Heroku

Heroku's git push was the tiny core that made it great. Max Schoening lists Heroku's git push among the tiny superpowers at the center of great products, alongside iPhone multitouch, the GitHub pull request, Notion blocks and slash commands, and Dropbox's menu bar sync icon.

His rule is to find that core and push everything else back, because adding one more thing to make a product finally great never works. In his words: "All the great products have something tiny that is a superpower."

Lenny's Podcast▶ 1:02:10

Heroku promised to replace ops teams and lost to Kubernetes. Kubernetes became more successful than Heroku despite a worse user experience. It made ops teams superheroes instead of replacing them, and it avoided cloud lock-in.

Schoening uses this to argue that products should make users look good, not replace or judge them. He applies the same idea to AI: code review tools that roast pushed code feel bad, while Claude Code and Codex let users publish the combined work of themselves and the AI and earn bragging rights.

Lenny's Podcast▶ 47:40