The Right It

Savoia ran engineering at Google and spent years watching competent teams build products nobody wanted, which he calls the law of market failure. The book is about pretotyping, meaning testing whether a market exists before building anything, using devices such as a landing page for a product that does not exist or a person manually performing what the software would eventually do. He introduces the idea of your own data, which is evidence gathered about your own market, and argues that opinions and analogies drawn from other companies are worth nothing beside it. Short, blunt and aimed at the fortnight before a build decision.