The Clevergy´s journey. A startup logbook. Month 2
To decide what you are not going to do is everything
When you are starting a new project, you have too many ideas in your head, and each one of them looks really brilliant. And maybe they indeed are. However, tech products take time to build, especially the development part, so, you need to prioritize and discard some of your t̶h̶o̶u̶s̶a̶n̶d̶s̶ millions of ideas, and that can be frustrating but you have to.
In Clevergy, every two weeks we are doing a product workshop with all the team members to align us to the next priorities we want to do, in the short, medium, and long term. In other words, we are doing a straw-man proposal of roadmap. As one will expect, the tasks planned for the long term change a lot as time passes by but, with this exercise, we consolidate our short and medium goals to achieve our strategy while aligning us. If we have something clear, it is that:
Our product is better than yesterday but worse than tomorrow.
Regarding the things we were working on during this month, here we highlight the most important:
- We told you that we were giving Claap a shot, and it is really useful to be aligned and work in an async way (we don´t want to fall into the meetings spiral). What is the use we are giving to this tool?
When the product team is working on a new prototype/feature, they are creating a Claap to share and ask for feedback/problems from the team. This is creating a lot of engagement with the product and further identify problems in development before starting to develop it. Furthermore, we are doing a weekly summary of new developments/works we are doing to have this documented. Probably we will start to use Claap for more things.- Ana started this month as a software engineer in Clevergy and it has been amazing because she deployed in production in her first week (a full feature, backend, and frontend). Pairing is amazing to share knowledge and having automated pipelines and deployments to production environments helps a lot. “Bring the Pain Forward” principle of the evolutionary architectures is giving us a lot of benefits from the very beginning. If you want to join as Ana did, remember we are hiring! Write me if you are interested.
- We built a native app. Maybe it sounds like an incredible work, but the reality is less fancy. Thanks to our microfrontends catalog, we are able to build easily different customized applications. To make it available in a native way, we are using Flutter and the webview plugin. After that, with Flutter, you can export it to iOS and Android with a click. Too easy, and has incredible results, so I strongly recommend Flutter if you want something simple like us.
- We are doing trunk-based development. It comes, always, with other practices like very small deployments and other kinds of code reviews (including pair programming). So far, with this approach, we are building new features for our product very fast.
Stay tuned for the next edition!
