“I haven't seen a lot of discourse in the industry about what's the most amount of change a user can take before they just don't try your features anymore. Because if you're shipping features faster than your users can try them, you're not doing important work. They're not going to use them.”
Fallthrough · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
In his closing thoughts, Hebert says software keeps reinventing from first principles when decades of history are available. Teams smash one bottleneck after another, he argues, without asking where the real ceiling is.
Transcript
…get a lot of people that are like, oh, wow, that actually solves my workflow problem. Thanks. I'm going to try that. And you'd be surprised at the response you get when you just share and what you're learning out loud. Cool. Anything that we left unsaid? I know we're running up against time here.
…drained properly so that we have proper slide strains and the proper size rest of the wastewater system. That can carry everything out at the rate that we're pouring things in. So I think that there's a bit of the things from the old, I think are relevant to the now again in a lot of ways.
Yeah. I think in software, we have a tendency to reinvent from first principles in places where there's decades of history that shows what works well, what doesn't work well. And we would save so much time by studying more of what other people do. or did in the past. Like the question about we're chasing and we're just like smashing bottlenecks one after each other. And I haven't seen a lot of like discourse in the industry about like, what's the most amount of change a user can take before they just don't try your features anymore. Because if you're shipping features faster than your users can try them, you're not doing important work. They're not going to use them. Like that's your bottleneck at the end as a user. So if that's the thing, like, and you're able to establish that, you don't need to go any faster than this.
Yeah. And if you're able to
think about the holistic point of view of the system, probably as good, yeah, Richie can take it over.
I was just going to say that a lesson that some companies have forgotten is that from product thinking is like users don't care if your app uses AI or not. What they actually care about is, does this solve my problem? Like I am not enticed as someone who is responsible for some budgets of some…
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