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For web and mobile products, the act of building or prototyping is where you do most of the learning. I believe that you can't come up with great ideas in a va
by gyardley 14y ago
For web and mobile products, the act of building or prototyping is where you do most of the learning. I believe that you can't come up with great ideas in a vacuum. You build some mocks, you write some code, and you discover a bunch of things that you could improve on.
Please tell me this sort of thinking isn't typical of Google's product organization.
You do learn as you execute, but this just moves you towards a local maximum - a local maximum that might not be that exciting, if you've badly misunderstood the people you're building for.
You do the most learning prior to starting, when you listen to the people you plan to build for and get to know them intimately - their problems, aspirations, values, and ethics.
Getting to really know the worldview of your targets is how you come up with the direction that leads toward the global maximum, and it's all done before you write a line of code.
- gaborcselle 14y agoGood point, but taken to the extreme, if you listen to people too much they'll tell you they want a faster horse. You have to combine the aspirational thinking of "let's build a self-driving car" with the day-to-day grind of actually building it. Without the first, you end up in the local maximum you describe, without the latter you land in the "talk is cheap" box. My post is about the fact that you can in fact leave your job and go through a phase of prototyping one product after another, and deliberately testing each idea for not just how great it sounds but how buildable it is.