Forem: charles

From Startup Idea to Interaction Diagram

charles — Sun, 05 Apr 2020 16:36:40 +0000

How to create an Interaction Diagram and use it to determine how your app idea might work.

Once you’re at the phase where you’ve completed some thorough vetting of your idea, and you’re ready to invest more time to bringing your idea to life, then it's time to create an Interaction Diagram.

An Interaction Diagram is a useful tool to navigate the details of your how your app idea might actually work, and its a helpful visual guide to use when explaining your project to others. This video will explain how to create an Interaction Diagram that describes what the experience of your app feels like.

Brave Goals is a YouTube channel focused on helping you take your idea from concept to an actual product and potential business.

Even if you're not a technical person, you can bring your tech ideas to life.

Tools referenced in this video
Omnigraffle

I'm Charles, a Product Engineer, and my motivation with this series is to help you along this journey and share what I've learned from 13 years of working as part of teams of talented engineers and designers breathing digital life into what was initial just an idea.

Also, this is a fun way for me to structure my side-projects in a way that makes each development phase it's own enjoyable mini-project - creating an informative vlog.

Introducing the Brave Goals Vlog How to Bring Your Tech Ideas to Life

charles — Sun, 29 Mar 2020 16:27:32 +0000

Everyone, developers and non-technical people alike, has had an idea to create some sort of tech product. Wouldn't it be cool to actually turn your app idea into a real life product? This series is focused on helping you take your idea from concept to an actual product and potential business.

This video will introduce you to the first 5 phases of transforming your idea from just a concept to a real life digital product.

Even if you're not a technical person, you can bring your tech ideas to life.

Tools referenced in this video
Evernote
SublimeText - a simple but powerful text editor
Headspace
Venmo

Technical feasibility resources
Toptal
Upwork
CoFounders Lab

Also, this is a fun way for me to structure my side-projects in a way that makes each development phase it's own enjoyable mini-project - creating an informative vlog.

From Wireframes to MVP

charles — Tue, 03 Jan 2017 18:30:51 +0000

This topic is heavily on my mind as I am trying to spend more time breathing life into my side-project - a fitness themed social app. Specifically, how to not get lost in the not-yet-important details and focus on making substantial progress towards implementing the critical minimal feature-set; making sure that this feature-set adequately captures the essence of the intended user experience and getting a version in the hands of some early users (i.e. friends).

Once I have some user feedback I can start making iterative improvements, and then this whole thing snowballs into next unicorn startup right? I'm pretty sure that's how this works. Either that or I'll just continue to have fun developing this idea while expanding my skill set.

It will be a worthwhile time either way.

Besides the obvious effort of regularly dedicating time, I've found that I also have to keep an eye out for those sneaky little productivity killers that try to mask themselves as productive items on my to-do list. Things like

Implementing an authentication solution from scratch instead of taking advantage of the many well supported open source oauth libraries
Revisiting UI designs over-and-over instead of moving forward with one that is good-enough-for-now
Spending too much time evaluating PaaS options looking for the one that will best support a user base that I may never obtain
Learning a once-source-code-to-rule-them-all framework for building multiple platform mobile applications when I can instead leverage my existing expertise in browser-based technologies

Yes these are all things that feel like productivity but I must remember to ask myself - Is this really the most appropriate option to help move the MVP towards the next milestone?