Keep calm and build stuff – for fellow creators

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I like building products. I like the process of making it and the anxiety of validation. Building a new product from scratch is exciting, but its also a long journey from idea to prototype. To everyone who’s on their way to building one and to anyone who has done this before …

1. Believe in your product, but don’t fall in love with it. Be objective about the business needs and requirements. If the need is not there, you need to change your offering and your product. You can’t change something that you fall in love with.
2. Work hard and then disconnect … for some time. Don’t think about your product all the time. Disconnect and think/ do other things. Watch a movie (even a shitty one), go and play a sport, gossip if you must. When you let other thoughts enter your mind, they will stimulate more ideas. Creativity is about connections. Get varied thoughts and experiences to get better ideas to connect.
3. Validate each idea earlier than later —Try and validate ideas quickly in the pencil sketch itself and then in the brainstorming session and then in the wire framing and then in the prototype. Get irrelevant features out early and quickly. Focus on the right ones.
4. Get more people to give feedback. But don’t listen to all of it. Consensus does not mean validation. It will just give you a broader perspective on your solution.
5. Haters gonna hate. Lovers gonna love. Don’t trust either. Take the objective outcome from both feedbacks. There will always be the “who wants to use this” guy and the “this is the next groundbreaking idea” guy. Both are useful. Listen to them objectively. You will get good negative feedback and also (much needed) positive vibes from the other. You need them both.
6. Design is everything. People don’t want to use clunky things — they want to use stuff that makes life smooth and makes it beautiful. No one cares about your idea. No one cares about your product. No one cares how many hours you put in it. People care about their time and how to make the best of it.
7. Designers for your product need to be strongly opinionated. Lack of decision-making skills in designers reflects a lack of direction in the design.
8. Build for emotion. But execute with machine precision. Your product is going to be used by people- people who get mad, who get happy, who get hungry, who have a family, who have ambitions. Build products to cater to their emotions. But don’t get emotional in building the product. The actual process needs to be done with machine-like precision.
9. MVP is a good thought — but beware of false negatives. A good product might be invalidated because of a bad user experience. Make sure the negative feedback happens for the right reason and not the wrong ones. You might end up discarding the idea because you got bad feedback on the execution.
10. Fail fast. But win faster. Nothing drains creativity and enthusiasm like repeat failures. If the idea is failing, make sure you identify the right reasons — and then improve or shut shop.

Any thoughts on this? Write to me and I would love to hear them.

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Connect with me on twitter: @shwaytaj

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Original article here.

See some of the projects I’m working on:

Stepjumpr — find the best tools for your startup

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