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Shipping Greatness: Practical lessons on building and launching outstanding software, learned on the job at Google and Amazon
Need a shortcut to a degree in shipping great software? Successful team leaders must have an extremely broad skill set to find the right product, work through a complex and ever-changing development process, and do it all incredibly quickly. In this guide, Chris Vander Mey provides a simplified, no-BS approach to the entire software lifecycle, distilled from lessons he learned as a manager at Amazon and Google. In the first part of the book, you’ll learn a step-by-step shipping process used by many of the best teams at Google and Amazon. Part II shows you the techniques, best practices, and skills you need to face an array of challenges in product, program, project, and engineering management.
224 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2012
67 people are currently reading
452 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
November 20, 2013
"Shipping Greatness" is a guide to 'shipping software' in the broadest possible sense. Chris Mey walks you through the software development process from start to finish, and it’s readily apparent that he knows what he’s talking about. As far as content is concerned, then, the book is pretty comprehensive. Unfortunately, when it comes to presentation, "Shipping Greatness" comes up short. This is a how-to guide where the author just can't seem to decide on who his target audience is. As a result, he tends to dive too deeply into widely divergent topics, to the extent that pretty much everybody is bound to find a lot of detailed instructions they'll never have the opportunity to follow.
This particular topics Chris tackles include: finding and pitching product opportunities, writing specs, managing software development, debugging code, and finally, shipping finished software. If pressed, I'd say that these stages are described from the perspective of a product manager, though again, perspectives shift frequently and without cue. "Shipping Greatness" is best appreciated if you think of it as a broad overview of how products are developed at establish, respected software companies (Chris hails from Google and Amazon, and he uses lots of examples). In this sense, the book is very informative.
Unfortunately, Mey is not out to inform: he's out to instruct, and he tends to get very specific with his advice. This is exactly how to create a revenue forecast model in excel, he tells you. That is how to use the omnigraffe to create wireframes - and here are a dozen screenshots to walk you through it. If you're an entrepreneur examining a market opportunity, knowing how to make a good revenue model is critical. If you're a product manager or designer, you might – might! – find his step-by-step guide to using omnigraffe useful. But for anyone else, you'll be left scratching your head - and skipping ahead.
To conclude, then, "Shipping Greatness" has a lot of legitimate, field-tested knowledge to offer. The content is there: distracting digressions aside, you'll learn a lot about how great software companies do their thing. Unfortunately, this alone is not enough to recommend it. The book tries too hard to teach too much, and the author's didactic efforts are obstructed by his inability to focus on a target audience. "Shipping Greatness" is too preoccupied with the roles of various people where it’d be better off aiming to explain complex processes. It tries too hard to teach you disparate specific lessons without bothering to ground them in a coherent narrative framework, and as a result, it's not always clear what the takeaways are supposed to be. That is to say, there's goodness to be had - you'll just have to work for it.
This particular topics Chris tackles include: finding and pitching product opportunities, writing specs, managing software development, debugging code, and finally, shipping finished software. If pressed, I'd say that these stages are described from the perspective of a product manager, though again, perspectives shift frequently and without cue. "Shipping Greatness" is best appreciated if you think of it as a broad overview of how products are developed at establish, respected software companies (Chris hails from Google and Amazon, and he uses lots of examples). In this sense, the book is very informative.
Unfortunately, Mey is not out to inform: he's out to instruct, and he tends to get very specific with his advice. This is exactly how to create a revenue forecast model in excel, he tells you. That is how to use the omnigraffe to create wireframes - and here are a dozen screenshots to walk you through it. If you're an entrepreneur examining a market opportunity, knowing how to make a good revenue model is critical. If you're a product manager or designer, you might – might! – find his step-by-step guide to using omnigraffe useful. But for anyone else, you'll be left scratching your head - and skipping ahead.
To conclude, then, "Shipping Greatness" has a lot of legitimate, field-tested knowledge to offer. The content is there: distracting digressions aside, you'll learn a lot about how great software companies do their thing. Unfortunately, this alone is not enough to recommend it. The book tries too hard to teach too much, and the author's didactic efforts are obstructed by his inability to focus on a target audience. "Shipping Greatness" is too preoccupied with the roles of various people where it’d be better off aiming to explain complex processes. It tries too hard to teach you disparate specific lessons without bothering to ground them in a coherent narrative framework, and as a result, it's not always clear what the takeaways are supposed to be. That is to say, there's goodness to be had - you'll just have to work for it.
