how hackers start their afternoon. Iām the guest host today because weāve hired a new person and a new firm, Dane Lyons of v1Labs. Iāve known Dane for a while and heās going to serve as interim CTO, as Hacker Noon builds itās own infrastructure. And Dane is a great person for this because heās built a lot of products, heās really one of the better product minds that Iāve had the chance to work with in the past. We worked together in his first company. I worked for him at Knowtify and they sold to Kissmetrics, where Dane was an engineering leader there for a while. And before that, a lot of cool stuff with how tags and stories work at, I forget the companies name now. but it got bought by Walmart, WalmartĀ labs.
David Smooke: And anyway, today weāre going to talk a little bit about the future of Hacker Noon. What does digital publishing look like for the tech industry. Then more specifically Scrum versus Agile, moving from wireframes to interactive prototypes, what does it mean build an MVP, how do you evaluate an MVP, an other stuff like that. Excited to have you on,Ā Dane.
Dane Lyons: Thatās great. Iām very excited to be here. Iām love the direction of Hacker Noon, to be honest. I think that Hacker Noon, in my mind, is brutal at itās best. Itās just very unapologetically raw and I like that. Iām really excited to beĀ here.
David Smooke: Yeah, I think the blindingly green does a lot of that rawness, and then, when you open it up to contributors of all walks of life and really, your only qualification is to doing cool work about tech or having your own perspective about tech. You just really open up to a lot of different tones and voices. So Dane, what do you think makes a goodĀ product?
Dane Lyons: Well, I think that itās a complicated question but, for me, I think that to build a good product, youāve got to embrace change. When you have a product and you change something about the product, thereās really only three outcomes. Itās going to get better, itās going to get worse, or itās going to stay the same. And if it gets worse, you can usually change it back so thereās no real harm in change and the up side of changing is very high. So I believe that teams need to find a system that embraces change, whatever thatĀ is.
David Smooke: And do you ever fear that too many changes, too many iterations, can lead to lack of identity orĀ sanity?
Dane Lyons: Changes can occasionally be negative. I think that you can always have misguided changes and I think that a lot of founders and a lot of people who are in charge of products, I think that creates a lot of fear. So there is a risk in a change going awry but the upside is so much greater that itās worthĀ it.
David Smooke: Was it scared money donāt makeĀ money?
Dane Lyons: Yeah, IĀ guess.
David Smooke: Could you tell me a little bit about Scrum and whether you think people should be usingĀ it?
Dane Lyons: In my mind, Scrum is not inherently bad, but it is not a great process for an early stage company. And the reason behind that, it kind od comes back to what I was just talking about, change. And Scrum is not optimized for change or for bringing about change. Scrum actually has a relatively bureaucratic process in terms of bringing about change. You have you stakeholders and you product owners who basically decide things an through this long process, they convert ideas into tasks and then your individual contributors are responsible for delivering those tasks. And that gets into a lot ofĀ ā¦ you get into trouble when you need to adapt and itās very slow to redefine yourĀ task.
David Smooke: You think the biggest problem is the most top-down engineering management style?
Dane Lyons: Scrum is definitely not the most top-down engineering management style but I think that itās deceptive in that people think itās a very agile and nimble process but it is pretty top-down, in my opinion. At least most implementations that IāveĀ seen.
David Smooke: And then, how do you think Agile is more bottom-up?
Dane Lyons: Well, in my mind, agile should really create a system where individual contributors can make the decisions that bring about change and if you can do that then the process of defining their tasks andĀ ā¦ it shouldnāt take two weeks to go and create a bunch od stories so people can bring about change. If an individual contributor has an idea that is going to make a product better, they should be empowered to go execute thatĀ idea.
David Smooke: Where do you see ideas going awry though, with an Agile structure?
Dane Lyons: In order for Agile to work well, youāve got to really spend a lot of tie thinking about our KPIs. You got to haveĀ ā¦ Youāve got to come up with a theory about which numbers you want to focus on to prove that youāre building a better product and if you can do that well, then you can make a determination whether any change that you bring to the product is actually positive or negative.
David Smooke: Yeah, I really being a results driven operation. Itās just, there are opinions everywhere but agreeing what facts and what numbers weāre trying to move definitely aligns peoples skulls in a way that gives them a freedom to approach the problem in more creativeĀ ways.
