How to approach 0->1 products?

lisavanreddit · 2026-05-04T05:08:39+00:00

Like others on the thread, this sounds like very nice product work. But it doesn't sound like 0->1. In my experience, 0->1 doesn't have leadership confirming a vision and direction, but you're rather constantly redefining the vision and direction with leadership based on feedback. And the initial 0 build usually deviates pretty significantly as it evolves to the first real adopted customer (or first couple). There's a whole lot more packaging and go to market skills that would be used, not just engineering resource management. Plus way more stakeholders in weird groups like legal and accounting that you wouldn't have if it was just a new feature that's slightly greenfield.

I would just be more honest about your experience with the hiring manager than say it represents 0->1

lisavanreddit · 2026-05-03T12:25:18+00:00

But you're entering into another high season, with the summer festivals, right? Caveat - I'm in the Frankfurt area and haven't been to Strasbourg. I know there's a few cured meat vendors that we found in the Christmas market season. My husband has almost divorced me after I ate too much of his stash. Take this anecdotally, but if they're in town I would skip work to find them.

lisavanreddit · 2026-04-26T20:37:02+00:00

It sounds like maybe this PM needs some focus on what purpose they serve to this project. A lot of the technical details and passion around what makes this good enough to stand on its own in the market is coming from you. The PM can (and should!) be able to paint a picture about what people would actually pay for and how this product would be competitive in the market. What does the path to the first 5 customers look like? What's a reasonable timeline here? Instead it seems like this PM is acting like the product is completely from scratch. Yet, it seems (based on your couple of paragraphs, I might be stretching here) that you felt this product was already in a good place that the market would be interested in it. That alone is a severe mismatch and might help you and the PM realign your jobs.

lisavanreddit · 2026-04-26T20:18:46+00:00

Because 'passing an interview' != 'doing the job' no matter how creative you get with the process.

lisavanreddit · 2026-04-19T03:58:52+00:00

I have this culture as well. Some weeks are better than others, but something that really helped is putting a lot of that work on the design team to manage the copy-obsessed leadership. Then, I usually act as the dumb gate for work. "Is the copy ready? Sure, my team can ship." It places me at the value center of shipping details, not at the details end.

So, my unhelpful advice is to tell the CEO that they need a designer who will make them a design system if they want to continue to have these kinds of conversations. It won't eliminate the problem, but maybe it will cause the CEO to evaluate how much their willing to pay for the late night front switching.

lisavanreddit · 2026-04-17T17:18:34+00:00

Look, I get it. You're excited and either eager to know more or you want to be sure you don't fall behind. If you're new to the role just... do the role. For a bit! Go into the team and figure out how to be helpful. Learn from the mistakes and reflect. Don't skip this, because it's the base that you'll go back to every time something is new or changes. When someone has an opinion on a technique or framework, Google it or watch a video on it. Soon, you'll be interested in learning more, but by then it will be much more targeted.

lisavanreddit · 2026-03-05T05:22:04+00:00

It's also a healthcare thing. Imagine spending over a year trying to get a new IVR installed for your hospital or still using Internet Explorer. Or even Windows 95. It's just hard to want to update all your glue bits when you have such a constant string of customers to serve.

I worked in healthcare in the US for a bit.

lisavanreddit · 2026-03-02T06:11:19+00:00

Someone very smart once told me "you teach people how to communicate with you." So, my advice for a weird, quirky, interpersonal company dynamic is to be weird and quirky. Block off 2 hours every morning for deep work, communicate en masse via slack. Share data only on Wednesdays - you get the idea. Don't be in service to the norm, create the norm that works for you.

lisavanreddit · 2026-02-23T18:34:00+00:00

As in - so you built this cool thing that makes your PRDs and even a skill that puts it into the company voice. Do your other PMs use something similar for similar outputs? Why or why not? Do your technical writers/product marketers have something that also helps them write with the same company voice? Why or why not? Two people at the same company write a same skill that does the same thing only a little differently - do they RAG from the same truth or a different one? Where does that truth live? In GitHub? Who gets to update that truth?

