When I worked at Dropbox, one of my favorite Friday product team rituals was the Product Teardown. Around 5pm, the product team of our division would gather in a conference room and the leader of the discussion of the day would cast their phone or computer for everyone else to see. After navigating to the product of the day, we’d begin the teardown.

At Dropbox, my greater 100-person team held a weekly meeting that required attendance: 1pm on Fridays, we had a Team Meeting where leadership made announcement, took hard questions, engineers demoed, and we reviewed our progress towards quarterly or annual goals.

At the risk of this blog turning into a litany of engineering complaints, I’ve decided to write about our experience with building iOS notifications into our mobile application. We were using Expo and React Native with AWS’s Amplify.

The first time I tried to ship an app on Apple’s Testflight a few years ago, I found the process to be incredibly frustrating. That first time, I eventually abandoned the exercise. To make the deadline, I “shipped” the app by sharing my password to my Expo account to the first few beta testers (not recommended in the slightest).

The first time I successfully shipped an app on Testflight, I found the process to be magical. I rode a high of letting Apple handle my beta process and alerting users to download the application.

Before a product road map, before UX design, before any code was written, before any funds were raised, we made a style tile for our startup.