Till Carlos

Outline

My goal for this resource is: take a non technical person with 0 product experience (PM/CEO/entrepreneur) to someone who can manage their own product.

I am here to help you do this transformation.

The articles are centered around Ruby on Rails but I try to write it simple so that it translates to other frameworks as well.

Got an idea what’s missing? let me know and I’ll fill it in.

Scope + Planning

Status of completion 30%
  1. About starting small: the definition of an MVP Outline
  2. Examples of different teams and how much PM overhead comes with it?
  3. Functional specs: the 80/20 of specification Outline
  4. Is it a good idea to build on top of existing OS software? Outline
  5. 5 lessons I learned from building products for startups Outline
  6. What’s better: working with freelancers or full-time staff? Outline

Teams and people management

  1. Freelancer vs. Fixed Employee. When to use who?
  2. Scrum process: when is a well-meant approach too much? What’s the 80/20 ?
  3. The mindsets differences of Asian to Western developers Outline
  4. Leading software teams: How to do hard things without screwing up the morale?
  5. How your project can attract great talent Outline

Productivity

  1. For Devs becoming PMs - how deep to go into a topic?Outline

Concepts to know

  1. Managers should know these 9 Facts About Technical Debt
  2. Important concepts about consistency Rails PMs need to know.
  3. I18n: what’s the best practice to translate a software? Outline
  4. Notification systems. What’s hard about them + some best practices.
  5. Tagging systems: How flexibility can slow your software down and screw with UX (and how to do it right)
  6. All things to know in a user authentication system.
  7. Multi-tenancy systems: How to separate customer data Outline
  8. Feature flags and main branch deployment. with

Implementation

  1. Graphql or not graphql? How much do you pay and what do you actually get?
  2. Do you actually need a tag system or not?
  3. Struggling with server deployments? What’s the DYI case, and when to use Heroku.
  4. Email provider options + most important things to know about DKIM etc. (with an SC admin?)
  5. What’s the 80/20 of testing?
  6. Architecture of a hack-proof system
  7. What’s the point of JAMSTACK websites?

Ruby on Rails

  1. Hotwire or javascript frontend. Can you actually make something that’s responsive, easy to code, extensible and looks good? (… with someone who built a large-scale hotwire app)
  2. Error system: 3 tiers of logging from MVP to Enterprise level
  3. The most common threats for a rails application.
  4. We processed 5 million EUR in one nightly run. Lessons learned from long-running background jobs.