Applying Lessons from Product Development to Life

The other day I stumbled upon Matter.’s podcast The Drunken Walk, and was very lucky to hear about Caitlin Kalinowski’s 6 rules for product development.

What was fascinating is how applicable her rules on product design are to approaching life. So, without further ado, here is what I learned:

Before Anything Else

Set Your Goals

Before you start doing anything — be it a book, a job, or a side project you want to embark on — do this first.

You need to know why you are doing the things that you want to do. You need to know what you want to get out of the experience.

Make sure to start with many goals, then group similar goals together, and then boil them down to the most 1 or 2 important things that you must absolutely get out of the experience.

I loved Caitlin’s example on this, she told an anecdote about Steve Jobs and the iPad. His non-negotiable goal was that he wanted it to be light enough, so a person would be able to read on it for hours and hours. That was the one thing that he would not budge on. The iPad was, in fact, delayed for years before it hit the market because it did not fulfill this one criteria.

Let Your Goal Drive Your Life

This is very important, because in many instances, people’s life ended up driving their goal — an approach that I believe to be neither effective or efficient.

Now onto the 6 rules for life-development

1/ Focus Your Effort on Planning

Some people are naturally better at this than others. But for sure everyone needs to do this more.

Planning is the details on the fabric, the roadmap to achieve your big, overarching goal.

This means looking at the different skills you might need to learn, focusing and prioritizing on specific task above others, or contacting & meeting people who you could learn from or partner with.

A good backbone will allow you to approach your day-to-day better, and make it easy for you to sort the new information that are presented to you every day.

2/ Solve the Hardest Problem First

I don’t know about you, but I would typically approach my to-do list from the easy tasks firsts. My rationale was that by doing this, I can get the momentum going and then take a stab on the heart of the problem later. The reality is, there are endless menial tasks, that you can continue to preoccupy yourself with — and it just becomes a way for you to procrastinate and hold things off.

That’s why you need to solve the hardest problem first. This will actually get the momentum going because honestly, once you checked this off, there really is nothing you can’t do.

3/ Layer in Your Problems One by One

After you solve the hardest problem that you currently have on your plate, layer in another one of those problems. For instance, when you are creating a branding package for a customer, once you figure out the brand’s story, layer in a design element like logos or icons that represents that story. Once that’s done, you can then move on and think of the typography elements, then the color palettes, etc.

The most important rule here is that you are only solving one problem at any given time.

4/ Don’t Fall in Love with an Idea

Before you start a project, you have an idea of how it would be, the kind of growth you’d like to see. But, once you actually start the ball rolling, you realized that you really don’t know anything and your expectations is not really on par with the reality.

That’s okay.

Remember to not fall in love with an idea, and just continue to work on at your pace. Sooner or later you will see the progress that you’ve been wanting to see.

5/ Ask the People Around You for Feedback

Other people often have a more pristine view of what you are doing than yourself. Simply because they have a bird’s eye view of the situation and they are not tied by any kind of bias or feelings that you might have.

Make sure to create an environment where the people around you are comfortable enough to give you feedback, and let them know how much you appreciate these feedback.

6/ You Can Always Learn More

During the first few weeks of my internship, I went through the projects that were given to me swiftly. What I did not realize — and that I’m glad I realized early enough — was the fact that you are never really done.

That there are ways to optimize your projects, improve the process, and present the ideas.

To do this, you need to adopt a growth mindset, and approach every day as a new learning experience. When you are doing this, keep in mind the strengths that you do have, and continue to iterate on those strengths, so as to differentiate yourself from the rest.

If all else fails, go back to where you started, and why you are doing the things that you are doing — and who are you doing it for. In life it is often easy to fall into routines, and get lost in the flow. The amazing thing is — you can easily get back on track by reminding yourself what is important to you, and why does it matter so much in the first place.

I definitely recommend you to listen to her podcast, which you can access here, if you have not had the chance to. I think everyone can definitely learn and take away important lessons from it — I sure did!