First steps

Before diving into any work, it’s a good idea to align on your initial motivations, acknowledge your constraints, and focus on a direction. At ThreeFiveTwo we have a variety of tools to pick from, and I think one is especially important for this venture: the Problem Statement.

The Problem Statement

A problem statement is a clear concise description of the issue. It is used to focus the team and validate our efforts. Ideally, the problem statement identifies the gap between the current state and the desired state.

My primary focus for this venture is to learn as much as I can, as quickly as I can. I want to learn how people use the app, what causes friction or delight, and what people wish for. I also want to validate everything I do through experimentation. When I make a change, I want to verify that it is an improvement, rather than just assume so. This is especially critical because it's highly likely that there are a ton of people who like the app just the way it is.

Comparing where we are with where we want to be, our problems revolve around our inability to affect change due to constrained resources, lack of user insight, and stale technology. When I look deeper into the root cause of our issues, one theme becomes clear:

It is difficult to grow MarinaraTimer because the platform doesn’t support rapid experimentation and learning.

For a 9-year-old app, this problem comes as no surprise. But it is really a blocker for every other user-centric problem I might want to solve, so I should focus on this first.

A supporting platform

So, we need a new platform that supports our goals. It should be data-rich, fast and cheap to set up, and enable rapid change. I've learned that other platform features seen in our other enterprise-level ventures (eg. scaling, high-fidelity branding, performance, security) are not critical during this prototyping stage. Trying to tackle those bigger, longer-term issues too early can hamstring your ability to experiment and learn quickly.

After doing some research, I landed on a general technology stack that will support rapid functional prototyping and generating user insights.

Read more about the prototyping stack.

System modeling

A system model is a conceptual representation of all the things in the system, free of any references to technology or UI design. I believe that whether you’re a designer, developer, or manager, you should be an active participant in this exercise, because it will improve your ability to communicate and track what’s going on.

Read more about the System Modeling exercise.

Next steps

At this point, I'm ready to take action. By the time you read this, I should have completed the next steps:

• Create a project in Monday to track my progress.
• Create a Github repository for the prototype.
• Install NextJS with ChakraUI and Firebase.
• Link the repository to Vercel for deployment.
• Code the system model into the prototype.
• Create a Nolt board and link it to the prototype.
• Create a development blog using Webflow and publish this post.
• Link to the developer blog on the main MarinaraTimer app.

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