Embrace Constraints

What would your team do differently if your job was to make sure the red phone never rings?At our agency, every client got a red phone. It wasn’t a real phone, just a direct line to us, any time, for emergencies. The message to our teams was: make sure it never rings. The habits that came out of that kept our agency alive, and they turned out to be good habits for any team building software.Think like an agency. Act as if you have to earn your budget every week, because the practices that keep a client happy are the same ones that make the software better.One of our red phone calls came from a team that was doing great work, shipping on schedule and committing code every day. The problem was that nobody at the client knew it. That one was purely a communication failure.We also get into:Why your sponsor should get the credit, even when the New York Times leaves your name outHow building for the handoff makes you write better docs, tests, and decisionsWhy “the dashboard’s green” isn’t an answer to “why haven’t we shipped?”“You can’t argue with working software,” plus two tips for better demosHow phase one keeps growing and never ships, and how a phase two list stops itMake Great Software is a show about timeless, practical principles for building better software experiences, hosted by Chris and Gina.chrisandgina.co

Speed is a feature. Maybe the most important one.A major insurance firm we worked with had a backlog of online claims that customers started and never finished, leaving money on the table. Uploading receipts was so slow it felt broken: endless spinners and stalled progress bars. If users have time to wonder what’s going on, your software is broken. You have to keep it fast.In this episode, we get into:How speed rot sets in, and why “it’s only one time” isn’t an excuseWhat AI chatbots, Netlify, and SimCity teach us about making a wait feel shorterWhy you should stop saying “tech debt” and show the slowness insteadWhat happened when Gina admitted to running an ad blocker in an all-hands meeting at an ad-supported startupWhen slow is okay: prototypes and powerful featuresMake Great Software is a show about timeless, practical principles for building better software experiences, hosted by Chris and Gina.Find out more at: chrisandgina.co

What if the deadline is the best thing that ever happened to your project?A client asked us to launch a video site alongside a big-budget TV show on a major network. The premiere date was printed on billboards, and we didn’t have enough time to build it properly. So we did the only thing we could: we accepted the deadline and worked backward from it. That meant building on an off-the-shelf platform, which was objectively the wrong tool for the job. Nobody who visited the site ever knew.Embrace constraints. A hard deadline, a small team, or a tiny screen cuts out whole categories of debate and makes you find the 20 percent that matters. When nobody hands you a constraint, set one yourself.The proof is a project where we didn’t have one. The front end was demoable early. The API team spent months debating which programming language to use, and the API never shipped. A new team, a familiar stack, and a hard deadline finally got it out the door.We also get into:Architecture astronauts, and why Fredkin’s paradox says the hardest choices matter leastWhy throwing away work is part of the workHow small screens and App Store review make mobile apps betterWhat Dr. Seuss, George Lucas, and Michelangelo made from their limitsWhen to drop constraints and go blue sky, and why even that needs a boundaryMake Great Software is a show about timeless, practical principles for building better software experiences, hosted by Chris and Gina.chrisandgina.co

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 teamWhy “just give the API all the fields it needs” is a trapHow premature optimization tempts backend engineers and AI coding agents alikeWhat Nest got right before it got the hardware rightWhen thinking small can bite youMake 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.

Most software is bad. Meet Make Great Software with Chris & Gina, a new show about building better software, apps, and digital platforms. Join us and subscribe so you never miss an episode.