

Ask “why” five times when something unexpected happens.Visionary complex: “but customers don’t know what they want!”.Avoid building products that nobody wants.Get as much feedback as possible, as soon as possible.Problem: no feedback until the end, might be too late to adjust.build a great product with enough features that increase the odds that customers will want it.

Use historical trends to predict acceptable bounds.If any metric goes out-of-bounds, wake somebody up.Monitor all metrics that stakeholders care about.Alerting & Predictive monitoring (Nagios).Reject changes that move metrics out-of-bounds.Monitor cluster and business metrics in real-time.Automatic feedback if the team is going too fast.All tests must pass or “shut down the line”.Continuous Integration Server (BuildBot).At IMVU, a large batch = 3 days worth of work.Tell a good change from a bad change (quickly).At IMVU time from check-in to production = 20 minutes.Allows us to achieve a big vision in small increments without going in circles.

