Engsplaining

In this episode, Laura and Lisa wax nostalgic about product specifications. It's been so long since either of them wrote one, that they can actually think of a few nice things to say! For example, they tended to keep people from releasing features with half of the important bits completely ignored. When we ignored something, we did it intentionally, God damn it. 

In this episode, Lisa and Laura discuss the many many things we expect of Product Managers and why that might be just a tad unrealistic! We also discuss a few strategies for finding the right PM for your particular product. 

In this episode, Laura and Lisa talk about all the reasons you're doing pivots wrong. It turns out that doing them right is really hard! Laura realizes she's going to have to talk to the engineers again if she wants to do things right, and we all know that will never happen. 

Laura gets waaaaay too excited about feature flags, and Lisa very kindly does not mock her too much. They discuss how to use flags to control feature launches and prevent giant merge conflicts.  I swear this podcast was not sponsored by LaunchDarkly, but it probably should have been. 

Lisa engsplains Git and Github to Laura. They discuss some best practices for setting things up to be right for your particular team, and Laura worries needlessly about merge conflicts. 

In this episode, Laura and Lisa talk about different forms of automated testing your team should be doing, what they're good for, and how to convince your coworkers that testing makes things go faster. 

audio Block Double-click here to upload or link to a .mp3. Learn more In this episode, Laura and Lisa talk about the best way to annoy your counterpart in Product or Engineering. And, you know, also how to not do that so that we can maybe get something done.   

Not content with telling you how you're probably building your APIs wrong, Laura and Lisa discuss how you're almost certainly breaking versioning, documentation, and support of them in APIs, part 2. 

In this episode, Laura and Lisa discuss APIs - what they are, what you should know about them, and all the different ways we get them wrong when implementing them. Lisa uses small words so the PMs can follow along. 

In this episode, Lisa and Laura discuss who on a team is responsible for implementing different parts of Lean Startup. 

Micah and Laura talk about how they learned to code and how much harder it was back in the days when you had to write code by carving it into stone tablets with tools made from the bones of a mammoth that you just killed. Also, we give you some advice for where to start and what to learn, if you're so inclined. 

In this episode, Micah and Laura talk about where terrible ideas come from and why they can derail the whole product development process. Also, Laura rants about patents. 

Laura and Micah complain about meetings and give some simple tips for making them less awful for engineers (and everyone else). 

In this episode, Laura and Micah fight about whether 10x engineers exist, what the term even means, and whether it's useful. We also offer some ideas about why the person you thought was a 10xer might not really be. 

From database dumps to spear phishing to users angry about privacy settings, a lot of privacy and security problems can be prevented by understanding the issues ahead of time. In this episode, Laura and Micah talk about the human causes of privacy and security problems and offer a few solutions for your team. 

The only thing worse than causing a major product failure is causing it a second time in the exact same way. That's why it's critical to run a post mortem after you've had any kind of major failure or outage.  In this podcast, Micah and Laura discuss what people get wrong about post mortems and give some suggestions about making them better.