While self-hosting taught me a lot, it was also a slog and prevented me from focusing on the product. If I were to do this project again, I would simplify it by: skip the Electron app of creating a website first and build an Electron app directly, focusing on just a Pomodoro timer before expanding to habit tracking, adding responsive design only after core functionality works, and deploying to the cloud before attempting to self-host.
I built Voyagr as a self-hosted alternative to commercial habit tracking apps. The goal was simple: create a privacy-focused habit tracker that runs on my own hardware, giving me complete control over my data.
Validating Ideas (or rediscovering Agile)
This was my largest personal project yet and as I reflect on it I'm struck by the reliance on good Project decisions to validate Product hunches and guide Implementation. The insight I want to drive home is that though the Product question is essential to a successful project, we can only know so much by talking to customers and looking at data. It therefore falls on Project planning to create a strategy to validate the Product hunch. Maybe another away of saying this is: validating the Product hunch through good Project planning is the most essential part of a project. Yes, this is agile.
- 20% Product: Why do we think we are addressing a real use case with this Product?
- 50% Project: What features do we build and in what order to validate and execute on meeting a real need?
- 30% Implementation: How do we build these features?
If validating the Product hunch with Project planning is so important than the Product and Implementation stages need to account for this. This is perhaps the bigger insight, agile isn't something an engineer or manager does, it's an organizational approach to projects.
Product:
- Make the upfront investment to build an engineering organization that can validate Product hunches.
- Staffing needs to allow and Culture need to value Project flexibility when hunches don't pan out.
Implementation:
- What technologies support gathering data to analyze Product hunches?
- What technologies open up the fastest path to answering Product hunches? And flexibility to build out features later.
Questions to check whether you're interviewing at an Agile organization
- Can you tell me about a time where you played a role in reshaping a Product's direction?
- On your latest project, how did you validate that you were building a feature that served a real customer need?
- Can you tell me about a project that didn't go right or was abandoned? How did it feel to be an engineer on that project?
- How is your success measured? Is there a rubric for engineering success?