How are we going to build our product

Wednesday, 09. 9. 2009  –  Category: Technical

In all, we are planning to organize our product features and release them in different phases. That is we will build something light, and then take feedback and improve accordingly as we believe launching something sooner save both money and time . By investing all our capital on a big product release is risky as some features requiring a lot of effort to develop might not be useful to user and this results in time wastage.

Also, a fully fledged product will be a bit too complicated and clumsy to strip down to a simpler version. So rather than adopting a top down approach where  features are removed, we will instead take a bottom up approach by improving and expanding the product gradually based on the market response.

We are also not spending bulk of our time planning because there are a lot of unknowns at the planning phase that only become clear in development. For example it may be that only once our team is deep into the build that we find some aspect of the plan very difficult to implement in its current shape requiring a rework. Therefore our methodology is to build first and see how it goes later. Impulsive it might sound but we personally find it the most efficient way in developing the product.

To summarise my point, following are the four essential aspects we will take for each release.

1) Dont invest everything in the first round
2) Get feedback
3) Take reflection seriously
4) Respond

In my next post, I will discuss more on the features we will develop for our first release. Until then, next time.

The above are written with reference to this website.

Jon

Tags: iteration, methodology, software cycle