Dane Lyons: But there is a challenge in your KPIs, where a lot of times people are not very good at determining what KPIs they should actually pursue and a lot of times, either your KPIs are too high level, so individual contributors canāt actually do anything to influence those numbers or theyāreĀ ā¦ you might be tempted to go after a lower level KPI that is actually not correlated with, say, revenue. Say if revenue is you highest level KPI, you might get seduced into having some other metric that everybody believes in but everybodyās focused on moving that metric, but it doesnāt actually make a better product in theĀ end.
David Smooke: So Hacker Noon is moving from two employees, me and my wife and partner, Linh. And now weāre moving to having an interim CTO, you, and then two to three developers, and so weāre looking at kind of a small team, like many start ups and being lean and small. How many KPIs do you realistically think a company of this size shouldĀ have?
Dane Lyons: In my mind, I think itās good to have at least two KPIs. A lot of people will try to focus on a single KPI but I think you need to have your high level compass KPI and maybe that is revenue, in a lot of cases for companies, and then you need to have a lower level KPI, which is a lot more relevant for the product. So maybe, on the product side of things, you might have a KPI like how many new stories are being created or written, how many drafts are being created. Youāve got a lot of options. You can probably assume that the more stories that are created, the more revenue is going to be generated. And if you get into a thing where youāre optimizing for stories and youāre cranking out a bunch of stories and things arenāt going so well, then maybe youāve got a quality problem and you need to adjust your KPIs. But itās fine to start out with a KPI that optimizes for the number ofĀ stories.
David Smooke: Yeah, Iām kind of gone through that exact problem and I like to think of getting to the 80% and to having that be a qualitative thing. And thatās yes or no and then once thatās yes or no, that yes multiplied by stories published is your real rate of publishing, because in trying to publish a lot, you make mistakes and you figure out ways where you should have quality control higher and I havenāt. But once itās of a certain level, itās more up to the community and I think a lot about serving contributors, serving the larger community, the reader, and then, making money. And thatās kind of where the three KPIs will tier downĀ from.
Dane Lyons: That makesĀ sense.
David Smooke: So we worked together, also, on a number of projects that have had different degrees of success, with things like starting 42 Hire and Paid Story. And what have you learned over the lastĀ ā¦ because youāve kind of gone back and forth of creating a lot of early products, then being in a, not a large engineering team, but being in more structured set ups and larger teams. How are you approaching building MVPs now, than you were earlier in yourĀ career?
Dane Lyons: Well, Iām definitely moving much more towards building functional prototypes, so, as we were talking about the importance of change earlier, I think that it makes a lot of sense to consider the cost of change. And if youāre building aĀ ā¦ if youāre introducing change into a fully formed product, like a complex product thatās already in the marketplace, then the cost of change is pretty high. As an engineer, youāve got to worry about testing, youāve got to worry about a lot of considerations. Thereās so many dependencies to deal with and so any kind of change that you bring about is usually pretty expensive. But you could also go the other route of trying to experiment outside of the product and to build functional prototypes that explore ideas and try to get validation where the cot of change is very low. And I think that thereās a lot of value in doingĀ that.
David Smooke: Letās just jump around a littleĀ bit.
Dane Lyons: Okay, soundsĀ good.
David Smooke: So, Dane, this is the Hacker Noon podcast, could you tell us about some of your work and lifeĀ hacks?
Dane Lyons: My life hack is all about productivity. I find that, as an engineer, there are just so many distractions in life and for me to kind of avoid some of those, I kind of use a variation of the Pomodoro Technique. I like to keep what a call a Captainās Log, so I will write down a goal for the next 20 minutes and then I will set a timer for 20 minutes, it could be 20 minutes to an hour. So you write down a goal, you set a timer, and you work like crazy. And at the end of that timer, you have to write what you accomplished and by writing what IĀ ā¦ by having that accountability to myself to write down what I accomplished, I find that I get so much more work done during that kind of mini sprint of 20Ā minutes.
David Smooke: Have you been able to keep going strong and for weeks at a time likeĀ this?
