曾两度改变世界的Evan Williams：Blogger和Twitter之后，我在创立Medium的过程中学到了什么
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What I Learned Building Medium (So Far)
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We’re now eight months into building Medium, having started in earnest in February of this year. In August, we launched what I call the “preview” version—which included viewing content publicly and creation for a small whitelist of folks. No real homepage, discovery, profiles, or many other important features.
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We’re now in the process of rolling out several of those things, as well as changing other stuff. So, we’re still in the nascent stages. We haven’t opened up, tried to grow, or, certainly, proven we have product/market fit.
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Still, it’s been educational. Here are some of my observations this time around:
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有一些创业者，不怎么招闪光灯待见，但是他们做出的成就却真实的改变了这个世界。Evan Williams就是一例。他在内容发布平台这一领域深耕多年，做出了Blogger和Twitter这类大红公司，现在又在忙着做Medium，另一个有可能再次改变我们信息发布方式的产品。最近Evan在Medium上写了一篇文章，谈了谈他在创立Medium的过程中学到的一些东西，一起来看吧。
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团队再优秀，一旦规模过大速度也会降下来
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Even if they’re awesome, having too big of a team will slow you down.
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我们在Obvious最大的优势就是有一支优秀的无与伦比的工程师和设计师团队。就像之前在Twitter一样，我像疯了一样四处寻找最好的工程师和设计师，最后我们组成了一个十人团队，而这时候我们还不太确定要去干嘛。
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One of the luxuries we’ve had at Obvious is the ability to hire an amazingly high-caliber engineering and design team. In fact, I was so hard-wired from Twitter to hire every great engineer or designer I could find, we built a pretty significant team—of ten or so amazing folks—before we knew exactly what we were going to do.
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我总是想着，哪怕在最开始我们的团队可能稍微大了一点，但是随着产品开始有点样子，每个人都会有忙不完的事。事实也是这样。现在我们有15个人，每个人都超级的忙，而且我们还需要更多的新鲜血液。但是我还是低估了初期招募太多员工的代价。
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I always assumed, even if we had a few too many people to start, we’d quickly need all of them as the product began to take shape. This has proven to be true. We’re now about fifteen, everyone is extremely busy, and we’re looking to grow. But I underestimated the cost of having too many people around the table in the beginning.
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有能力的人需要足够的挑战。但是在创业初期其实并没有什么挑战，除了搞清楚自己到底要做什么事。而这件事你是没办法细致的将其分解开来的。同时让团队中的所有成员都能保持同步这件事，也会消耗极大的沟通成本。
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Capable people need meaty challenges. There are no meaty challenges in the very beginning except defining what it is exactly (or approximately) you’re doing. That’s a job you can’t divide up too finely. And the communication costs of keeping everyone in sync with the daily changes is daunting.
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设定期限是保持专注的最好方式
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Nothing clarifies focus like a date. (Or: If you don’t have a tough constraint, make one up.)
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以前我经常会受制于工程师或者资金等资源的不足，这些都可以鞭笞我在做产品时力求简约，也会让我担心做出来的产品不如预想的好。
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Historically, I’ve been constrained by engineering resources and money. These are good forcing functions to drive simplicity. It’s caused me no end of angst that I couldn’t make our products as great as I wanted to in the past.
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如今在Medium，我们有了一支无所不能的工程师团队，远大的抱负和充足的资本。在这种情况下，我们怎样才能管好自己，不至于做出一款过于繁杂的产品呢？有一个办法，设定期限。
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With Medium, we have an engineering team that can build anything, matched with large ambitions, and plenty of capital. How do we ensure we don’t create something overly complex and/or fail to ship at all? By picking a date.
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之所以定在8月份发布初版，就是为了把不该做的事挡在门外。一旦确定了最后期限和最基本的功能设置，我们就能摆脱那些可有可无的功能（其中有些会在后续版本中加入，有些则会永远砍掉），我们还设定构建了真正开始开放时的基础构架。团队的效率高的出奇，那段经历也非常神奇。
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The reason we did our preview launch in August was simply to get something out the door. As soon as we picked the date and a minimal feature set, we got rid of loads of other features we were playing with (some of which we’ll bring back, some of which we won’t). We also identified and built a bunch of infrastructure we’d need to host real users. And we got more done in less time than I’d ever seen any team do. It was magical and fun. Before we had the date, frankly, we were drifting.
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把可有可无的事情关在门外的好处在于可以让我们拥有更清晰的视界，专注于当下，这样我们就不用去过多的猜测。这一切不是因为我们有了明确的用户反馈和数据分析资料，也不是因为仔细观察和体验过人们在真实场景中的使用情况。
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Getting something out the door was key also because it clarified our vision and focus more. We were making fewer guesses—not because of explicit user feedback and data analysis as much as just observing and experiencing real-world usage. As Matt Mullenweg put it, Usage is like oxygen for ideas.
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从头开始设计一个产品从来都不容易
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Designing a product from scratch is always hard.
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Medium是我做的第三个或者第四个内容发布平台，也是我创立的第四个或者第五个公司。自2000年以来我一直在琢磨这件事，但是对我而言，弄清楚Medium到底是干嘛的依然非常困难。 zhuo注：探索方向，把脉产品
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This is my third or fourth publishing platform and fourth or fifth company (depending on which ones you count). It’s the culmination of ideas I’ve been thinking about as far back as 2000. And yet, it’s a struggle to figure out exactly what Medium should be.
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那么这个过程到底是什么如此之难的呢？
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Things that are hard
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从纷繁的想法和意见中理清思绪，尤其是这些点子不光有我的，还有许多是团队其他成员想出来的。
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分析现在所处的状况，预测未来可能的走向。
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在心怀大志的同时保持极简状态，不至于陷入企图为太多人提供太多服务的圈套。
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一边盯着远处的目标，一边还不忘观察一线用户的反应。
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在保持快速迭代的同时能够处理好团队中的完美主义趋势。
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明白你现在做的一些“小”决定可能在未来产生巨大影响，而另外一些则毫无影响。
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Boiling down over a dozen years of ideas and observations (and those are just mine, let alone the rest of the team).
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Analyzing the current landscape and predicting where its all going.
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Wanting to be extremely ambitious, but knowing the value of simplicity (and the pitfalls of trying to be too many things to too many people).
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Having your sights on aspirational goals while taking into account the realities of how users react.
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Wanting to move quickly to try stuff and yet embrace your team’s perfectionist tendencies.
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Knowing that some “little” decisions you make today will have enormous consequences down the road—and some won’t really matter.
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这些就是产品设计的点点滴滴。或者就像Steve Jobs说的那样：
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This the process of product design. Or, as Steve Jobs put it:
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“设计一个产品，你得将脑袋中5000个想法以全新的方式糅杂到一起，产出你想要的东西。每天你发现一个新东西，解决一个新问题，都是一个将这些事情变得稍微不一样的新机会。这个过程就是奥秘所在。”
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Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.
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And it’s that process that is the magic.
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我不是Steve Jobs，但我是Evan Williams。过去几年在产品设计上的打磨让我受益匪浅，我给自己和团队设定的标杆也越来越高。我们会在细节上反复斟酌，永不满足现状。最后再一次欢迎加入我们的团队。
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I’m no Steve Jobs, but my confidence about product design has gotten much stronger of the years. At the same time, the bar I hold myself and the team to is higher, as well—so it hasn’t gotten easier. We sweat all the details, and we’re constantly unsatisfied with where we’re at. Welcome (again) to startup life.
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Stay tuned to see how it unfolds.
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