February 14, 2016
This is quite a light read, but the content is pretty useful for someone who is interested in software development, but who doesn't have any technical background to understand the deep details of it all. You can also read it for general knowledge or for fun, because the author does provide many interesting stories about his time at Amazon and Google.
August 30, 2017
Plenty of insightful nuggets in this comprehensive guide to shipping software, with a healthy dose of sharp wit poking both business and tech. It's ironic that I read 75% of the book after leaving a PM role at Amazon, but the content was still relevant and my own experience added extra depth to the concepts. The key takeaway of the book is that, as a product lead, your goal is to ship the product, warts and all. Shipping is about managing tradeoffs and "done is better than perfect". The author dives into all the key drivers and pitfalls: balancing budget/scope/schedule, hiring people, managing conflict, asking technical questions, contributing to UX design, presenting to leadership, tracking actionable metrics, writing emails, escalating appropriately, and formulating documents.
This book focuses on large-scale product launches (i.e. corporate), but that shouldn't stop startups from picking up this guide. The frameworks, which make up the majority of the content, are relevant for all products. And ultimately, we all face the same problems: 90% miscommunication, 9% misaligned objectives, and 1% from the inevitable bad apples.
This book focuses on large-scale product launches (i.e. corporate), but that shouldn't stop startups from picking up this guide. The frameworks, which make up the majority of the content, are relevant for all products. And ultimately, we all face the same problems: 90% miscommunication, 9% misaligned objectives, and 1% from the inevitable bad apples.
September 8, 2017
I should start this book much earlier. It is a very good guidance for product manager who just breaks into this position and walks through the pm skills. However, it is more for shipping software product, especially for google and amazon because the author worked a lot in these companies. Might agree with everything listed here inside of this book as a PM with two years past experience at Oracle. Still, a very useful and practical book for a new pm.
October 30, 2023
I was a bit unsure what is the audience for this book. Given the experience of the author a lot of examples and situations are unfamiliat to me either because I have not worked for the massive tech companies with org structures to match, or maybe because I am from different region (not SV). I would guess the former is more likely.
Non the less this book is good at delivering message of what is required to ship greatness. And most and formost it is shipping!
Non the less this book is good at delivering message of what is required to ship greatness. And most and formost it is shipping!
July 6, 2017
Good summary of fundamentals of PMing. Geared towards large companies.
June 29, 2019
Interesting and great at certain points
June 4, 2022
Good for non-eng people considering product roles.
October 24, 2014
I think Shipping Greatness is a decent attempt at explaining the nuts and bolts of the software industry. Unfortunately it does not comprehensively explain the product engineering process in detail explaining how to set up the development ecosystem like setting up version control software, setting up incident management, the designing process in a little more detail. Its more like a business guide for engineers or a technical guide for managers. Matter of fact I believe Chris got confused when it came to addressing the kind of audience that would like this book.
December 29, 2012
I didn't really care for this book or get much out of it, but I'm also clearly not the target audience of the book, as I'm not a team lead or in charge of shipping anything. Maybe I'll read it again if I ever find myself in such a role, but my guess is there's a bunch of other better books out there on this topic.
April 29, 2014
I'm biased because I know Chris AND I'm a Product Manager at Amazon but I was honestly impressed by this practical book on Product Management for techies. It's filled with solid advice for what it means to own all the aspects of customer experience - from feature performance and scalability, to user interface and analytics.
March 11, 2013
This book packs in a lot of great information, and the author's pedigree couldn't be better. (That is, unless he had spent a tour at Facebook as well.) It was a fairly quick read for me since I've been doing product for the last eight years now and it's geared for a non-development audience.
August 29, 2013
A very interesting book with the experiences and practices of a professional who worked for Amazon and Google. Many practices that I really use at amazon!
July 17, 2015
Pretty good book. I would definitely recommend to any product manager as a tactical manual for day to day operations.
December 8, 2016
A little too technical and I found it to be dated
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews