Press releases

Shipping Greatness--New from O'Reilly Media: Practical lessons on building and launching outstanding software, learned on the job at Google and Amazon

Sebastopol, CA—There's a reason why Amazon and Google have been successful software companies—they know how to ship. Product and engineering expert Chris Vander Mey (@ShippingChris) tells you how he learned to ship great software at these companies in Shipping Greatness: Practical lessons on building and launching outstanding software, learned on the job at Google and Amazon ($21.99 USD). It provides a simplified, no-BS approach to the entire software lifecycle.

"Shipping software is one of the most important jobs you can do," notes Vander Mey. "There are recipes you can follow that will save you pain and time as you try to build and launch your software. You need to invest time to read, to learn, and to incorporate these processes and techniques into your own process, and the road will be bumpy at times, but overall you will be more efficient and your customers and team will be happier."

In the first part of the book, you'll learn a step-by-step shipping process used by many of the best teams at Google and Amazon. Part II shows you the techniques, best practices, and skills you need to face an array of challenges in product, program, project, and engineering management.

Readers will learn how to:

• Clearly define your product and develop your mission and strategy
• Assemble your team and understand enough about systems to communicate with them
• Create a beautiful, intuitive, and simple user experience
• Track your team's deliverables and closely manage the testing process
• Communicate clearly to gracefully handle requests, senior-management interactions, and feedback from various sources
• Build metrics to track progress, spot problems, and celebrate success
• Stick to your launch checklist and plan for marketing and PR

Advance Praise
"Shipping Greatness condenses years of experience on working with world class products into an accessible, practical guide. Whether you're looking for reference as an aspiring software leader, or need a handbook to keep everyone on the same page, it is a must-have guide for software leaders. Intensely practical advise that I've seen applied on the best products, built from startups through to Google, Microsoft and Disney."
—Mike Smith, CTO Disney Interactive

"Shipping Greatness is a perfectly-sized primer on how to lead a software project—readers will gain great appreciation of the entire shipping process from several levels—enough, even, to role-play for others on the team in a pinch. In full geek-out terms, it's quite possibly the "Dungeon Master's Guide" of anyone's set of technology business volumes."
—Matt Shobe, User experience designer, co-founder of FeedBurner.com

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