Lessons learned from building consumer facing products
Really grokking the foundational pillars of how you build a product is something that can help you iterate faster.
Why do we care about iterating faster? It means that you can deliver something of value to a 'customer' which gives you either a competitive edge and/or helps you actually ship something.
'So What' is a book that overviews communicating what matters by asking “So What?” to really make sure you understand what you are doing – you can apply this principle to building products too:
- Start with the actual problem. Small projects are fun but if your goal is to be impactful and build something that helps someone do something then you need a laser focus on what problem it is you are actually solving.
- You probably don’t have to build anything. Using a spreadsheet is still a solution. Making a template of a spreadsheet and sharing it with people is impactful. For example, “I want to build a personal finances app” becomes “I want to help people be more financially literate” which could become sharing a budgeting spreadsheet template.
- In terms of engineering/technical concerns you can apply this same logic. Do you need to have data/state in the cloud? Do you need that CRUD API? There is a whole movement on Local First which leans into this idea. More moving parts means more complexity to maintain and more chaos to organise when you want to add that next feature.
- Iterating quickly is a means to an end to help you figure out step #0. A good litmus test can be, if something isn’t a burning problem, it probably isn’t worth solving (unless for fun of course!).
I haven't explicitly connected the dots here but I hope it is useful to draw these together yourself. Thanks for reading!