If you’re an existing user, you’ll see a handful of stability and performance improvements in this release, including a fix for some check-in errors. However, the main change in this release is for new users: we’ve changed the sign up steps to make it easier for people to connect to Twitter or Facebook, add friends and add habits.
Our philosophy of continuous improvement has us releasing as often as we can (this is our second release this week). But we often have features that take many weeks to build.
This creates an ordering challenge for us. Practically all of our large features can be broken into smaller, useful, releasable increments. But, what increment should we build and release first?
Our philosophy, and I’ll tie this into real world achievement in a moment, is to work inside-out. We start with the core feature and then build the support features second.
So, in this case, changing the new user signup experience supports a set of core social features that we’ve already validated.
While Lift is primarily focused on consistency, both in your habits and in our product development process, our experience is that you get more out of consistency if you have strong fundamentals.
There’s actually a name for this, deliberate practice, which some of you may know as the 10,000 hour rule (a misleading concept since you start accruing benefits in the first hour).
The research on deliberate practice says that greatness (and don’t we all want that) comes from focusing on fundamentals. Most people engage in un-focused practice and end up as experienced non-experts.
In our product development, we choose to spend most of our time on the product value, which we think is fundamental to building a successful company. This is as opposed to having growth be the primary focus. We’d hate to have millions of users who aren’t achieving anything. What would be the point of that?
In your habits, this concept is even more important. Here’s a challenge for you. On your habits today, try to find a way to increase the quality from what you did yesterday. Did you really floss each of your teeth? Could you get more dark greens into your salad? How smooth was your pedaling on today’s bike ride?
In both our product development process and your habits, there’s always a temptation to just go through the motions or try to take advantage of tricks. But true excellence comes from paying attention to quality and fundamentals. We’ll try to be better at this if you will.
Tony & Jon, Matt, Erin, Alicia, Matt, Amanda
P.S. on a completely unrelated note, we’re doing a lot of work with meditation for the month of March. The Lift team are all meditation newbies, but we’ve already seen immediate benefits. Try joining us in the Meditation habit and following our Twitter account (@liftapp) for tips.
