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.
Episodes
12 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...
1.5: The Agile Precursors
In the 1990s, the advent of consumer software, the rise of the Internet, and mounting evidence of the failures of Waterfall to deliver results created space for new ideas and new ways of working. Put another way: A righteous solution was failin...
1.6: Agile & Lean
As the dot-com bubble came crashing down, a group of "organizational anarchists" got together at a ski resort and created the Agile Manifesto, finally providing a common banner for incremental software people. One of the most successful offshoo...
1.7: The Startup Wave
The dot-com crash absolutely crushed the consumer Internet economy in 2000, launching a fit of soul-searching and rethinking foundational ideas about the relationships among customers, products, and companies. At the same time, new technologies...
1.8: Quantified Leap
The 2010s were characterized by a huge shift toward rigorous experimentation and quantification in many aspects of software development. Big data and data science, A/B testing, data science, quantified OKRs -- it was the decade that we all need...
1.9: Agile at Scale
As the Internet grew in the 2000s, it drove the creation of far more large and complicated software organizations than the industry had ever seen before. This posed hard new questions, leading to both a crisis of confidence -- "Agile is Dead!" ...
