One thing I was thinking about today is how when you’re building stuff a lot of it comes down to quantity and quality of shots on goal.

Things won’t work on the first try. At Coinbase I was on so many projects that were reorged, deprioritized, or killed for a variety of reasons. I would say for every successful product there are probably 10 dead ones that don’t even make it to the finish line. Engineers would always get mad at leadership for killing a project, but in reality that was just always part of the process of shipping good product.

Some code, for no particular reason, will be 10x more valuable than other code. At Coinbase the monorail was not my favorite service, but it also made the company the most money. As engineers we need to maintain the same level of quality, but on average have the expectation that what we build won’t be used much. It’s our job as a team to discover the right things to build and build in that direction, but if something doesn’t work, we should be hopeful and optimistic instead of discouraged. One of our shots will work. That’s part of being on a strong team.

Right now we know the products we support have massive potential, but we still have a lot to learn. We need to approach this process with an open mind and know that a lot of what we’re going to try won’t work. We should know it won’t work, but we should expect that something will work really well. Our goal is to build fast with quality and learn as much from our customers as we can. We have a lot of runway for many shots. That’s how we win: quality and quantity of shots on goal.

One thing I was thinking about today is how when you’re building stuff a lot of it comes down to quantity and quality of shots on goal.

Things won’t work on the first try. At Coinbase I was on so many projects that were reorged, deprioritized, or killed for a variety of reasons. I would say for every successful product there are probably 10 dead ones that don’t even make it to the finish line. Engineers would always get mad at leadership for killing a project, but in reality that was just always part of the process of shipping good product.

Some code, for no particular reason, will be 10x more valuable than other code. At Coinbase the monorail was not my favorite service, but it also made the company the most money. As engineers we need to maintain the same level of quality, but on average have the expectation that what we build won’t be used much. It’s our job as a team to discover the right things to build and build in that direction, but if something doesn’t work, we should be hopeful and optimistic instead of discouraged. One of our shots will work. That’s part of being on a strong team.

Right now we know the products we support have massive potential, but we still have a lot to learn. We need to approach this process with an open mind and know that a lot of what we’re going to try won’t work. We should know it won’t work, but we should expect that something will work really well. Our goal is to build fast with quality and learn as much from our customers as we can. We have a lot of runway for many shots. That’s how we win: quality and quantity of shots on goal.