Every impactful tech products have fascinating stories behind them, from the people behind them or how the product itself came into existence, which are worth reading. These are some of my personal summarized list as a self-reminder with their key take aways.
Amazon vs Google↗
Key takeaways :
If you want to build a platform, you cannot cheat, you have to solve all the hard problems up front
- Amazon created a rule to make each teams to communicate and expose their data and functionality through service interfaces and if someone doesn’t obey, they will get fired
- Facebook works because they are consisted of many engaging products that builds as a platform
Link - written in 2011
The two pizza rule↗
Key takeaways :
A team should not be any bigger to be fed by two pizzas
- The goal wasn’t to cut down on the catering bill. It was, like almost everything Amazon does, focused on two aims: efficiency and scalability. The former is obvious. A smaller team spends less time managing timetables and keeping people up to date, and more time doing what needs to be done. But it’s the latter that really matters for Amazon
Link - written in 2018
Magic of small teams↗
Key takeaways :
PostHog has 47 employees operating in 10 countries
- Each team have their own mission, leader and target customer
- One of the trade-offs is you got to hire the right person. Each employee is required to have extreme level of ownership and low-ego
Link - written in 2024
What Engineers get wrong about communication↗
Key takeaways :
Engineers spend most of their time doing two things: coding and communicating. The first has endless amounts written about it; the second much less so
- You create a culture of communication that prioritizes shipping features that users actually care about, rather than planning or theorizing them.
- Because the information you need is available at the right time, everyone can work more autonomously with fewer meetings and less back and forth.
Link - written in 2025