Product Fundamentals
The Product Fundamentals podcast is dedicated to giving software professionals of all levels the core knowledge they need to thrive in their jobs. Join us for season 1, in which we unpack the deeper history of why we build software in the way we do, from the Industrial Revolution through the Space Race and on to today. Whether your role is in product management, design, engineering, or another nearby field, there should be something interesting to learn about how we work in every episode.
Product Fundamentals
Latest Episodes
1.0: Preamble
The way we make software is weird, especially compared to how the rest of the economy works. In the first season of Product Fundamentals, we'll unpack that history, and figure out how forces dating from the Industrial Revolution through the Spa...
1.1: Chasing Waterfalls
To understand why we make software the way that we do, we start from the beginning, with the earliest programmable computers, exponential growth, NATO's first "software engineers," and Winston Royce's articulation of the Waterfall.
1.2: Intro to Iteration
While we may think of the Waterfall as the original way to make software, the philosophy of moving fast and making small changes -- called iterative and incremental development -- dates back just as far. Today we're tracking how IID got its sta...
1.3: Management and Measurement
This episode, we take a pause from the Waterfall vs. IID rivalry to catch up on the management and measurement parts of software development.We'll track how statistics got its start in the early modern era, through the quotas of the Ame...
1.4: Waterfall Ascendant
This episode, we cover the rise of Waterfall to its dominant position over the software industry, find out what it was like in day-to-day practice, learn how it became the official way to make software on both sides of the Atlantic, and discove...
