Inspiring story about an extraordinary leadership and engineering team.
In 2018, Nat Friedman convinced Satya Nadella that Microsoft should buy GitHub for $7.5B. What was Friedman's first act as GitHub's new CEO? Ship one thing. On his first day, at 9am, he had meeting with his leadership team over Zoom. They were probably expecting a long term strategy, but instead he shared his screen and pulled up a GitHub repo where users could submit and vote on product feedback. He said "we're going to pick one thing from this list, and fix it by the end of the day." He initially got pushback that it wasn't possible. But ultimately they found something that would work, and they shipped it that day. Then he said, we're going to do this again, every day, for the next 100 days. What did this accomplish? 1. It built trust with their customers: "We needed to show the world we cared about developers, not that we care about Microsoft. If the first thing we did was add Skype integration, developers would have said 'we're not your priority'." 2. It built excitement internally about shipping: "Github was a company that had a little bit of stage fright about shipping, so when we broke that static friction it felt great." 3. It helped Friedman ramp up as leader: he quickly figured out which teams were standouts, where there was a lot of tech debt, which stuff they shipped was good and which was bad. The big strategy (including becoming a leader in AI) would follow. But first, he shipped 100 things.
