Realization of the day: ⒈ I actually enjoy building products. | Not boring, and a bit of a condescending prick

Realization of the day:

⒈ I actually enjoy building products.
⒉ If the backend for a product would take me less than a week, I don’t believe in such a product.

When a conversation about “product development” is exclusively about appearance & presentation, and not a single thought from, say, a ~15 minutes long part of this conversation has to do with the data that this product is about, I’m out.

Examples of good products: Google search, maps, GMail, Uber, Mixpanel, Tableau, AWS, online brokers, Kubernetes, multiplayer online games, programming languages.

Because building these requires carefully thinking through the workflows, most of which are far from trivial data-wise.

Examples of what I don’t even consider products: weather-tracking chat bots, DocuSign, Blind, modern messengers, Twitter, LiveJournal, Dropbox, Salesforce.

Because in these projects the major concern is not how to build them, but “how do we best present the user with feature X, which we believe they need”.

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Simply put, I want to work on products where it’s clear a) what is that the user needs, and b) why it is hard to make happen from the technological standpoint.

And I do not want to work on products where the main “challenge” is to make the user want to do some obvious thing with a slightly better UX, and to have them enjoy the process slightly more.

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I can totally see myself working on the technology side of, say, Telegram. That would be fun and exciting. But I won’t be the guy designing the “product” part of it, as it’s, well, too simple and thus too boring to my taste.

Actually, if I'm the CTO of Telegram, I’d make the product part of it open source, and let individual developers compete to build the best UI/UX part. Because the “product” part of Telegram can be handled by a bunch of teenagers; to my taste, it’s the tech behind it that matters for this particular product.

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And to this day I don’t understand how come DocuSign is even considered a product. After all, it only exists because its “users” were too lazy to figure out which five features does their business process need, and then hire two good engineers to build the tech for that five-features process in a bulletproof and effective way.