Blog
- 193Oct 2, 20193 minmarketingarchitecture
Lyft's Marketing Automation Platform Symphony
How can advertising campaigns achieve higher returns with less money and fewer people? Lyft's answer is automation, which includes an LTV prediction module, a budget allocation module, and a delivery module. When people are freed from tedious delivery tasks and can focus on understanding users, channels, and the messages they need to convey to their audience, they can achieve better campaign results.
Read more → - 194Oct 2, 20191 minentrepreneurshipcareer
Why Side Projects Should Be Stupid
The design lead at Spotify, with decades of experience in side projects, believes that successful side projects must be "stupid" to explore boldly and interestingly. Don't let complex issues like scaling, funding, and competitive analysis slow you down. Doing things is more important than learning.
Read more → - 195Sep 24, 20191 minsystem design
How to write solid code?
Empathy plays the most important role in writing solid code. Besides, you need to choose a sustainable architecture to decrease human resource costs in total as the project scales. Then, adopt patterns and best practices; avoid anti-patterns. Finally, refactor if necessary.
Read more → - 196Sep 17, 20192 minstartup
Metrics for Measuring a Product
There are many metrics to measure the quality of a product: the number of active users, profit, transaction volume, retention rate, and more. To ensure better product development, it is essential to focus on the following metrics: improve retention rate, as high retention means high valuation; assess weekly growth rate, maintaining its level will lead to exponential growth; prioritize iteration speed. When it comes to metrics, we must approach them correctly.
Read more → - 197Sep 17, 20193 minstartup
Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
Four main reasons why smart people have bad ideas: bad ideas are products of intuition; bad ideas prioritize being impressive over making money; bad ideas yield to fear of competition; bad ideas are too superficial. Therefore, smart people must clearly understand user needs and conduct user research to unleash endless potential and truly do smart things.
Read more → - 198Sep 9, 20197 minstartup
Introduction to Beancount.io
If you want to manage money in a better way, what you need is more understanding of your financial status. Beancount.io is such a tool that assists you by recording your financial transactions in text files and visualizing them into financial statements.
Read more → - 199Sep 1, 20195 minstrategy
The Company's Technology and Market Quadrant Diagram and Gravitational Directions
The quadrant diagram of market and technology determines the company's market position. With the inflation of technology, excellent technologies tend to become mediocre, and mediocre companies adopt excellent technologies; companies with a market will have a larger market, while those without a market will have a smaller one.
Read more → - 200Aug 26, 201917 minsystem design
Designing a metric system
Designing a scalable metric system for monitoring business KPIs, counters, and conversion rates with alerting.
Read more → - 201Aug 23, 201924 minsystem design
Designing Square Cash or PayPal Money Transfer System
Design a money-transfer backend system that can receive, send, and payout. It should cover issues like scaling, internationalization, Deduplication, single-point failure, strong consistency.
Read more → - 202Aug 19, 20194 minsystem design
Designing payment webhook
Design a webhook that notifies the merchant when the payment succeeds. We need to aggregate the metrics (e.g., success vs. failure) and display it on the dashboard.
Read more → - 203Aug 18, 201999 minsocial
The Fine Art of Small Talk
Initiating a conversation with strangers is the biggest social fear. Actually, people often appreciate it when you make an effort to speak with them. Here we provide some ideas on how to start a small talk, what we should talk about and how to end it in a courteous way.
Read more → - 204Aug 15, 20192 minanalytics
Mobile Analytics Metrics
Key mobile app analytics metrics including DAU, MAU, retention rate, LTV, ARPU, and ROI explained.
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About Tian Pan
I'm Tian Pan, an engineer-founder focused on agentic engineering — building autonomous AI systems and scaling engineering teams. I write practical guides on system design, technical leadership, and shipping with AI agents. Previously an early engineer at Uber, Brex, and IoTeX.
