Being in problem domain is more important than product

I once read that companies should define themselves as solving (or living and breathing) a problem domain rather than as offering a product. The article gave an example of Amazon as a company in the problem space of how to deliver products to customers fast and cheap. This means Amazon is not a website defined by the current iteration of the process-technology curve. It means the company’s essence is in solving a real human problem. The problem domain should have a character of being timeless, which means it’s worth the effort. This perspective gives us a lens to sympathize with the customer and to focus on solving their problems. It also highlights to not obsess over product as the end goal of the company. Of course it remains the case that customers interact with companies through their products and the only way to influence customer experience is to perfect the product. But building products is hard, time-consuming and layered with traps of judgment and direction. It’s much more prudent then to identify the goal of one’s enterprise not with a frail nature of the product, but of the problem space one is solving for. With time, and earnest effort, good products can emerge from being immersed in a customer's problem domain.

Popular posts from this blog

Terminology of CICD

To be clear, there are two types of software: libraries and applications. Libraries are used by applications to provide some key piece of functionality. Applications are always deployed to some Environment and run to perform computation. It should always be clear which one of the types is being implemented in a given piece of code. Building and publishing a new version of source code which is ready for use is called Releasing the library/application. The release is always associated with a new version number. Act of change to use a new version of an application in a given environment is called a Deployment. Deployments may also be other system or data changes that affect state produced by the application or general behavior of the application. All such changes should be associated with some code changes making them easy to track.
Read more

Perils of classes and pointers

When trying to understand or debug a piece of code the amount of state that one needs to keep in mind is inversely proportional with success. This leads us to an obvious advice to try to limit scope of each function to the essential components. However, there are also certain programming concepts that contribute to the amount of state one needs to track. The first one is the use of classes because class attributes are accessible in each method and may change between calls. The second one is a pointer (or reference). Pointers are problematic because, unless explicitly managed like in rust , they make it difficult to determine the owner of data at a given point of computation. This leads to uncertainty about what state a given variable may hold. Be very careful when adding classes and references to your code. Sometimes a pure function is just better.
Read more

On Testing

Test a piece runs A basic building block of a codebase is a function. So for each building block let's just at the very least test it can be called with some reasonable input and produce the right result. If you feel that’s not needed perhaps you don’t need that function at all. That is a base case for testing that prevents breaking what works. It should be enabled to run on all PRs. Every test case should have a human understandable description of the test (LLMs will be able to generate those tests soon, so better be ready). Test it runs end to end Once a bunch of functions are composed things get tricky to check if it all works. So let's test if a thing can be run end to end and produce something sensible at the end. It can be enabled on all PRs and definitely done before any release. Test pieces produce similar results Once a thing runs end to end it will produce a result. But it's hard to say that the result is right without anything to compare. So instead, we will test...
Read more