What’s the smallest thing you can ship today?

Novelist Anne Lamott keeps a one-inch picture frame on her writing desk. It reminds her that on any given day, she only has to write what she can see through it: one scene, one detail, one interaction. Building software works the same way. Make it smaller, point the frame at the right thing, and get that one piece right before you move on.

We took this approach on a complicated digital platform we built for a major public transit system. It pushed real-time, targeted service alerts to screens on subway platforms. We started with one text box, one Publish button, and one test screen.

We also get into:

• How zooming out to the big picture can freeze a team
• Why “just give the API all the fields it needs” is a trap
• How premature optimization tempts backend engineers and AI coding agents alike
• What Nest got right before it got the hardware right
• When thinking small can bite you

Make Great Software is a show about timeless, practical principles for building better software experiences, hosted by Chris and Gina.

Learn more: https://chrisandgina.co

Customers will lie to you. They aren’t being cruel. They just don’t want to hurt your feelings. In this episode, Chris and Gina take on a principle that sounds obvious and is hard to practice: solve a real customer problem.

Chris opens with an advanced search interface he helped build early in his career. It was well designed, well engineered and powerful, and almost nobody used it. Gina tells the story of ThinkUp, the startup she shut down even after a thousand people signed up to pay before launch. Along the way they cover why enthusiasm isn’t commitment, painkillers versus vitamins, what Google Wave got wrong and what it left behind, why you should sit next to your users and watch them work, and why you should ship before it’s done.

Mentioned: The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, Google Wave, Twitter at SXSW 2007, the original iPhone, Ramp.

Make Great Software is produced in New York City by Chris & Gina.

Find out more at chrisandgina.co.

Software is everywhere. It’s the layer between us and the world. Yet most software is bad.

In the debut episode of Make Great Software, Chris LoSacco and Gina Trapani dig into the gap between software that fights you and software that feels like magic. Add one unnecessary second to something a million people do and you’ve cost the world eleven days of human life. It works the other way, too: shave a second off and you’ve handed eleven days back.

Now that AI can build almost anything with a few prompts, the scarce skills are judgment, taste, and caring about the person on the other side of the screen. Everyone can care, which means this show is for everyone who makes software: engineers, designers, PMs, founders, and the marketer who vibe-coded a tool last week.

Fixing bad software is good work, worth doing. Let’s get to work.