[zswaff]

Yeah, great question. This is something that I have spent a lot of time thinking about. Honestly probably worth a whole blog post/PG-style essay at some point. Shipping and iterating at top speed is honestly paramount for a startup.

Probably the biggest thing we've done has been to focus on hiring for people that can and will move quickly, and building a company culture around that. Our team is very strong, works unusually hard, and ships quickly at all costs. For a startup, I would recommend hiring startuppy people rather than engineers with 20y experience at the magnificent 7.

One of our most counterintuitive/provocative/potentially wrong practices has been to deemphasize automated tests. I'll probably catch a lot of flak for this but I think that spending a bunch of extra time writing thorough tests for something that will change next week when we iterate and improve is a waste of time. In my experience you can make up for this with thorough manual testing by someone (e.g. founder, product owner) that really, really cares about the product and UX. This is part of the overall "do things that don't scale" ethos and as the product has matured we have started to evolve to a higher level of test coverage. tl;dr I recommend less time spent engineering tests pre-PMF.

Otherwise we generally follow established best practices. Review fast, ship fast, roll forward. Extreme ownership and responsibility to ICs. Use Dart for project management to save time ;)

Overall, I think the first thing is most important: build a team and a culture that moves uncomfortably and unusually fast and breaks things (then fixes them immediately).