July 30, 2020

My First Successful Product

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I launched my first successful product about 6 years ago. It was an internal tool that gathered data from internal and external sources, munged it together, ran deduplication, cleanup, and formatting, and spit out an Excel file, which would then be used by the consumer team.

While building it, I pulled triple-duty: data analyst (exploring all the data pieces that had to fit together), engineer (building the thing), and product manager (taking a list of asks and figuring out what the solution would look like).

It was a mess.

The database DDL was defined by hand, and resembled spaghetti
Most of the heavy lifting was done by a few really big PL/SQL procs
To make it better, some data loading was done nightly via a few random Python scripts
UI was an eyesore - mostly sticking with Oracle Application Express default themes (and some custom jQuery underneath it for more complex functionality)

But it worked.

A team of 10-15 people consistently used it - nearly every day!
It took an 8+ hour manual process and reduced it to ~20 min of app usage
I usually received more feature requests than bug reports

Getting there was a gradual process - but very in-line with the normal product story

Worked hand-in-hand with the team before they were officially a team to understand what their needs were (building user empathy)
Started by supporting one-off requests, which took 2-3 days to finish (service-based model)
Put together some repeatable scripts so that any analyst on our team could support those requests (slightly-scalable concierge)
Launched the first version of the web app (minimum valuable product)

And we iterated

As the team used the product, we identified patterns of where they were consistently spending manual effort - so we automated more of those tasks
As the team grew into their new charter, they understood more areas where they could add value - so we added supporting data to the app
I remember being confused early-on by some requests for features that already existed, then realized that either the functionality wasn’t obvious, or was too hard to use - so we re-designed those features to be more conspicuous and intuitive

Nowadays, this product is a few iterations along, with an entire team of great people working on it. When I think about the engineering work that went into it, I cringe. But despite that, it’s one of the most clear examples from my career of a product that directly provided value to our users by solving their problems.

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Kudos

My First Successful Product

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