Wayne Fan

Product development is 80% explaining ideas with shitty metaphors.

Simulations are a new kind of testing for a new kind of software, simulating conversations between AI agents and mock personas ensure reliability at scale sierra.ai/blog/simulatio…

@brian_lovin ** → ×

The first two are needed if you ever write HTML comments.

Here you go everyone

First day at @SierraPlatform! So excited to be joining the team. 💚

🟩🟩🟨🟨🟧🟧🟥⬜⬜ 78% #Config2024

@brownthings This and Nike Better World were absolute legendary websites of the era.

Still the best app pre-launch page, 13(!) years on: web.archive.org/web/2011062302…

Came up with a completely diabolical way to make pie charts in @principleapp Basically export a 33% pie chart asset and masking them with rects so they can be rotated in and out when needed. Then just duplicate the rectangle so I can get a 2-step 0→33%→66% pie chart animation

Demo GIF for a new feature. After Effects was freaking out so this just a screen recording of me clicking through a Figma prototype. Not too bad? 🥲 balsa.com/feat-tasks

Introducing Tasks view!! ✏️ ✅ Click on “Tasks” and get a breakdown of all your project’s tasks at a glance—sort, filter, and get work done. Learn more: balsa.com/feat-tasks

@magsawww @balsa @CleanShot @gifbrewery Hope that’s helpful / interesting. You can see more of these on our change log: updates.balsa.com

@magsawww @balsa @CleanShot That gets rendered out as a mp4 and then I use @gifbrewery to convert the movie to a GIF that’s Twitter-friendly in size, dimension, etc. Sometimes it takes some fussing with frame rate, color, and speed to get it under 3MB

Can your PRD do this? Balsa now supports Image Annotations, letting you comment directly on specific locations in a mockup or screenshot. It's just one of many ways Balsa helps software teams write better docs and get more done. Learn more: balsa.com/feat-annotation

@chopchopcda @getfernand @balsa I’ll show you when I have more pixels! Also! Sometimes we make these little one-off websites for features we are especially excited about balsa.com/feat-annotation

@chopchopcda @getfernand @balsa I really like how we can use the product itself to tell a story. Also it’s very easy to maintain/update when we add new features. I’m actually working on an update today 🙂

“Where is that design.... I think it’s in this task... wait, no.. that’s not it.. Did I delete it? Hold on 2 seconds. brb.” Great news! Our new link box finds and organizes all the links in your doc in one place. Search and more goodies coming soon. 🔗 📦

When I tell people we didn't use an issue tracker at Slack, I typically get one of two reactions, either "oh thank god" or "how tf did you stay organized?" Here's the thing: we were incredibly organized. Here was our system: Use a document (and checklists) to track your work. We used a tool called Hackpad, which Dropbox acquired and became the bones of Dropbox Paper. With Paper we could keep the product brief, designs, and engineering tasks in a single spot. This was immensely helpful for keeping everyone aligned -- there was just one place to check, and no risk of things being out of sync across multiple tools. We'd project the doc during team meetings, and the whole team worked out of this document throughout the day. (This was so effective that it motivated us to build @Balsa to implement the patterns we used at Slack.) Use a spreadsheet to track status. We used a simple Google Sheet, with a row for each project, the PM/EM working on it, launch date, project status (red/yellow/green), and a column for comments, which contained a weekly note on how things were going. We reviewed this spreadsheet every Monday in an all-PM/EM meeting with the CPO, CTO, and VPs of Eng and Design. Use your issue tracker as a bug database. Issue trackers are great at remembering, but they suck for keeping track of what's happening now. Eng tasks related to a project we were actively working on, including bugs caught in QA, were all kept in a checklist in the project document. Things we knew we weren't going to fix, or that needed to be done by other teams would go into an issue tracker we built ourselves. (We eventually migrated this to Jira.) The issue tracker was helpful for cataloguing things and giving Customer Support a place to search for known defects, but we never worked out of it for active project work. Closing thought: Most of the time, you just need a document. Lightweight product process is not anarchy. As an industry we've been brainwashed for 20+ years by giants like Atlassian telling us the only way to stay organized is to use Jira (or issue trackers like it). This is outdated advice. Issue trackers are designed for a bygone era. Nowadays projects change daily or hourly as designers, engineers, and PMs adapt in real time, tweaking designs, running experiments, and incorporating feedback between research sessions. When your whole team is coordinating in Slack, chiseling tasks into your bug database slows you down and makes you less adaptable. A doc and checklists. It's all you need. (We're building @Balsa as a builder-focused, dedicated tool for this workflow, but you can do this with Dropbox Paper, Notion, or even Word or Google Docs.)

Ooooshitttt new stripe website dropped!!

Have to start checking my new work against AI to see how much time I have left in my career 🟩🟩🟨🟨🟧⬜⬜⬜⬜ 54%

SO much better than pre-annotating designs in Figma and then exporting PNGs to your doc/tix.

@iamkory @faresende Bricked an Apple Watch too. We were fearless.

@iamkory Every WWDC I think about how @faresende and I went all in on MacOS preview on our work machines and couldn't run stuff like After Effects for months.