I can’t believe i’m not done with this admin page yet. I’m finally working on estimates, but they are giving me stupid trouble–it’s late, and my mind isn’t at 100% any more at this point especially after the fights i fought about bedtime with the two persistent toddlers who think they are in charge of the world.
While fighting with toddlers is exhausting, fighting with code all morning is equally as frustrating. I made an ‘improvement’ late friday, which was tested and all the tests passed and continued to pass today, but when i ran the browser it literally told me that it “choked on some data” and stuff wasn’t pulling in right. Finally, i found it–in the clj code, not even the cljs code; argh!
Late this afternoon we met with a prospective customer (yay!). That was very fun. It was fun & maybe even inspiring to see just how much heart these guys had in their product. You could see their passion clearly enough to be cautious in the way you might ask a question so to avoid insulting them that you didn’t quite understand their vision even though they had it all laid out with visuals and videos.
But they needed help, and that was interesting too. I’ve been pretty quiet on a lot of these calls, because I’m new, ya know–i’m no expert, so i’m quiet. Toward the latter part of the second half of the call, i finally realized that despite their passion & whole-heartedness, they needed help–not just building the app help, but help through that entire process and creating the idea of a preliminary project.
Once I realized that, i actually worried that I’d maybe over stepped a couple of times, because I started speaking up and asking questions and even leading them a couple of times. Every time we asked them a question to enhance our own understanding, it came with a detailed explanation of why it might be in the MVP but also that maybe it might not have to be?
This was fine and it was admirable to see how excited they were to tell someone about their product, but it became clear to me that they needed help defining what their MVP would be. I mean, afterall, they’ve dreamed about this project from the standpoint of a finished application with every detail scoped out to perfection; and here we were telling them to strip it down to the bare minimum. I mean not telling–if they want it all, i’m sure we’d do it, but from a business & cost standpoint, we had to strip it down) in order to make it affordable. They’re dream baby stripped down to skin & bones in a way that maybe they’d never assessed it before.
Once i kinda got into it and saw their vision, while still being confused about the focus of the product, i got more involved and was trying to lead them to at least what I believed they were trying to accomplish. They needed help, and that was interesting.