”What will happen when we can build things faster than we can think of things to build?” This is a question I have been thinking a lot about since reading Steve Yegge’s posts about Gas Town .
Companies have always been looking for ways to make product development deliver faster, in order to save money. Empowered teams and agile work can speed things up a bit, but the biggest time-savers have always been the methods that lets the team cut entire development cycles.
- Validating with users before you start building, so you don’t have to build twice.
- Collecting user feedback and distilling it into tasks that drive value. (Remember, to avoid the build trap you need to trust your own expert insight over the demands of the loudest users.)
- Making sure that the thing you just built actually made your product better, before you move on to building the next thing.
Will AI make us so fast at building things that we no longer should do these things? I don’t think so.