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Comment by kevsim | Hacker News Reader

This article makes me feel very fortunate to work the way we do in my company. We have tight feedback loops with our users, we plan work together as a team (not just a PM dictating things), we're not forced to give finger-in-the-air estimates (we work on stuff until it's good enough to ship and then ship it) and we follow up with analytics and user interviews to figure out if we achieved the outcome we were after. We rinse and we repeat.

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Can you say more about how you plan work as a team? Interested to hear how you keep this fast and productive and avoid getting caught in the weeds of other's opinions.

I'd say the main factors that avoid getting stuck in the weeds of opinion vs. opinion are:

- Focus on the outcomes you want to achieve, not the exact thing you're building or the way you're building it. This should be based on the needs of your users. Of course there are exceptions like refactoring tasks, infrastructure improvements, etc.

- Give people a lot of autonomy on how they achieve the desired outcome

- Work together across product, engineering and design so people's opinions are heard early and often

- Ultimately have a "boss" who can stop the endless discussions if it comes to that (doesn't happen often)

Another thing is if you feel like you're iterating quickly, you feel less like stuff is set in stone and that results in less analysis paralysis and less bikeshedding.

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