Blog

Prototyping

We’re making some nice progress on our MVP. Without getting into details, it’s marriage of knowledge base and publishing system. To my knowledge, there’s nothing quite like it in production today.

On the business side of things, this is great!

For development – especially UI / UX – it presents a bunch of challenges since there’s not much to mimick.

I installed Balsamiq shortly after starting the work and the wireframing have been helpful, but they can only get us so far. Earlier this year, we moved to Proto.io for rapid prototyping and it’s been awesome. It’s sort of a mix between Balsamiq and more advanced tools but it is still user friendly.

We can easily pull together a prototype and see if it works rather than committing a lot of hours to developing and then pulling it apart. Frankly, I’m unsure how we ever got this far without it.

COVID-19 End Game

A long dev road and quarantine makes for boring blog posts so rather than skipping … let’s dive into when the world may look similar to the pre-COVID-19 world. And, that answer is about a year or two from this moment.

Key questions: if you’re moderately intelligent and not a mind-numbed Fox News robot when will you do any of the following:

  1. go to a movie theatre?
  2. go to a crowded mall?
  3. Allow your kid to go hang out with 30 kids in a classroom and 300+ kids at lunchtime?

… and not worry?

I’m having trouble seeing an endgame without a vaccine that has been widely distributed or we’re all wearing N95 masks. And, even with the masks I don’t see that as a viable option for kids.

Little kids have the same concentration skills as a moth and older kids don’t or won’t listen so for at least the kids part of this, I only see a vaccine in place.

I’m really hoping I’m wrong because 2022 is pretty far away and can the economy hold out? Here’s hoping for the best but holyshit – not good.

We’re rushing to finish our MVP because our product can and will help people in their job search. Unfortunately, we only have so much money and can move only so quickly.

COVID-19

I’ve kept this blog largely on our startup but thanks to the global pandemic it’s hard to think of something to write when everything seems to be going to hell.

Our new developer asked to miss a stand up because his aunt died. We readily agreed and gave our condolences the day he returned, but never asked more about the reason for her passing. Even if it wasn’t COVID-19, I suspect we’re all going to be telling and hearing about family members deaths soon.

Our startup will help people in their job search. I’m more motivated than ever to get this thing released so once the dust settles, people can use it to help them recover.

Staying ahead of the Dev

Our new developer started on Monday and holy smokes has the workload increased for both me (UX, requirements) and our CTO. Our new guy is shaping up to be really good and really quick so I’ve been hustling most of the week to keep ahead of him in UI and requirements cards.

CTO has extra workload too thanks to the odd change of API depending on the requirements and he’s the one reviewing the code.

Most of this week has been shaking out the bugs in our work processes and systems. And by that I mean, investing hours into trying to figure out Jira’s crazy ass approach to permissions. In the 30 to 40 hours I’ve worked this week -about 30% of that has been just unscrewing Jira.

For instance, I wanted to setup Jira so that if I created a story card or improvement card then it would automatically create about five subtasks. I figured a little config work now would save me a bunch of time in the future.

That is until it took three hours to update the schemes, workflows and conditions … I still haven’t figure out how to remove the damn branch button from a subtask.

All in all, things feel like we’re getting some momentum. Sure, there’s extra work but that’s the entire point.

And We’re Off

We held our kickoff with our new developer today and it seemed to go well.

The process of preparing for the kickoff and devops planning has been helpful as well. We’ve tightened up on our planning, requirements process and communications so we’re actually more organized now than before. This can’t be bad.

Of course, the entire point is to start making development progress so hopefully that’s successful too.

I’m off the next week so I’ll be up to my neck in requirements and high-fidelity prototypes.

No Advertising

New co will never sell advertising or any type of sponsorships. We’ll also never sell user data but that’s a rif for a different time.

Why no advertising?

Simple – I loathe the idea of having to work with ad agencies and marketers. A different company I manage (super small) sells advertising and it’s a nightmare thanks to the fact that about 95% of “marketers” are lightweight clowns looking to outsource any type of strategic thinking to some other agency.

