The DoubleLoop vision

Many fundamentals of product development are straight forward in theory but difficult to apply reliably in the real world. With each launch, teams should define clear objectives with measurable success criteria. They should communicate launch strategies and details to the broader company. After time passes, they should analyze whether a launch met success criteria. Periodically, teams should step back to evaluate the efficacy of their overall process and identify opportunities to improve.

Teams who consistently apply these practices will continuously improve their ability to ship successful products and build the company’s confidence in their efforts. Yet few teams do. Under the pressure of running a business, fundamentals slip through our fingers. We launch changes we believe are valuable without formulating clear, measurable goals. We get too busy to bother informing the broader company about what we’re doing. Focused on the future, we often neglect to loop back to assess previous launches or reflect on our engrained processes.

Even after building an appreciation of best practices in my 10 year product management career, I often find that, to the detriment of my company, applying them is too cumbersome to actually do. This is why I’m driven to create DoubleLoop. The vision of DoubleLoop is to make it easy for teams to follow, and keep following, the fundamentals of product development. DoubleLoop will transform teams’ ability to learn from their launches and make the right bets moving forward.

DoubleLoop records a historical timeline of events related to a product or suite of products. An “event” could be a code change or any type of happening relevant to the product such as a marketing campaign, news story, or Google search engine change. Events are added either automatically when the company ships code or manually by any member of the team. The record of each event consists of a summary of what happened, details, visuals, people involved, and the expected impact to the business. When time passes after the event, DoubleLoop helps teams loop back to record the actual impact of the event.

DoubleLoop provides a longterm memory store that will help new team members rapidly catchup with organizational learning. As contributors seem to be coming and going from companies at an increasing rate, DoubleLoop will ease the transitions between the old and the new. DoubleLoop increases the value of each of a company’s launch by maximizing the amount of learning retained.

While the first target users for DoubleLoop are software development teams, the applications are broader. Any type of organization that would benefit from a recorded history will be able to leverage DoubleLoop.