Pragmatism and Panache: On Managing Priorities for Delivering Quality Products by Postlight

Roadmap vs. Backlog: On Product Thinking by Postlight

As a hybrid and remote-friendly workplace, it’s rare that the whole Postlight team gets together, but recently the entire team congregated in New York City for a week of in-person events. In this episode, Chris and Gina chat about the importance of Remotes Week in building trust and relationships and share tips on how to make everyone feel at home during in-person events. IRL cheers to IRL meet-ups!

Keeping huge software projects on track is hard but not impossible. This week Chris and Gina walk us through how they come up with deadlines that work both for the client and the team. They explain what questions you should be asking to make sure nothing is overlooked in the beginning planning stages and explain what to do in that dreaded scenario when you realize you’re not going to hit your target. A good tip: Challenge anyone who says, “This should be easy.”

What Postlight’s senior leadership team has learned about leading through their own mistakes.

There’s nothing worse than waiting for a page to load. This week, Chris LoSacco and Gina Trapani go deep on a crucial yet underappreciated feature of digital platforms — speed. They break down how things can get so slow and share tips on how you can build for speed, from database indexing to managing how much processing is happening on the service side versus the client side. We’ve got the need for speed!

Software is never done — but that doesn’t mean you need to be stressed about constantly reworking it. The codebase architecture choices you make at the outset can set you up better for the future. This week, Chris and Gina share their tips on building for the future, from reusing code wherever possible to deciding what kind of technical debt you’re willing to take on to addressing accessibility concerns first instead of last.

Founding Executive Editor of Wired Magazine Kevin Kelly just turned 70, and on his birthday, he shared 103 bits of advice that he wished he had known. This week, Paul and Rich share some of their favorite pieces of Kevin Kelly wisdom from the list.

Paul and Rich on the wealthy and their vanity projects

Is impatience the root of anxiety? Is a lack of others’ anticipation the root of our impatience? Is good communication the root of anticipation? This week Rich, Gina, and Chris discuss when impatience is a feature and when it’s a bug — and call on a framework from Gina’s kid’s school to prioritize what should get done when.