{"id":5706,"date":"2018-08-21T14:52:28","date_gmt":"2018-08-21T06:52:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skale.today\/2018\/08\/21\/lean-code-and-developers-side-projects\/"},"modified":"2018-08-21T14:52:28","modified_gmt":"2018-08-21T06:52:28","slug":"lean-code-and-developers-side-projects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.skale.today\/content\/2018\/08\/21\/lean-code-and-developers-side-projects\/","title":{"rendered":"Lean code and developers\u2019 side projects"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI like to focus on software development, and marketing is really not my game.\u00a0 I don\u2019t like to step out of my comfort zone\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not too uncommon to hear something like this for when you work with developers who are working with side projects, helping them to build those missing pieces on marketing.<\/p>\n

Many of the developers end up building more than what could be measured as \u201cminimum\u201d for a given stage of validation of an idea.<\/p>\n

And this is something, many starting up experts do not like.<\/p>\n

They come from a school of approaches that produced some of the leading businesses today including Facebook, Twitter, AirBnb, Dropbox, Reddit, LinkedIn, and likes. \u00a0The approach used In these new age startups blew off traditional marketing for a new set of strategies that felt more like engineering and product development.<\/p>\n

In earlier days, marketing was long been applied after the product fully is completed. This kind of sounds familiar with how many (still) developers end up building almost a full product before thinking about marketing.<\/p>\n

The result is, marketers are often forced to promote products that don\u2019t resonate, that doesn\u2019t really work.<\/p>\n

The new approach prescribes marketing and product building to go hand in hand or even better, marketing to commence when you haven\u2019t even written a single code. This is the heart of lean startup methodologies.<\/p>\n

Having worked closely with handful developers and their projects in this situation, we have now decoded the two perspectives and evolved a way that works.<\/p>\n

Lean start-ups way<\/strong><\/p>\n

Launching a new enterprise\u2014whether it\u2019s a tech start-up, a small business, or a side project\u2014has always been a hit-or-miss proposition. This approach had founders falling into the \u201cbetter mousetrap fallacy\u201d, which is the mistaken belief that a superior product will automatically generate customers.<\/p>\n

But the \u201clean start-up\u201d approach changed this. It favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition and iterative design over traditional \u201cbig design up front\u201d development.<\/p>\n

The Lean Startup provides a scientific approach to creating and managing startups and get a desired product to customers\u2019 hands faster. It is a principled approach to new product development.<\/p>\n

And this makes lean startup experts prescribing a formula of \u201cNo coding before customer conversation\u201d and advise using smoke tests instead to find if at all you should start coding at all.<\/p>\n

Developers defying the lean code<\/strong><\/p>\n

Many developers begin the work on a side project that they think is a cool idea people want. They then spend months perfecting that product without ever showing the product, even in a very rudimentary form, to the prospective customer.<\/p>\n

Talking to prospects is hard, coding is much easier. There are several reasons for this:<\/p>\n