A summary of a normal meeting with [insert name of just about every company I’ve ever worked with] marketing team goes like this:

Me: you all bought four brand coverage articles – what would you like us to write about?

Clown Co marketer: unsure, do you have some ideas?

Me: OK, what type of strategic goals do you have for this year?

Clown Co marketer: [hear blinking, no talking]

Me: OK, do you have specific industries you’d like to increase market share

CCM: [more blinking]

Me: [head now on table, happy to not be on video call]

…

and the call goes on like that until we finally think of something to write about and my company essentially becomes the strategy arm of yet other technology company.

All is good until a new CCM shows up and starts questioning everything … delays happen … challenging half-questions occur … end of contract.

Fuck that.

This Co ain’t working with CCMs. We’re going to sell a remarkable product to consumers and business and enjoy those profits.

More Help, More Work

We signed an outsourced contractor agreement today to start working with a new developer. We’ve gotten this far a couple times but this time feels more solid.

The developer is certainly of a higher qualify than ones we’ve interviewed before and the fact we have a support system by way of his employer will make things better.

Now, we have a ton of work to do before our kickoff on March 12th.

I’m quickly pulling together mockups, requirements and will handle onboarding the new fella to our systems while our CTO will be preparing the code repository and our dev environments.

We have a good bit of work to do and a short time to pull it all together, but if not now, then when?

We’ve sort of slow-walked this for a while at a more hobby pace versus a business preparing for a release. So, it’s time to bust our butts and get this thing moving.

Finding the Right Fit

Damn, I wish we had more money because I’d happily hire both of the people we interviewed earlier this week. But, we really only have enough cash to fund one developer so we’re doing a second round of reviews to see which person is the right fit.

Candidate 1 is a little younger and quieter but he has all of the skills and some degree of experience with those skills.

Candidate 2 seems a little more experienced in business and development, but doesn’t have as much demonstrable skills and experience in the tools we’re using.

Personally, I like Candidate 1 a little more because he’s been there and done that and frankly, he asked our questions without a lot of chatter. The CTO sort of likes the second guy a little better … thus we need some more data.

The plan is to have a decision by Monday or Tuesday so we can let them know and start planning their onboarding.

I’m like a little kid who knows Christmas is coming but not here yet.

Preparing for New People

Interviews with our two developer candidates are scheduled for next Tuesday. This is a fairly new experience for us and I’m hoping one or both of them are very good.

Adding new people is absolutely essentially, but it will kickoff a new round of activities including preparing the developer environment and ensuring that our requirements / wireframes and cards are ready for them. Our hobby+ approach has meant that things could be pretty loose thanks to it not costing much.

Now, these folks are paid by the hour so we’re going to have everything shipshape before they onboard. I’m an experienced PM and planner/organizer by habit so this isn’t a major deal for me. In fact, I’m excited because it means we can build out our work processes a little more.

I want to start codifying us doing wireframes / high-fidelity mockups first and deciding on the look before then drafting the requirements and breaking these out into story cards / test cases. This doesn’t sound revolutionary but right now things are a lot looser.

The new design should make us faster and put the creativity upfront with tools that are fast, rather than trying to do development to see what it looks like and then have to redo it. Again, this was sort of okay when we weren’t paying by the hour but soon – that’s just really expensive prototyping.

Let’s hope one of these interviewees are good so we can start evolving our work processes and ramping up development.

Developer Candidates

Oh, happy day.

It appears that we have a few developer candidates that we can afford & and a supporter to help us as get ramp up development.

We don’t have anything confirmed, but our vendor contact (new best friend?) has found a couple frontend developers who he thinks would be a good fit. They’re more junior (thus why we can afford them) but he’s willing to do some code review and a little mentoring to help them get their skills together. From my POV, that’s fine.

I need to connect with my CTO so we can setup some interview times. In some ways, I want to slow walk this process because we need more time to prepare for the new developers.

We have a fairly orderly ship but only because we’ve been working together for years & my partner is a very good developer. Now that we’re bringing in outsiders, we’ll need to get things far more organized.

I’m super ready to do this since the moment after we’re organized and we onboard the new dev we can increase our velocity and start getting this thing ready to launch.