Bringing Feedback Loops to API Development

At Zuplo, we believe that the best way to build is with tight feedback loops.

Not just at a product or project level - although we obsess over receiving quick feedback from customers - but also at the development level: we love using and building dev tools that have short feedback cycles.

Let's categorize these feedback loops as a macro (product) and micro (dev) feedback loops.

Building products: macro feedback loops

Making the right decisions when building means that you shouldn't build all the features at once but rather include your end user from day 0. Yes, even at the planning level.

At Zuplo, we achieve this by having design partners: customers we work with closely to build our products, with weekly calls to show them the status. (If you're interested in becoming a design partner, please let us know.

Having customers shape the product does not mean they should shape the vision; that still has to come from the builder. However, the tactics and priorities of the vision should be influenced by who is using your product; this way, you avoid building in a vacuum.

The faster you can get feedback from your customers, the faster you can iterate on your product.

Building tools: micro feedback loops

When we're building, we are constantly receiving feedback from our tools: from our tests running in the terminal, the type checker in your language of choice, or hot reloading features that allow you to see what you've built in action instantly.

A company whose dev tools we like a lot is Vercel, a hosting platform that improved a lot of the feedback loops of building frontend projects. These feedback loops include:

Deploying every pull request of your frontend project (quickly) so anyone can preview the changes without testing in production directly
Providing tools to give comments and feedback directly on the deployed site preview

These tools have been game changers in frontend development and have played a massive role in the success of Vercel because they allow developers to get feedback on their work quickly. And quickly getting feedback is the key to building the right thing in iterations (as opposed to making the wrong thing in one go).