[usehackernews]

As a product manager, spreadsheets have been an incredible asset to build products when I had limited resources and to iterate quickly.

When we had no front-end devs available - we used Googles sheets API, connected our spreadsheets to our production DB, and did all the input of raw data, and ingestion of outputs automatically. User interaction happened within the spreadsheets.

When FE devs opened up, we eventually built the UI to replace the spreadsheet (Which is a very hard task, spreadsheets are good at what they do). But by this point, we knew exactly what we needed in the ux and had iterated on the ux multiple times.