I’m reading this list, and it’s a great list but it also makes me sort of depressed. I think I have the combination of time and intellect to achieve maybe half of what’s proposed here. What do you do when you can’t possibly achieve writing throwaway prototypes to get design input while engaging deeply with your customers and keeping up with the research in your field while designing your APIs for 2+ implementations? And oh by the way shipping this major product in under a year?
I think you are assuming all these things are independent of one another. I think deep engagement with customers directs your problem statement. Build the smallest possible thing to test the idea you are proposing. If you are trying to publish than its a requirement to be reading papers in general, you need to be able to argue why this idea you are testing is orthogonal to other ideas being proposed. As time goes on you just scan important conferences in your field and get better at knowing which papers you need to skim versus deeply understand.
Edit: Also intelligence is an over-rated metric, persistence is far more important when it comes to these hard problems.
Yeah I know what you mean, I'm in awe of the author's ability to create the perfect environment for his team to succeed. Part of the key, I think, is that he was dedicated to caring about every factor that might affect success (customers, project management, design, and the other categories from the list), which left his team free to execute on the technical aspects.
I also think we might be underestimating how much one could do with one year, a relatively well-specified problem, and a team of three super motivated and intelligent coders.
I think you assess your skills and what you bring, figure out the deficiencies, and then find people who can fill in other gaps(and hopefully have some overlapping skills as well). At the end of the day having half of the time and intellect is a great place to be, that is much better than having none of the time and intellect.
