Product Velocity Playbook

I spend an unhealthy amount of time in my office, so I’ve upgraded my workspace a ton lately. I have a nice monitor, studio microphone, and a TRMNL display to keep me dialed in.

TRMNL is a beautiful e-ink display that connects with your favorite tools to feed you information without getting distracted.

They offer 70+ native plugins (calendar, weather, stock prices, etc.) that you can set up in minutes. They even have a beehiiv app so you can track the performance of your newsletter in real-time (an unhealthy obsession of mine).

Here’s my current rotation:

If you’re technical (or know how to use ChatGPT) you can even build your own app to display whatever you want. Use code BDE for 15% off.

Speed is a competitive advantage.

At beehiiv we ship a handful of new features and updates almost every single week… and today I’m going to share our playbook.

Funny enough, I don’t think Matt is our biggest fan. On more than one occasion he’s gone out of his way to insult us and even called me the Donald Trump of newsletters (which is either the greatest compliment or the greatest insult depending on which side of the aisle you sit on).

Regardless of what you think about us, you can’t deny our product velocity. And we’re accelerating…

I have a running list of upcoming updates that I try to coordinate in some strategic manner because there’s a whole lot that goes into each launch (more on that below). In the past few weeks we’ve legitimately been shipping too many features for me to keep up with.

I’ll start with some context as to why we’re like this.

Insecurity (at least in the beginning). When we first launched back in 2021 there were already dozens of competitors who had platforms far more advanced than our nascent little toy.

Mailchimp had recently been acquired for $12B, Substack had just raised $65M, and there were a dozen other email and marketing solutions with huge teams and robust capabilities. Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure we first hooked up the ability to actually send emails like 4 days before launching.

Our philosophy from day one was simple: ship or die.

For the first two years of the company, my days were entirely consumed with anxiety. I’d wake up to dozens of emails from unhappy users and have conversations that typically went like this:

User: “Prior to beehiiv we used X and they had Y feature. You guys don’t have that, and if you can’t launch that soon we’re going to have to go back to X.”

Me to user: “Totally agree, give me two weeks to get this live.”

Me to the team: “Hey uhhhh — we gotta figure out a way to get this feature live in two weeks.”

To be fair, and the team hates me for it, I still do this today. But it at least happens far less frequently and feels far less existential. Back in those days, those unhappy users churning may have accounted for 10% of our revenue.

When you consistently operate with that level of urgency, you accomplish two things:

And it’s not just shipping features for the sake of it. We’re constantly prioritizing what our users are asking for and building things to make their lives easier.

Most of our competitors launch a single update each quarter, whereas we launch a handful of new things each week. Which platform do you think consumers want to bet on?

Here’s the playbook we deploy to make it all possible:

We don’t have a separate front-end team and back-end team (which requires processes and handoffs). All of our engineers are full-stack and can pick up a feature from the idea stage and more or less handle design, front-end, back-end, and QA entirely on their own.

That means that in theory, 5 engineers could be building and launching 5 entirely separate features in parallel.

The thing about software is that there is always room for improvement, optimizations, and new bells and whistles. The limit does not exist to how much you can in theory improve a new feature, and if you waited for perfect you’d never launch anything.

We routinely ship features that are probably only 80% ready (except for anything dealing with money). Once they are live, it’s all hands on deck to collect feedback from users and address them as quickly as possible.

More often than not, users give feedback on things that weren’t even on our radar during development. Meaning that if we had kept building in isolation, we would just be wasting our time.

From day one, the heartbeat of our company has always revolved around this virtuous cycle of collecting feedback, prioritizing requests, building, launching, marketing, and repeat.

I can guarantee you that I make life pretty damn difficult for a whole lot of people on our support team, QA team, and those working on our knowledge base, tutorials, marketing site, etc. When you are making constant updates and launching a handful of new things each week, things are going to break.

But that’s just the trade-off we make in order to prioritize the customer above everything else. We aren’t playing for comfort, we are playing to win.

Behind each and every launch, there is an entire content and marketing engine that we have been building and refining for years. In broad strokes…

I write a dedicated email to explain the new features in detail with examples, dubbed Product Updates.

We launch a handful of video tutorials showcasing the new features in practice.

We publish several new articles to our knowledge base to support users.

We launch a hype video to announce the new features and distribute across socials. Our team also has a full social strategy to engage and amplify each release.

We launch dedicated popups and alerts in-platform to educate existing users.

We update our change log, landing pages, marketing site, comparison pages, etc.

We leverage our Slack community and online forum to promote the features and gather feedback.

We launch on Product Hunt and other select channels for increased distribution.

I typically go in and use the features myself for Big Desk Energy, then create a video showcasing my personal use cases.

…And while all of that is happening, we’re already QA’ing the next round of features set to drop the following week.

Like I wrote a few weeks ago, working weekends is the only way.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: mail.bigdeskenergy.com/p/product-velocity-playbook

Floor-to-ceiling windows with a beach view is my love language. Also don’t sleep on the texturized ceilings or the quality of the chair.

Shoutout Szana for the reader submission. If you’re reading this — reply and send me a better one 🙂.

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