Product Fundamentals

Send us a Text Message.The way we make software is weird, especially compared to how the rest of the economy works. In the first season of Product Fundamentals, we'll unpack that history, and figure out how forces dating from the Industrial Revolution through the Space Race and on to the present collided to form the way we make software today.For a show transcript, check out the podcast website at https://www.prodfund.com.Support the Show.For full show transcripts, links to sources, and ways ...

Send us a Text Message.To understand why we make software the way that we do, we start from the beginning, with the earliest programmable computers, exponential growth, NATO's first "software engineers," and Winston Royce's articulation of the Waterfall.Support the Show.For full show transcripts, links to sources, and ways to contact me, please see the show site at https://www.prodfund.com.Intro and outro music by Jesse Spillane.

Send us a Text Message.While we may think of the Waterfall as the original way to make software, the philosophy of moving fast and making small changes -- called iterative and incremental development -- dates back just as far. Today we're tracking how IID got its start in classic early 20th century manufacturing and evolved through pioneering NASA projects into an important precursor of how we work today. Plus, we'll cover the first rise and fall of the "cross-functional team" at the US Navy ...

Send us a Text Message.This episode, we take a pause from the Waterfall vs. IID rivalry to catch up on the management and measurement parts of software development.We'll track how statistics got its start in the early modern era, through the quotas of the American Industrial Revolution and the analytical surge during the Second World War, and finally on to the rise of Management by Objective at HP and Intel.Support the Show.For full show transcripts, links to sources, and ways to contact me, ...

Send us a Text Message.This episode, we cover the rise of Waterfall to its dominant position over the software industry, find out what it was like in day-to-day practice, learn how it became the official way to make software on both sides of the Atlantic, and discover that old-timers have been complaining that kids these days don't how how to code since at least the 1970s.Support the Show.For full show transcripts, links to sources, and ways to contact me, please see the show site at https://...

Send us a Text Message.In the 1990s, the advent of consumer software, the rise of the Internet, and mounting evidence of the failures of Waterfall to deliver results created space for new ideas and new ways of working. Put another way: A righteous solution was failing to handle a wicked problem. Amid all these challenges, the work of two Japanese academics researching successful hardware products planted seeds that would eventually bear fruit in the Scrum and Extreme Programming approaches.Su...

Send us a Text Message.As the dot-com bubble came crashing down, a group of "organizational anarchists" got together at a ski resort and created the Agile Manifesto, finally providing a common banner for incremental software people. One of the most successful offshoots of Agile would be Lean Software, which took its foundations from Toyota's lean manufacturing system and brought it to software, setting the stage for the startup wave that was to soon follow.Support the Show.For full show trans...

Send us a Text Message.The dot-com crash absolutely crushed the consumer Internet economy in 2000, launching a fit of soul-searching and rethinking foundational ideas about the relationships among customers, products, and companies. At the same time, new technologies like smartphones and cloud infrastructure were creating new markets and lowering starting costs. Layer in the "free money" of persistent low interest rates, and the stage was set for a generation-defining wave of startups.Support...

Send us a Text Message.The 2010s were characterized by a huge shift toward rigorous experimentation and quantification in many aspects of software development. Big data and data science, A/B testing, data science, quantified OKRs -- it was the decade that we all needed to brush up on our statistics.This episode, we cover the history behind this shift and the technologies that made it possible. Plus, we take a little detour into the contentious issue of how to make a proper cup of English tea....

Send us a Text Message.As the Internet grew in the 2000s, it drove the creation of far more large and complicated software organizations than the industry had ever seen before. This posed hard new questions, leading to both a crisis of confidence -- "Agile is Dead!" -- as well as to some fresh green shoots in the form of DevOps.Support the Show.For full show transcripts, links to sources, and ways to contact me, please see the show site at https://www.prodfund.com.Intro and outro music ...

Send us a Text Message.In the penultimate episode of season 1, we're finally addressing the silent partner in all our work: the place we do it.We'll track how we got from the first large office buildings in early modern London, through the rigorously optimized work spaces of the early 20th century, on to the cubicle, the open-plan office, and finally, the the modern tech campus.We'll also cover the history of modern work-from-home, which has a lot more to it than the recent pandemic.Sup...

Send us a Text Message.Sixty thousand words and six hours of audio later, we've made it to the end of season 1 of Product Fundamentals!This episode, we'll revisit the question that we started with: why do we make software in the way that we do? I'll draw some principles from the story we've covered, and suggest what that history indicates about what could come next.I hope you'll stay subscribed to this feed -- while the first season is over, there are a few bonus bits that should follow, plus...