A journey begins
Introduction
Welcome guys and girls to my journey of building and launching my first SaaS. I am a self-taught Software Engineer with a big urge to finally build my own product.
Although I have built small and large projects working in companies, I now want to launch a complete product on my own. By going through the whole process of planning, programming, launching and marketing all by myself, I sure will be running into a lot of problems and pitfalls I haven’t been in. Solving these problems will make me understand the process and grow.
Why do I write about this? Well, this is a good question. First of all I think a lot of Software Engineers, Programmers, Entreupreuners with coding exerpience or eager people who are willing to learn have the same urge as myself. The thriving lust of building something on their own. And by documenting my journey I am hopefully encouraging you, yes you!, to do the same. Yes I expect it to be incredibly hard. Yes I expect it to be boring sometimes. But my urge is bigger. The second reason why I am blogging about it is the fact that I am commiting to the whole internet that I am going to finish this product! This is a pretty huge commitment and a very scary one on top.
But let’s finally talk business!
The Problem
A few weeks ago my coworkers and I started with pair programming (PP). Since I have a couple of years experience with PP at my last job, I was put in the expert position in terms of PP. With the help of our agile coach we introduced PP to our team and now it is my job to keep track of the progress throughout the sprints and visualize the results and keep track if we met our goals. And this is exactly the problem. There is no solution out there that lets me keep track of the progress and visalize it. Currently we are working with a WIKI and … do I really have to say more? Preparing the next Sprint always soaks up several minutes every Sprint and transcribing the white board to the WIKI cosumes up to 10 Minutes every day. Seeing if we met our goals or not is a manual task. We do not have a progress during the sprint and comparing sprints is incredibly cumbersome because of, well, WIKI. All in all the whole process of taking notes within the WIKI, as well as comparing this sprint to the last takes up to much unnecessary time which could be spend on more productive tasks. As you can imagine, I have a pretty huge personal urge to optimize this process and make it faster and easier to keep track of our teams PP sessions.
Pain Points
- Time consuming to keep track of pairing sessions
- Manually comparing pairing sessions of sprints
- Visualization of pairing sessions time consuming
- Manually keeping track of progress of the sprint in regards of set goals
The Idea
My idea now is that I am going to build a service, basically a website, that is enabling me to do exactly that! The main features for my minimal viable product (MVP) are going to be
- Create a company account
- Create teams
- Create users
- Add users to teams
- Keep track of PP sessions throughout the sprint
- Set goals for sprints
- Compare sprints
Documentation
During the process of documenting my journey I will set goals for the week and, of course, try to meet them. Since I will be having weeks where I have more spare time than others I am not sure if my goals are always going to be all met.
So the next weeks goals are going to be: In order of priority:
Next weeks goals (06.01.20 – 12.1.20)
- Define MVP functionality more concretely
- Write User Stories
- Wireframes + Mockups
- Get as far as possible with proof of concept implementation
That’s it for this week. If you like this article and never want to miss the next one, follow me on Twitter: @langhorstthomas