What are the best steps when creating a product?
In my journey as a programmer and indie hacker, I've struggled with small daily decisions and their impacts on the long-term of a product after launch. Recently I'm thinking about what would be the best step-by-step to follow that would cover most of the situations on product creation. Here's what I came up with so far:
Business:
- Canvas
- Empathy Map
- Personas
Design:
- Decide UX with wireframes
- Color pallete
- Fonts
- High fidelity components (button, form inputs...)
- Use components for prototyping screens and features
Code
backend
- Decide on / create a database
- Decide on / create backend api
frontend
- Decide frontend technologies (CSS, JS)
- Create a library of components (storybook)
- Create unit tests for the components
- Create all the features and app pages
- e2e tests
- CI to automate deployment with testings to guarantee safe deployment to users
What do you guys think? What do you do differently?
Might be good to say that I agree that sometimes the best thing to do is to go vanilla js (or jquery :P) and use some simple solutions like localStorage to validate an idea. I've done it before and I will do it again, but here I'm thinking more about a situation of a post-validated product.
I think you've got too many steps in there. I don't really understand the business steps, canvas, empathy map and personas mean nothing to me.
Personally I reckon, cut out all the design steps. For the front end and back end, just use whatever you like using. It's unlikely to impact your business.
Do you think it might depend on the product? For example, let's say your product will be Medium.com. Would you cut all the design steps?
Personally yes I would. I think your goal should be to get into PROD as quickly as possible with the simplest thing that will solve your users problem.