Dane Lyons: I think the longest Iāve gone is probably about a week and Iām actually quite happy when Iām doing that, The trick that Iāve runĀ ā¦ well, one problem that Iāve run into quite often is, being able to manage all of it. So what I would really like is an application where I have an easilyĀ ā¦ a visual indicator of all of the 20 minutes sprints that Iāve accomplished over a given week and an easy way to dive into those sprints and to, I donāt know I theyāre called sprints, I donāt know what theyāre called, but an easy way to dive into those notes. If I could have a better tool for organizing those, I think Iād be a lot more disciplined in usingĀ it.
David Smooke: Yeah, that would be a good app to create but we diverge. So could you tell me a little bit about v1Labs and where you think youāreĀ going?
Dane Lyons: Yeah, so v1Labs is all about helping companies introduce a discovery track. A lot of Agile teams have what I would consider a delivery track where you have a bunch of tasks thatĀ ā¦ you have a backlog of tasks that get delivered. And like we we were discussing earlier, you need toĀ ā¦ itās a lot moreĀ ā¦ itās a lotĀ ā¦ how should I say this? Itās difficult to just have a pure delivery track and to innovate. You really need to be investing a lot of your energy into figuring out what makes sense for your product going forward and to validate those assumptions. So v1Labs is all about that. Itās helping you to get started on building a new feature or a new product,Ā just-
David Smooke: Or a new content management system?
Dane Lyons: Yep, or a new content management system, whatever it mayĀ be.
David Smooke: Yeah, content management, man, itās wild. WordPress is 30% of the internet. No one really likes it. Innovative new things are being built and a lot of themĀ ā¦ itās a veryĀ ā¦ if you go after the whole content management system market, itās a gigantic market but itās a real pain to fit your use case to everyone and I donāt want to fit my use case to everyone. Iām of the philosophy of, cot 90% of WordPress, give me the right 10% and I will have a site thatās 10 times better than if I built my site on WordPress.
David Smooke: Now thereās this thing of where Iāve been thinking more of products ofĀ ā¦ I just donāt want any extra stuff because itās not essential. Iāve been kind of forcing the Hacker Noon workflow into the media and publication workflow and it helped us grow but it also limited us with things like, just how contributors communicate with their community andĀ ā¦ Iām of the opinion, if you donāt have their email address, theyāre not your follower. And itās just, trying to think about how weāre going to reinvent this and take whatās working and fix how contributors want to workĀ ā¦ I guess Iām ramblingĀ here.
Dane Lyons: No, that all makes a lot of sense. Iāve actually had quite a bit of experience working with building WordPress websites and blogs. And I think that they were a fantastic innovation compared to what came before WordPress, which was, God, it must be 15 years ago or maybe not quite that long, maybe it was 12, 13 years ago. So they came out with this blogging platform, which was great and they had a plug-in system where you could extend the functionality and it wasnāt a great system. I think, even today, they do some reallyĀ ā¦ they do a poor job of making sure that the plug-ins that youāve added to your WordPress implementation are not going to break your blog orĀ ā¦ and are compatible with the other plug-ins. So, they donāt do a very good job of that. I donāt think theyĀ ā¦ I donāt think the database is structured very well, to be honest. And I think that they could do a lot of improvements.
Dane Lyons: But I definitely agree that, especially for Hacker Noon, that it doesnāt make a lot of sense to try to take WordPress and to kind of add all the functionality that you need and to kind of pare down all of the stuff that you donāt need. Itās a complete mess for that sort of thing. Youāre much better off just building something fromĀ scratch.
David Smooke: Yeah, itās definitely the conclusion that Iāve reached. Yeah, itās like the deeper you get, the more you just donāt want to be reliant on other people and trusting these other firms to continue supporting the technology that they support. Itās a trust thing and then itās, how trustworthy is the brand? And if the brandĀ ā¦ WordPress is a great 30% of the internet and theyāre still not making that much money for being 30% of the internet, and powering 30% of websites.
David Smooke: Thereās always a balance between building to help other peopleās business versus building to help you own. When your own business is struggling, you see it in how you start to treat other people around the internet and so I really want to have sustainability and sufficiency from the ground up. And a lot of people are in spots like me, so could you talk a little bit about taking wireframes and moving them to interactive prototypes?
