Experience

For fifteen-odd years, every few years, I find myself staring at the same problem wearing a different costume. Sometimes it appears as server costs that don’t quite square with usage. Sometimes as a few extra milliseconds in response time—the kind you’d shrug off if you weren’t paying close attention. Sometimes as features that, once they hit scale, start standing out as resource hogs: not broken, just hungry. “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras....

You ask any startup Entrepreneur about the biggest problem in his life, and more often than not the immediate response will be ’time’, we have all but 24 hours a day, which simply isn’t enough time to process the overwhelming number of stuff you need to do- writing code for Augment, attending meetings, responding to emails, address customer queries, research, firefight… so on! Theres no template, theres no formula that will help....

In my last blog I chronicled the roadblock we faced while building our app. A well-structured design thinking approach helped us in freezing the features, UI, UX and backend of the first version of Augment app. Reuven Cohen rightly point out in this article that, “design thinking” is a a human-centered, prototype-driven process for innovation that can be applied to product, service, and business design. Companies and especially startups need to have a strong foundation of innovation, without which they are truly headed towards a roadblock sooner or later....

Life is too short for a bad software! — Balsamiq I love good products, cool and sexy tech that does magic! I admire and adore their creators but criticize the not-so-great ones all the time. Fortunately, the entire team that I work with shares the same degree of enthusiasm towards tech products as I do. Often, when we are not working on our product or while having an idle coffee we end up talking about how great Hummingbird is and why it sucks at times, how awesome Mozilla Banana bread is, how beautiful Dropbox‘s simplicity is or how LinkedIn has the worst UX ever....