For the past few months, I haven’t turned up any new articles. Partly due to laziness, partly because I’ve been on a journey of rediscovery. I call it rediscovery because I thought I had already trod the path of discovery. I thought I knew who I was, and who I wanted to be. But that wasn’t the case. Life comes at you pretty fast. You think you know yourself, you think you have something figured out. Until you discover you don’t know anything.
I’m not really sure what sparked this desire to rediscover myself. I think recently I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I was missing a deeper understanding of my sense of purpose. Why did I want to do the things I wanted to do? My ‘why’ wasn’t strong enough. Couple that with the fact that I made a conscious decision earlier this year to spend more time around people. It’s a change that lent so much perspective to how I have lived my life up until recent times.
Let’s just say I have been doing it wrong. For much of my life. And I didn’t even know it.
2020-2021, will go down in my memory as a period of time where I underwent a much-needed maturing. But, I learned a lot of things lately. Many of the things I learned within this time frame are things I wished I had learned 10 years ago when I was still a teenager. All is well though. At least I have learned. I wouldn’t trade my knowledge and experiences for anything.
So what else have I been up to?
Asides from learning and self-reflection, I have been building. Writing code on most nights and weekends. Trying to turn out a product idea that has been stuck in my head for the past 2 years. Yeah, 2 years seems a pretty long time. I haven’t been focused, at least not until the past few months.
The idea was born out of a conversation I had with a guy I met at a party. Some 2 years ago. At the time, it didn’t quite seem like the best of ideas. I guess I hadn’t warmed up to it yet. But after weeks of contemplation, I eventually settled on it. This was around late 2019.
I began work on the project hoping to learn a lot of new tech in the process of building the product. I wasn’t really trying to ship anything, I just wanted to learn. And learn I did. All through 2020, I worked on the product idea without much progress to show for my efforts. I was overly focused on the tech and not the outcome. Somewhere along the line, I got lost in implementation, and that is how I didn’t get to finish an MVP.
2021 came along, and I swore things would be different. I didn’t want to continue along the path I took in 2020. First I needed to rethink the product. I wasn’t quite comfortable with the current implementation. There were several edge cases I had failed to handle, several loopholes in my business logic. I couldn’t ship the product live if I didn’t have it properly mapped out, end to end.
So, early in 2021, I decided to put on my Product Manager cap and do an in-depth analysis of what I’m really trying to build. Somehow the effort served me well, as my product idea became crystallized. It’s not perfect yet, as of now, I am still working on the product, but at least I have something I intend to ship and I’m steadily making progress. When I enter the market, sometime later this year, the market will draw out the product it really wants.