Everyone's going lean these days. Work lean and cheap, go to market as quickly as possible, fail fast.
While this approach works great in our time and age, it causes a lot of products (Jelly, for example) to come half baked.
The philosophy behind it is correct. Test the market as fast as you can, to validate your idea and gain ground. If you fail enough times, you might even succeed once. And one good success is all you need, right? (Yes, I am being ironic.)
However, unless your service goes ballistic right after launch, you might never know if it works or not. Hell, even if it does - What's your measure of success?
99% of the apps do not pass the 10000 download barrier. So what does success mean? You might fail your product a bit too fast there. You might even not know why it failed.
My advice would be to be a bit more thorough about your product. Get real feedback from as many people as you can (2nd hand friends are even better, as they don't owe you anything. You can even pay a symbolic token like a t shirt or something).
Don't launch too early, don't fail too fast. Thinking twice might not align with the cranky, wham bam lean approach, but might save you a lot of time and heartache.
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Deliberate Mistake, correct end result
I've spent my army service days as an infantry soldier.
A lot of my unit's field practice included night navigation - Where you learn a path (By heart), and sent to navigate few miles at night, and collect a few waypoints.
The most challenging part of these drills was not walking with 35 pounds of gear on, or even seeing what's ahead of you to avoid pitfalls. It was memorising the path, and walking through it - If you don't know everything by heart (Sometimes you only have 20 minutes to prepare your gear and learn the path), you're bound to get lost. If you get lost, you walk more. If you walk more, you'll be more tired. And so begins a downward spiral no one likes.
I found that the most effective way for me to study these paths was using the deliberate mistake method: Where you choose a point on the map that's easy to recognise and reach, and from there walk to the nearest waypoints. This would sometimes mean walking more than the 'direct' approach, but you'd be less likely to forget a turn or a hill, and less 'marks' to count when you're walking, at night, with your gear on.
Nowadays, sometimes when I look at decisions I need to make, I sometimes take the 'wrong' decision, to reach a larger goal sooner - Like coding some ugly patch - I know I can correct this mistake later, but I also know I would also reach my goals on time, with confidence.
A lot of my unit's field practice included night navigation - Where you learn a path (By heart), and sent to navigate few miles at night, and collect a few waypoints.
The most challenging part of these drills was not walking with 35 pounds of gear on, or even seeing what's ahead of you to avoid pitfalls. It was memorising the path, and walking through it - If you don't know everything by heart (Sometimes you only have 20 minutes to prepare your gear and learn the path), you're bound to get lost. If you get lost, you walk more. If you walk more, you'll be more tired. And so begins a downward spiral no one likes.
I found that the most effective way for me to study these paths was using the deliberate mistake method: Where you choose a point on the map that's easy to recognise and reach, and from there walk to the nearest waypoints. This would sometimes mean walking more than the 'direct' approach, but you'd be less likely to forget a turn or a hill, and less 'marks' to count when you're walking, at night, with your gear on.
Nowadays, sometimes when I look at decisions I need to make, I sometimes take the 'wrong' decision, to reach a larger goal sooner - Like coding some ugly patch - I know I can correct this mistake later, but I also know I would also reach my goals on time, with confidence.
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