Headline driven development

Building a roadmap is hard. Sometimes a release feels like a flop, even if you build exactly what customers are looking for. Having 12 independent features that don't join up to tell a cohesive story feels like you've built a grab bag of features with no vision.

That's why I like to theme releases around groups of related features. All of the features should be useful to customers, but sometimes I might choose a tier 2 or tier 3 feature over a tier 1 feature just because it fits well with a different tier 1 feature that I want to launch. Telling a compelling story is how you catch people's attention and get them to use what you've built.

Slava recommends "headline driven development" to solve this problem, and it works really well for three reasons:

First, headlines is how humans process change. If you ever found your users confused, your boss frustrated, your investors anxious, your peers indifferent – these problems go away when you organize communication around a stream of headlines.

Second, it makes it easy to ruthlessly prioritize. If you can credibly ship a headline without something, cut that something.

Third, the deadline effect is real. Most of the work in college happens at midnight before the project is due. The industry isn’t that different. So simulating class assignments turns out to be a very effective way to ship quickly.