Baby steps and why it's more important than your code skills

In this talk I'd like to explain why many startups fail when trying to build a product with fancy code and a "scalable" solution before learning what business/design needs they're trying to solve. Actually, it's not only for startups, it's also for you, as designer or developer. Why we should understand our ideas is more likely to fail than succeed? This is for sure much more important than learning Material Design, ReactJS or any other buzzword of our field.

This talk was given at http://frontinamsterdam.nl/

Transcript

1. Baby steps and why it's more important than your code skills @ramonvictor
2. Front-End Engineer at @ramonvictor Recife, PE - Brazil
3. First of all, why this subject?
4. What this presentation is *not* going to be about?
5. What do I mean by “baby steps”?
6. Changing the mindset
7. But, does changing the process mean we’ll be working on the right things?
9. Let’s talk about real business impact
10. My experience with failures
11. In the past I couldn’t explain why we failed, because… • The idea was nice; • We had an amazing Engineering team; • Good dev. infrastructure; • The team mastered 
 Agile development techniques; • Design process dream.
12. So, what was wrong? Today, I have a few hypothesis about the why…
13. Here’s the main reason: We forgot about business!
14. If I could go back in time, what would I try to do differently?
15. I wouldn’t take too long to launch the first MVP and validate the business impact 1
16. I would suggest reducing the technical team and investing more on customer service 2
17. I would not invest time refactoring the code to scale a platform that has no users 3
18. I would use measurement tools in our favor to make better business decisions 4
19. Believe me, it’s not a big deal
20. Failing fast! From @jseiden - Lean UX: http://www.slideshare.net/jseiden/2013-oct-15-continuous-learning-and-delivery-dpm-summit-2013-seiden
21. Taking the evaluation step seriously!
22. Taking the evaluation step seriously! A/B test everything you can!
23. Taking the evaluation step seriously! A/B test everything you can! Source: http:/ /blog.booking.com/hamburger-menu.html Base Variant VS
24. Taking the evaluation step seriously! Some tools that might help:
25. Learning with other people’s mistakes
26. We focused on building prototypes to validate that our vision was technically feasible. Instead, we should have released something. Source: https:/ /medium.com/inside-wattage/well-we-failed-77e795e16ecf “
27. Conclusion
28. Don’t try to take a step bigger than your company can
29. Think big
30. …but start small
31. It doesn’t matter how awesome the technology you’re using is, your product should be solving a real business/user need. And never forget!
32. Dank u wel! ;) @ramonvictor