Dane Lyons: Actually, I wanted to come back to the WordPress thing, just a second, and then we can move on to the wireframes. So one thing that I think is pretty interesting about using WordPress to run your product, is their plug-in system. As we were talking bout earlier, when it comes to introducing change, you actually donāt have a lot of change when it comes to WordPress. You have a lot of plug-ins that you can just pop into your application and add functionality but to iterate on that functionality, itās really difficult because youāve got to go and learn the code base of each individual plug-in, and sometimes youāve got to just take it upon yourself to go and change the functionality if it doesnāt do what youĀ want.
Dane Lyons: So, a lot of times people will go and theyāll rotate through plug-ins to try to find the perfect commenting plug-in or the perfect caption plug-in, and nothing really kind of solves the problem so then you have the burden of going and trying modify one of the existing plug-ins. Itās not conducive to change, I guess is what Iām trying toĀ say.
David Smooke: Yeah, I think software has a longer reaching problem of, a lot of itās with the incentives of how software is sold, where itās just, you want to be able check this box, that it always has more, like this RFP structure. And then, whenever youāre saying you can do any type of software on top of this software, itās like, āOh, yeah, you make it so easy to add software but you make it so hard to remove.ā Itās like, you canāt change if you canāt remove. You should be removing as much as youāre gaining. At the end of the day, you change stuff but you come back to an equilibrium and if your whole point is just adding more and more and more and more features, their going to get in the way of eachĀ other.
Dane Lyons: Oh, absolutely. I think that you really need to pare down your feature site to the minimum number of features required to satisfy the useĀ case.
David Smooke: Yeah, and then itās, how many use cases do you support? How big of a company are you? Which of these use cases is really your business and which one is not your business? Itās cool to think about where software and strategy overlap and when they work together well, you understand how it serves the contributing write and then, what contributing writer do you want to serve. If weāve become a destination where just brands publish press releases, weāre not going to be a very good site. And by the same token, if we become a destination where itās just only product managers talking about why Agile is better than Scrub, then weāre also not going to be a very good site. But how we support the contributors will drive the editorial line, then the editorial line will drive how we support the contributors.
Dane Lyons: Right. Yeah, itās a delicate balance because so many start ups are pretty much forced to go up market way too fast, and to not focus on smaller use cases, just because theyāve got to satisfy an investor and I think if you kind of go up market too fast for the wrong reasons, it can killĀ you.
David Smooke: Yeah. Yeah, some investors are on the other side of things, where they only satisfies the users that really love you and donāt worry about losing your 80% middle of users that use you but may not tomorrow.
Dane Lyons: Right. Yeah, from my point of view, I think it makes sense to really go and try to find the best way to satisfy an individual use case and to be relatively focused and once youāve kind of cracked that nut, then you can try to understand if your product makes sense for other adjacent use cases or is you need to build a complimentary product. But you can kind of expand that way, just kill it and satisfy one use case at a time, I think. Thatās kind of the way that I think aboutĀ it.
David Smooke: Day-to-day, youāre living in San Francisco, where I used to live, once upon a time, and itās an expensive city, itās a unique city. Itās got people from all walks of life. How are you hacking your life to live a better San Francisco?
Dane Lyons: Oh, man, Iām probably not, to be honest. I probably should not be in San Francisco, to be perfectly honest, because Iām not really taking advantage of the community here. I would love to spend a few weeks or a month trying to think about this problem and trying to understand how to maximize my time in San Francisco and then to try to build around that becauseĀ I-
David Smooke: No, thatās time away from spending it in San Francisco, with other humans and what-have-you.
Dane Lyons: Yep. But I think that thereās plenty of technology that can help solve this problem because I mean, thereās so many events that happen and itās kind of an informational problem. You need to be able to be exposed to the information to know when the events are available and which events you should be attending and who you should be networking with and all those sort of things. Almost like a personal CRM or something likeĀ that.
David Smooke: And then artificial intelligence will monitor your activity and recommend related activities.
Dane Lyons: Oh yeah.Ā Yep.
David Smooke: I donāt know. I hopeĀ ā¦ Youāre always been a little more optimistic of the machines taking over than IĀ have.
