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Pragmatism in delivery

Today, I want to talk about the importance of being pragmatic. 

At Alan, we love to think deeply about topics, find excellent solutions, and create perfect models.

Sometimes, we could take a step back and be, as in our leadership principles, street smart. That means finding solutions that work for our members, for our customers, for us, and that save time and speed things up. 

Some examples I found interesting are as follows, and here's how we can think about them.

• If a customer service tickets cost us €15, how many demands on small discrepancies in claim reimbursements, should be fixed automatically in the favour of the member (like Amazon does very well)

• If having a perfect solution for a system costs us 6 more months of engineering with marginal operational gains, can we cut the right corners? 

• If we see an Alaner who is an owner of a topic that is low to middle impact at Alan and can be reverted, do we spend time to argue, or do we just share one or two tips, and let them make the final decision faster without looking at it again?

Of course, we don’t want this to be interpreted as “we don’t aim for quality” or we push for imperfection. It means how to achieve the best overall result, pragmatically to deliver incredible quality to our members & customers (focusing on the outcome for them/us)

Some good articles I have read this week

Building companies & culture

👉 Committing to your Craft (Farnam Street)

• Have long stretches of uninterrupted focus!

• Extraordinary results come from doing ordinary things exceptionally well for a long time. 

• “Instead of asking how many tasks you can tackle given your working hours, ask how many you can ditch given what you must do to excel.”

• Avoid being unreliable, low-energy, and a complainer.

👉 The Untold Story of the Browser Company Started with Josh Miller (The Split)

• Products have a right to be complex and not a single feature. You can differentiate as well through “all these little details and these little touches and these little innovations that added up to a cohesive experience that made it better.” 

  • It can be different for each user, but there's something for everyone.

• Big bet on Youtube

👉 Gokul Rajaram on X on minimum revenue to go public (X + X)

• The closer you are to $1bn revenue the better it is from being public

• Growth rate at 50%+ is very welcomed by the markets. 

• Being $1bn revenue for SaaS

AI

👉 Gemini 1.5 and Google’s Nature (Stratechery)

• Very interesting examples of grounding.

• Did you test code assist?

👉 An Interview with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian About Google's Enterprise AI Strategy (Stratechery)

• The example of the insurance company is interesting, what does it inspire us to do?

• Are we testing their platform for grounding?

• Are we masters of function calling? Should be really interesting for us.

• The techniques for access control are also super interesting

Design

👉 UX Bites #16 – Hackernoon, Adzuna & more… (UX Bites)

• Good inspiration for referral

• Good inspiration for Alangotchi: taking of yourself is like growing a little marmot

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