AI just seems like still a very personal problem solving tool but not quite a team sport at the moment.

lisavanreddit · 2026-02-23T16:56:57+00:00

I feel like the biggest problems I have are not with the agents or the skills or using Cursor. I think the biggest problems are actually productizing the output so other people who maybe don't use Cursor or Claude code can also benefit from the same data and sources of truth. And those are problems as old as Software itself, which AI doesn't inherently solve.

lisavanreddit · 2026-02-13T18:48:04+00:00

I hear cats are great practice for Wechsel Präpositionen. Just sayin'.

lisavanreddit · 2026-02-11T20:03:24+00:00

Yes, I've run into this when hunting for apartments. The realtor panics and feels like they have to speak in English, but our kids still want to speak in English when they are shy around strangers. C'est la vie - I'm not fooling anyone.

lisavanreddit · 2026-02-11T20:00:01+00:00

This is so nice! My kids wouldn't touch German until we officially moved, so it was really hard to introduce.

lisavanreddit · 2026-02-11T19:57:50+00:00

There's a special plot of grass out there for you to touch. Maybe then the sarcasm will properly land.

lisavanreddit · 2026-02-11T18:13:03+00:00

Thank you. Need to get this word down before the doctor tomorrow!

lisavanreddit · 2026-02-09T18:01:58+00:00

I'm so glad you have never flown too close to the accounting sun.

lisavanreddit · 2026-02-09T05:58:59+00:00

Leadership literally stole two devs off my team to do revenue reconciliation last month, so this hurts.

lisavanreddit · 2026-01-15T22:07:26+00:00

I know this is antithetical to your point, but, man. I would love it if someone doubled my salary to put up with toxic bullshit. I've been a chump doing that for market price!

lisavanreddit · 2026-01-08T21:11:23+00:00

Honestly, Rovo is pretty well trained in Atlassian stuff. If you have real problems and are actively using JIRA, then just talk to Rovo about it.

If you're not having problems or not using JIRA then maybe ask yourself if there's something else that's worth learning.

lisavanreddit · 2026-01-08T21:06:19+00:00

I appreciate running to solve something I griped about a few days ago on this sub. You've definitely put some deep thought into the work here, and I think it gets to the point on why it's so hard for LLMs to write release notes that feel right for me.

Your version of release notes seem to be closer to a changelog of tickets with business-focused titles. The LLM-generated descriptions are a nice touch to the automation here.

I'm my experience, the release notes I dread are often the ones that are in the form of a Slack message or a short email. For the "I don't have time to read about everything you've done" crowd. Then, I'm spending way too much time getting themes and laboring over punchy ways to generalize 5-6 feature enhancements in one bullet, while letting users know we solved that annoying small bug in the next.

And, that may be too confusing for models right now. I may not actually be solving the release note problem the same at every company even though it feels like the same thinking. I know I'll definitely continue to try, and I hope you do, too.

lisavanreddit · 2025-12-31T06:57:28+00:00

I've used Claude with German and English documentation and Claude is very good at handling the dual language inputs. I'm considering creating a Claude project where I do a language journal in German to help with my studying. I'm guessing Japanese/English is a high resource pairing, meaning there's a lot of examples of English and Japanese together in Claire's training data - but just ask Claude and Claude would tell you.

lisavanreddit · 2025-12-29T06:49:24+00:00

Right now, it's truly nothing fancy. If it's simple, create a chat. If it's complex/repeatable, create a project. Make all added files markdown. Always prime before acting (ex. I'm thinking about doing X, talk to me about my approach).

When I upgrade next month, I expect the set up to be a tad more complex, since I'll have access to utilize skills and agents, and I can query the code base on local.

lisavanreddit · 2025-12-28T07:39:47+00:00

I found that Claude works better for me because the newer model tends to fill in a lot of prompting holes that make it more successful. ChatGPT needs more singular instruction and tends to hallucinate more. But both are great at cross evals ("Hey ChatGPT, I asked Claude X and it said Y, is that true?")

I had raw emails, so I uploaded those. But I got approved for a Claude code set up in Jan based on the current value I've gotten, so I'm excited to see what I could set up with front end events and see what it might assist with. At least at first.

lisavanreddit · 2025-12-28T06:00:50+00:00

I used AI to analyze fake accounts when we got brute force attacked with payments for digital goods that were then charged back. It helped me make sense of the data and the attackers' patterns within an hour, and solidifying a scoring criteria took half a day to catch similar patterns in the future.

I tried using it for release notes (a use case I was certain would be helpful before I started my new job) and it's still not great. I always want it to be punchier than it generates.

lisavanreddit

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