I have been working for the last 6 months on a major UX rewrite. During this time, my focus had been productivity. That meant getting as much done as possible. Now that the rewrite work is done and the product is out, the goal is to improve the product and establish a product market fit. This effort is very different from the rewrite.

This note is a reflection on the difference in mental approach to these two phases with a few notes to self as I embark on the journey to navigate the product to PMF.

Analogy:

The engineering effort of the rewrite was like climbing a mountain. It was a huge task. Just the sheer size of the mountain makes you doubt, if you can scale it. The climb itself has some smooth stretches and some steep. At times, you might have to camp to wait out a blizzard. You have to acclimitise to the altitude. You have to be vary of hidden crevices that can trap you for days and break your climb.

All of this was true with the rewrite as well. Complete frontend rewrite of our product especially with zero experience in frontend work felt like an impossible task. There were some modules that were just work and some that I had to write over and over to the get the design right. Some days my environment was too chaotic to focus and get work done due to personal, social and health conditions. There were also those days when everything was fine, but my own creative energy was just not sufficient to deal with the complexity of the problem. There was a deep crevice too with an emergency cloud rearchitecture to avoid bank breaking cloud fees. That was that journey.

Navigating the product to PMF feels more like navigating across a thick valley rather than climbing a mountain. Finding the shortest, quickest, easiest path itself is a challenge. Sticking to a planned path in the disorientating thick underbush is not easy. Then one might suddenly find a water stream cutting the path or a cliff drop or a waterfall. Getting a good night’s sleep is near impossible with swarms of mosquitoes singing. There might be a lot of options to eat, but some may be toxic.

The product journey is its own version of the valley. Picking the right users for feedback is deceptively hard. Becoming too shortsighted while implementing tiny features and losing the bigger picture of product market fit is too easy. You might suddenly find out there’s a big change needed to implement a small feature or UI fix that could take weeks. Once you do find a few paying users, keeping up with feedback can give you sleepless nights, especially if the users have paid what they feel is a premium. Pitching to a few negative people might just kill your morale.

Mindset:

Climbing the mountain was about being disciplined, using my energy efficiently and having the determination to push through the hard stretches to the summit. The process was a long meditation with intense focus on the now. It was about breaking the journey into smaller milestones and focusing on the next one alone. It was as much about the internal voice in my head as much as the external work.

Crossing the valley will be about keeping a clear bigger picture and periodically reasserting it. It will be about staying alert through out while making the small decisions. It will be about developing the right insights. It will be about keeping eyes and ears open. It will be about moving with the jungle and not fighting through it. It will be about staying calm and focused.

The one thing that is common though is the determination to not give up.

Productivity:

Climbing the mountain has a clear metric, the altitude, that helps keep track of progress to stay motivated. In my case, it was the work done and the hours put in. At any point, you know all you have to do is just keep going. Just this one module.

Crossing the valley is different. You could keep going in circles for a long time before you realise. You might get stuck at one place for too long. Progress is not obvious. Sometimes, we might have to circle back to go across a cliff drop or a waterfall. Productivity is not a very good indicator of progress.

The right measure of progress in the jungle is learning. This distinction is very important and I need to be very mindful of it. If I am not, I might get frustrated easily and lose gumption and gumption is the key to make it through the valley.

Pitfalls:

There are no rules in the jungle. But these are a few personal resolutions to avoid the pitfalls:

  • Keep it stupid. Take 30min to walk around than try to climb down a cliff. Just add a tutorial video instead of implementing some complex UI.
  • Don’t start any projects. Don’t worry about constructing a bamboo hut if you can sleep under a rock. Don’t implement custom analytics if mixpanel will just about do.
  • Don’t overthink the route. You can always come back and take the other one. Just keep fixing issue based on user feedback.
  • Don’t commit to long plans. Keep making sure you’re going in the right direction. Keep the todo list limited to 4 most important issues to fix.
  • Learn about the lay of the land. Know where the watering holes are. Connect and talk to SaaS experts who got PMF right.

Modus Operandi:

  1. Find a vantage point.
  2. Identify the direction out of the valley.
  3. Identify 2-3 landmarks on the easiest path out.
  4. Keep moving forward at a comfortable pace.
  5. Repeat from step 1.

Vantage points:

Vantage points are trees, cliffs or high points that offer a bird’s eye view of the valley. Vantage points for me are:

  • off days with some distance from the daily work
  • conversations with insightful outsiders with context
  • statistical analysis of user feedback
  • funnel analytics of product usage

Some questions to ask about the product are:

  • Have I identified the right users for the product?
  • Are interested users able to extract value?
  • What will get users to start paying?
  • When will the business equation work for me?
  • How can I get more users?
  • What will keep the users coming back?