3 Surprising Lessons learned from Lee Rob

Hey friend,

I interviewed Lee Rob - the VP of Product at Vercel on my Youtube channel. I learned a lot from our conversation and want to share a few lesson I learned which surprised me.

What's so surprising is that these foundational ideas are still crucial, even for someone at Lee's career stage.

If you prefer a video version, you should check out the full interview here:

But if you prefer reading it, then keep reading.

Lesson 1: Ship Small and Get Quick Wins

Feeling overwhelmed by a massive feature or a complete site overhaul? 🙈 Lee's advice: "Ship small, iterate big."

Don't aim for perfection right out of the gate. Get something functional out there, gather feedback (from your team, your users, even your rubber duck 🦆), and then refine.

👉 Think of it like a 1% improvement with each iteration – those small gains compound into massive progress over time.

For devs, this means breaking down projects into smaller, shippable components. Focus on delivering value incrementally, learning from each release, and always staying aligned with what your users actually need.

Lesson 2: Deepening Your Understanding of Next.js Architecture

Knowing how to use Next.js is good, but really understanding how it's built is even better.

Lee said it's super important to know why the people who made Next.js did things a certain way.

Like, why did they create the different parts of it? Like why App Router exists today alongside Pages Router? What were they thinking about? What were the good and bad things about the choices they made? If you understand these things, you can make better choices when you're building stuff, you can help other people, and you can easily learn new things about Next.js as it changes.

Lesson 3: Future-Proof Your Skills

"Design APIs not just for current users, but for the "next million developers." 🤯"

This means prioritizing intuitive, easy-to-learn interfaces. React focused on the next million developers as it changes how the future of React looks like.

As devs, let's apply this principle to our own code. Write clean, well-documented code that's a joy for others (and your future self 👴) to understand and maintain.

These are just a few golden nuggets 🍩 from an awesome conversation although the video covers a lot more that you should check out.

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