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.
Now, multiply this passion over a 100 or may be 1000 times, and you will probably get a taste of how we feel about our product (our baby) Augment. I’m sure entrepreneurs out there will quickly relate to what I’m trying to say :).
Common Mistakes Founders Make While Building a Product:
1. Too much love – Getting drowned in deep thinking:
Thinking deep into the product would often take us so close to the product and so deep into the love of it that we would lose the bird’s eye view and objective of the problem we are solving.
2. Feature first:
The brainstorming sessions tend to divert into feature sets which are awesome and cool, but you lose track of the overall product.
3. Debates:
Once we go down the rabbit hole of discussing features, inevitably we would have very different views of how we want it to be and thus wasting hours in debating about trivial stuff which probably would be insignificant to the entire product in reality. These debates tend to make you more opinionated towards the way you look at it.
4. Vicious cycle – back to square one:
It hits you hard that you have not actually addressed the problem – and one of us, more often than not it will be Utkarsh who questions “what problem are we solving?” And then again the same discussion, the same debate, more cold-sweat and nightmares.
Progress was slow, our product as a concept forms shape but its a blob, something is missing.
Solution – Design Thinking
A good design thinking process can really get you pretty far. In our case, we get to do a three days brainstorming session with the awesome team at BOLD Ventures led by Soaib. We reach a concrete, well-defined product within three days. Three days only! Can you imagine? The outcome is very close to what we had in mind but instead of a blob, now we knew exactly what our baby is going to be.
What made the difference? In the next blog I will share the design thinking approach that I think worked for us. Until then, stay close and try our first product, a chrome plugin which is a proof of concept of our upcoming revolutionary app 😉