I believe that you would see a sizable bump in your effectiveness if you adopted customer development and lean startup practices.
These practices were developed precisely to combat the problem of investing too much time or effort in projects which are not wanted or needed.
In high level principle form, that looks something like this:
Make explicit your assumptions about who will use your product, what problem it will solve, how you’ll reach them, etc.
Talk to the people who would use your product about your product, and see if any of your hypotheses are wrong, if so, change that hypothesis.
Once you have a set of loosely confirmed hypotheses, create a wireframe or mockup with the minimum feature set that fits your hypotheses, and test the design on people. See if your hypotheses are still confirmed.
If feedback is still positive, build your minimum viable product.
If people use it, invest more time in making it better.
Thanks. This is definitely something I think we’ve struggled with, owing—I think—to lack of group cohesion, due to intentional decentralization. But we’ll definitely have to keep this in mind to avoid wasting our time.
I believe that you would see a sizable bump in your effectiveness if you adopted customer development and lean startup practices.
These practices were developed precisely to combat the problem of investing too much time or effort in projects which are not wanted or needed.
In high level principle form, that looks something like this:
Make explicit your assumptions about who will use your product, what problem it will solve, how you’ll reach them, etc.
Talk to the people who would use your product about your product, and see if any of your hypotheses are wrong, if so, change that hypothesis.
Once you have a set of loosely confirmed hypotheses, create a wireframe or mockup with the minimum feature set that fits your hypotheses, and test the design on people. See if your hypotheses are still confirmed.
If feedback is still positive, build your minimum viable product.
If people use it, invest more time in making it better.
Thanks. This is definitely something I think we’ve struggled with, owing—I think—to lack of group cohesion, due to intentional decentralization. But we’ll definitely have to keep this in mind to avoid wasting our time.