Are we eating our pastry with a shovel?

I have spent a good amount of time in the startup fraternity from the tech side of things. It had been a couple of months when I started consulting a few emerging startups and realized a few of the mistakes from the past. Without a further ado, let’s quickly get to the lessons:

Lesson 1: User gets the first preference

Any product is essentially built for a target audience but what if that user isn’t kept in the center of all discussions. The biggest issue of not keeping the user in the center creates more problems than solving one. A product moves from the phases of useful(solves a problem like a painkiller), usable(empathizes with the user), and desirable(user enjoys the process).

Lesson 2: Technical prowess isn’t that crucial to start

Airbnb started with a simple WordPress blog to start their initiative and today they’ve around 100 mobile engineers(Jun 2018) in a company of fewer than 5000 employees. Facebook started with PHP in 2004 and later in 2014 created a dialect of PHP titled Hack. Also, created a virtual machine called HHVM(HipHop Virtual Machine) for improving the performance and stability. Data-driven decisions instill overall stability to a product and the company; could’ve facebook thought of the same in 2004. Only use that much amount of technology which solves the purpose.

Lesson 3: Where’s your failure framework?

Thomas Edison had failed a thousand times before creating the electric light bulb. Obviously, Bell didn’t invent the telephone in a one-shot process. When great scientists with huge experience and knowledge took years to create something then what are we afraid of? The only thing is to start fast and fail fast. The missing part of the puzzle is reinvesting the learnings from a failure. Remember the reason for solving the problem was the non-existing solution and that would take time. Also, remember the effectiveness of a solution does make a big difference to stay ahead from copycats.

Lesson 4: Die in a team than survive in isolation

In any team, there will always be differences but the whole team can stay in sync with the problem statement(how might we make the experience better). Irrespective of the role played by a team member they can think and empathize with their end-user. If you’re leading your team then ask yourself whether the potential of all the members is correctly utilized?

I hope these lessons give you some context and give you a slight push to question the ways things are currently solved at your workplace. Next time before embarking on a treacherous journey with some heavy technologies, ask yourself, are you eating your pastry with a shovel?