Engineers & product builders

Every question in this questionnaire

1. Describe a design trade-off where improving one important quality required knowingly making another worse. —
2. What are you best at that nobody watching would notice? 26
3. Which failure mode do outsiders underestimate because the system usually hides it? —
4. When did observing real users overturn your idea of how a system should work? —
5. How much should instinct count in big decisions? 4
6. What did you remove or simplify that made the result substantially better? —
7. What bad recommendations do people in your field repeat too often? 32
8. What have you learned from maintaining something long after the excitement of building it passed? —
9. How has a setback or failure set you up for later success? 69
10. Which shortcut became a debt, and how did you decide whether to repay it? —
11. When you put your name on something, how thoroughly should you have checked it first — and when have you signed off without checking enough? —
12. Which problem are you still chipping away at? 12

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