In episode 699, Rob Walling chats with fan favorite Derrick Reimer, the founder of SavvyCal, about scaling products tastefully. Derrick offers his perspective on maintaining a tidy UX and deciding which features to implement. They also cover best practices for maintaining knowledge bases, changelogs, and documentation. As a bonus, Rob and Derrick offer podcasting advice to their past selves.

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Topics we cover:

2:35 – Establish design systems and language as you scale your product
8:36 – Building out a front-end directory to maintain consistency
10:17 – Truly understand how customers are moving through your product
16:28 – Naming convention dilemmas, industry norms vs. accuracy
19:22 – Hiding product features with feature flags
23:04 – Scaling new products that serve different verticals
31:12 – Best practices for maintaining a product knowledge base
37:11 – Bonus: What advice would you give to your prior self starting a podcast?

Links from the Show:

Register for MicroConf US in Atlanta, April 2024
The SaaS Playbook
Derrick Reimer (@derrickreimer) I X
SavvyCal
Allen D King (@allendking) | X
FunJoin
FullStory
Episode 681 | Why Launching a Second Product is Usually a Bad Idea
Help Scout Knowledge Base
Headway Changelog

Episode 699 | How to Build Elegant, Scalable Software Products with Derrick Reimer

Startups For the Rest of Us