Making a Product for Myself — Part 1
The resolution
I came to the realization that, after many years of building products, I have never built a product for myself. Has it happened to you?
A bit of context
I have been building different technology product for the past 10 years. Many things: accessibility technology for visually impaired people, software and hardware for mining operations, educational games for children using computer vision, technology to digitalize farms, and so on. But … what about me.
My problem (one of them)
Since I became an economically active person (aka started working), one of my duties has always been to evaluate candidates for developer positions. And I hate it. I mean … I like getting to know smart people with whom I would have the luck to work with. But, the more you make an effort to get better people, the more bureaucracy there is. And that sucks.
Specially, when you are going beyond the interview-hire mode. By this, I mean when you make an interview for half an hour to an hour and, just based on this, you decided to hire them or not to hire them. This is a bad idea. Do not do it. Even more if you are bad at firing.
Evaluating good tech candidates is very time consuming and, beyond those AHA moments where you realize you are in front of the PERSON, it is also very disappointing.
For every candidate there is a CV somewhere in a drive folder, some specifications and notes in spreadsheets, comments on a slack channel, Colab notebooks for the coding interviews, two or three email streams (where I will need to find the link to repositories with their coding challenge response). All of this while I still need to deliver X features for this week and help my team to deliver too. Ahhhh…
If only there was something that could smooth this process.
Why not
So… why not build something that can help me with this.
Probably, there is already some tool that can partially (or maybe fully) help me with this. If you know one, please, let me know.
Anyway, I decided to take the chance to actually build something with me in mind as the end user (for the first time probably) and documented to have a clear view of the process for myself and hoping it can serve as a guide for people making (or wanting) to make a product.
Also, I see this as an opportunity to generate accountability to finish this project. I will be posting weekly. If I don’t, please, push me.
What to expect
I hope to cover four aspects of creating a product:
- Conceptual: why should I make it, what it should allow me to do minimally (and a roadmap, for later)…
- Design: how should it do what it is supposed to do. Making paper sketches, high definition mockups, etc.
- Development: How to go from a mockup to a working product. How to design a database and API, all the user interface and how to put it on the air.
- Future: how to define what we should do next.
I am excited. Let’s keep it going…
Thanks for reading! Let me know what do you think in the comments below and if you liked this, hit the recommend button!
Find me on twitter as @adolfovaldi.
If you want to get notified when there is a new post, please suscribe!
Adolfo Valdivieso is passionate about creating technology that helps people. Awarded as a MIT TR35 Innovator under 35. Recipient of full scholarship for Singularity University’s graduate program, at NASA (Silicon Valley). Bs. in Physics (Summa Cum Laude). +10y making technology products.
