Quotes from Jeff Patton

There are two kinds of people in this world. And I'm not one of them.

At the end of the day, your job is to minimize output, and maximize outcome and impact.

There's always more to build than we have time or resources to build — always.

Your job isn't to build more software faster: it's to maximize the outcome and impact you get from what you choose to build.

Globo.com is good at it. That's not because the company is faster than everyone else — sure, it's fast, but it's not that fast. It's because it's smart about doing less.

Design by community is not design by committee…design is never democratic."[

Half a baked cake may not be enough to feed a wedding party, but it's enough to taste and leave everyone looking forward to the rest of the cake.

I had to work hard to figure out the least I could build to make people happy.

Great art is never finished, only abandoned. — Leonardo da Vinci

The best solutions come from collaboration between the people with the problems to solve and the people who can solve them.

Prioritize specific business goals, customers, and users, and then their goals, before prioritizing features.

Shared documents aren't shared understanding.

meeting" is often the euphemism we use for unproductive collaboration.

It all seems important. But then we step back and think about the specific people who will use our product, and what they'll need to accomplish to be successful. We distill that into a sentence or two. Then we carve away everything we don't need, and we're shocked at how small our viable solution really is. It's magic

The way you approach a big software cake is to break it down into lots of little cupcakes.

Slice out a release strategy. Remember: there's always too much to build.

Use slices to identify all the tasks and details relevant to a specific outcome.

Focus on what you hope will happen outside the system to make decisions about what's inside the system.

The clean language and distinction between output and outcome was first made clear to me in a talk by Robert Fabricant called "Behavior Is Our Medium".

The goal of using stories isn't to write better stories. The goal of product development isn't to make products.

But the alternative is the "HiPPO" method — the "highest paid person's opinion." That one sucks worse.

scope doesn't creep; understanding grows. And

If you're not cutting away more ideas than you keep, you're probably not doing discovery work right.

Minimize output, and maximize outcome and impact.