Write it down: process, benchmarking, and product judgment with Ronan Berder
Notes de l’épisode
If you ship features before you can explain the process, this episode is for you. Kent talks with Ronan Berder about building consumer products at Nike, Hilton, and Burberry scale in China, why engineers need to leave the IDE, and why a process you have not written down is not a process.
They cover aligning teams on product vision, benchmarking competitors before you invent, design boundaries that unlock creativity, consulting failures from expectation gaps, and the homework that sounds too simple: write down what you are struggling with.
- (00:00) - Meet Ronan Berder
- (01:53) - Shipping at China consumer scale
- (03:42) - Partner vs vendor: strategy before build
- (09:02) - Aligning engineers on product vision
- (15:56) - Benchmark competitors before you invent
- (17:35) - Design systems, boundaries, and process
- (22:42) - If it is not written down, you do not have a process
- (28:40) - Process scale: five people vs 160
- (33:21) - Horizontal skills beyond the IDE
- (34:15) - Abstraction layers in the business
- (39:44) - Talking with VPs and C-suite
- (44:49) - Consulting failures and expectation gaps
- (50:48) - When clients insist on bad bets
- (53:39) - Large companies lack creativity
- (58:23) - Homework: write down your struggles
Ronan Berder founded Wiredcraft in Shanghai, grew it past 160 people, and sold it after years of shipping localized consumer apps for brands like Nike, Hilton, Burberry, and Adidas - often to tens of millions of users on day one. In this conversation, he and Kent dig into what product engineering looks like when you are a partner to VPs and C-suite, not a ticket-taking vendor.
A major theme is process as a creative constraint. Ronan argues designers and engineers need boundaries, shared definitions, and written playbooks - not because bureaucracy is fun, but because you cannot improve what you never articulated. He is blunt about engineers who never benchmark competitors, teams that chase cool campaigns over boring work that moves sales, and consulting failures that come from expectation gaps more often than from bad code.
They also talk about AI making pure implementation more replaceable, why understanding one layer above and below your work still matters, and how large companies rarely invent the creative bets that startups do. Ronan's homework is simple: whatever you are struggling with right now, write it down and organize your thoughts.
Homework
- Pick one thing you are struggling with in your work right now.
- Write it down and organize your thoughts until the gaps are visible.
- Share the written version with a teammate and use it to align on what 'done' means.
Resources
Guest: Ronan Berder
Host: Kent C. Dodds
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