FAQ and Disclaimers #

Just to get it out of the way, here are our responses to some complaints we hear every now and then.

"These techniques won't work for me." #

Yes. Many of the methods, techniques and examples will not work for you or your company. That is fine.

The idea behind this book is to share a wide set of well-established techniques, but then you choose what actually makes sense in your context. As we like to say in software enginering "it depends".

"This is too complicated" #

Many people will feel it's too complicated to use the methods and techniques described as they imagine a much simpler product-building process.

We encourage you to read about these techniques anyway and then you can decide to ingore them and proceed with your simplified approach. However, it's important to know about possible techniques you can adopt in the future.

"You didn't invent that idea."  #

We're not claiming to have invented any of these techniques. Most of them have been around in one form or another for a long time and used by many world-class teams. We have curated and presented them in this book for your convenience.

"This is very opinionated and it doesn't include X or Y" #

Yes. It is an opinionated book about what we believe is generally useful. However it doesn't mean that the 1000 other things that were excluded are not useful or they are worthless. We just had to choose and reduce to a reasonable set of methods and techniques that we come back to.

"Are you even using them on your products?" #

We are using different methods and techniques in different products, where the context, motivation, team, financial and other constraints allow using them. We do consider using appropriate techniques wherever we can to improve processes and outcomes. The most important factor is that the founders and the team adopt a certain process or technique and that it actually works for them.

"This seems incomplete and it could be improved #

We launched the first version of this book in less than hundred hours of work, using some of the techniques described in this book to launch and iterate faster. The book is getting continuously update and iterated upon based on your feedback. Freel free to send any feedback to our e-mail info@ministryofprogramming.com.

"All of this is outdated in the age of AI" #

We would argue that AI requires good inputs/prompts and great thinking. Writing down your thoughts and modeling things to increase clarity just improves the effectiveness of the AI tools you are using. All of the methods in this book serve as great context and input for your AI tools.