By Justin Reyes
Gumroad is a platform that lets individuals easily sell their digital goods. One just needs to create a digital product, upload it to Gumroad, and then Gumroad takes care of the rest! It creates a simple link to the digital good, which sellers can share. Gumroad also processes the payment and distributes the digital good to the customer.
Gumroad currently services individual content creators, small businesses, and even big celebrities like Eminem!
Designing with the User in Mind
Amir began by telling me that when Gumroad sets out to build out a new feature, the engineering team first asks the following questions:
Why are we doing this? We ask this question to fully understand the rationale behind a feature. It also keeps us motivated, because we’ll understand the impact our work is going to have.
Has it been done before by someone else? If so, can we learn something from it?
How are we going to measure the success of the feature?
They also imagine that a customer is sitting in front of them, and whether the customer would be happy with the decision to build a new feature. This helps the engineering team stay objective, map out what is going to be built, and saves them from building out costly features.
Validated Learning
Once they decide on a new feature to build, they quickly decide how they will validate it to learn if it is indeed valuable to customers.
“Sahil designed a prototype of the feature. He then sat down with one of our sellers and had him walk through his thought process. When he came to us he distilled this early feedback that assisted us in building out a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).”
When it is time to deploy a new feature, Amir and the rest of the team roll out the feature to a select few power-sellers first. That way they can get early feedback, make adjustments, and gradually roll it out to 100% of their users. They simultaneously monitor certain metrics that can be affected by the feature.
“Getting early design and implementation feedback from our sellers has not only resulted in shipping better features, but has also helped up ship more features faster. This is because finding a design flaw early on saves you so much time down the road, by potentially saving you a re-design, which would have taken time away from implementing other features.
It takes discipline to apply these principles every time to each project, big and small.
We keep hearing from our sellers that they’re impressed by how fast we ship new features and they’re also surprised once they learn about our team’s small size.”
Constantly asking why, using each other’s shared experiences, and getting validated learning as quickly as possible helps the Gumroad engineering team remain lean while still producing a well-designed, elegant product.
According to Amir, having a lean engineering culture also requires having engineers who are passionate, have a certain drive, are hungry, and have a great sense of ownership within the company. At Gumroad, they’ve worked hard to create that culture, and it shows in the quality of their product and its adoption!
If you’d like to meet the Gumroad engineering team and learn more about them, then come out to our next Femgineer Forum on Thursday March 13th. Gumroad will be hosting us! The topic will be How to Showcase Your Expertise Through Content. We hope to see you there!