Dane Lyons: Yeah, Iām pretty optimistic. I think thatĀ ā¦ I donāt know. I think machine learning is just a fantastic thing. Recently, AlphaZero beat Stockfish in their first, machine learning, or Googleās first machine learning foray into creating an AI for playing chess and itās just fantastic, to see how creative this AI has become. But the AI that Google used to create this chess-playing machine, is not going to hack your vehicle and drive you off a bridge or something like that. Itās justĀ ā¦ thatās not really something that I worry about too much. If there is some kind of hacking attempt that I fall victim to, I think itās probably a much more malicious intent, rather than AI going around. I think that the risk of that is farĀ higher.
David Smooke: Yeah, we publish Googleās Chief Data Science Officer and one of her best posts, she puts, āMachine learning is the simplest thing it is, is a thing labeler.ā And thatās where it all starts. How can you label this thing properly and then what do you learn from labeling a million things in a million different places for a million different whatever. It is kind ofĀ ā¦ thinking about searching photos, is kind of an area where Googleās done a lot and itās just interesting, especially like thereās a piece of art in my office, itās abstract and thereās shapes and thereās circles, is this going to be searchable under rectangle and circle or is it searchable under art? And then, within the art, what other things does it recognize? Does it recognize that this is a sunset or is that possible? An it is,Ā yeah.
Dane Lyons: Itās a very purpose built application. Itās not like that AI is learning how to walk or to do things thatĀ ā¦ or even has the ability to do the things that are malicious in nature. Certainly there is a possibility of that something like that could happen but for the most part, I donāt think that the risk of AI, as we see it today, is veryĀ high.
David Smooke: Yeah, but itāll make mistakes and thatās why, when a Tesla car crashes, itās in 10 million sites and whenever the crash that happens outside your office happens, it doesnāt make the newspaper. Itās under a microscope right now because of the implication of switching all drivers to self-driving cars. Itās massive on a labor level, a safety level, all that, and a performance level. Self-driving cars, thatās the one where I just canāt get my eye off that industry, you know what IĀ mean?
Dane Lyons: Yeah, definitely.
David Smooke: It hits those things of those bigger tech themes versus practical day-to-day application of running into everyoneās lives from a business perspective and a user, a writer. Dane, what do you think I should prioritize in the new HackerĀ Noon?
Dane Lyons: Well, I think that you should embrace a system that empowers your contributors. I actually donāt necessarilyĀ ā¦ Well, I definitely donāt like to call contributors āresourcesā, that drives me crazy. I think that contributors should be called collaborators. And so the engineers that you hire and the designers that you hire, I think that you need to empower them to make change and to feel like they have the ability to do that. And that, I think, should be the number one priority.
David Smooke: Cool. So weāre now hiring front-end, back-end, you can apply at jobs.hackernoon.com or you can just email Dane, Dane@hanckernoon.com. Thatās D-A-N-E, Dane, thatāsĀ you.
Dane Lyons: Yep, thatāsĀ me.
David Smooke: And where else can people find you,Ā Dane?
Dane Lyons: Also Dane@v1labs.com, or on twitter at duilen, thatās my handle, and thatās pretty much your safestĀ bet.
David Smooke: And duilen, your handle, whereād that comeĀ from?
Dane Lyons: I donāt know. I was just aĀ ā¦ itās a name that I invented probably about 15, 20 years ago and it just kind of stuck witĀ me.
David Smooke: And thatās your internet name, you internet given name, self-given?
Dane Lyons: Yeah, I think I probably made it up in AOL days or something, I donāt know. Itās just kind of stuck withĀ me.
David Smooke: The early days of the internet. And anything the internet should be doing to be a betterĀ place?
Dane Lyons: Thereās a lot problems with the internet. Thereās a whole cyber-bullying thing and people just need to be more, I donāt know, open and tolerant to their neighbors and just good neighbors, I guess. If people were just better neighbors on the internet, just like in real-life, I think that the world would be a betterĀ place.
David Smooke: I do too. Hey, thanks for doing the Hacker Noon podcast. You can find more episodes at podcast.hackernoon.com or just visit hackernoon.com and Iām sure youāll bump into a great tech story.Ā Peace.
Product Iteration with Hacker Noon Interim CTO Dane Lyons was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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