Reflecting on the first few apps I’ve built (and continue to build) - I’ve realised that my documentation, planning and ‘product thinking’ is not up to standard. I’ve learnt a lot from these experiences, but something sorely lacking is the rigour and deep thinking to create things that not only work, but users actually want.
I realised that what I really want (and need) is a ‘Product Template’, onboarding checklist and status tracker for all of my projects. A space that reduces the friction of starting new things, tracking the progress of current projects and actually declaring something ‘DONE’. I keep building slightly different workflows and systems for each one, when in reality I should build a single playbook and process that works for all of them.
Consider this Writing a ‘working doc’ of my thought process, the steps I’m taking to build it, and a documentation of the process of making documentation.
The feature list here is particularly helpful, to make sure that I touch all of the bases of everything a good product needs. Thankfully, I have a lot of these components from different projects, so it’s more or less a matter of pulling them together into a single space.
I had a quick skim of the templates (and did my own searching) and didn’t really find anything that jumped out at me. I like the act of making templates and my brain works in a very specific way, so I am going to have a crack at building this myself!
(A few other prompts back-and-forth with Perplexity went into the above, mainly just to check my thinking, but I’m happy with where I landed)
Alright, we’ve got a pretty clear ‘why’ and a set of acceptance criteria (we’re basically just building a Product that will help us build Products at this point…)
There’s only so much planning one can do, so let’s get cracking into actually making the thing.