Creating products in a week?!

This year, I had my first professional project, which was followed up by more and more. I wanted to talk about the most unique (and annoying) part I found when working with Clients: showing results.

Why is this difficult?

"I already made multiple projects, I can easily just do the same and show the result" is what I thought when I started, but I soon realized that clients don't have any knowlage about coding, deployment, or even product management. When you work with clients, you need to show results fast. Sometimes this could take 3 months, sometimes a month, or sometimes even a week.

How can I make a good product in under a week?!

this is a difficult task, and the simplest answer is: you can't. You can make a product quickly though using these 2 things:

Agile development

Agile is also a mindset that influences how we choose to think and act. As agilists, we choose to: Accelerate our value realization by embracing worthwhile changes. Delight customers by taking a customer-centric view to our work. Improve group capability by proactively collaborating instead of working in functional silos. Improve predictably by refining our understanding of what is needed through regularly showing our work and acting on feedback. Optimize flow by working on small things instead of big things. Big things are accomplished incrementally as a series of small things. Keep workloads within capacity by finishing the things we work on instead of starting lots of things. This is called limiting work-in-process (WIP). Improve continuously by frequently learning from our experience and evolving our practices based on what we learned. Agility predictably, sustainably, and rapidly delivers high-quality value in a changing, complex environment.

According to pmi.org.

Basically, you move fast, and complete small tasks every time, until you end up with a final product. I personally found the methology to be better than any other I tried, and it's a key component of creating products this quickly.

Use pre-existing code

This is something that's very difficult to properly do, but can ruin your skills if not done properly. Copying and reusing code isn't just doing CTRL+C -> CTRL+V, it requires you to understand the code, and to modify it to fit your code. otherwise, you're gonna come back to the code with no idea what it does, and you're gonna end up wasting far more time than you think on it.

However, when done right, you can take weeks, if not months of work and do them in under a week, which is exactly what allows you to create good products like this.

conclusion

When you start working with clients, you need to start coding fast. When working normally, you won't be able to show a complete result until a month passes by or so, and during that time, the client will think of you as lazy, and that you're not working.

So learn how to move fast, plan quickly, and start using existing code instead of writing things from scratch (but still, don't just copy code, learn what it does). And you willl be able to make products in under a week.