Building Products That Clients Actually Use

We've built many products over the years. Some were technically excellent but rarely used. Others were simpler but became essential tools for our clients. The difference wasn't the code—it was our approach to understanding and solving real problems.

Start With the Problem, Not the Solution

It's tempting to start with technology: "Let's build a React app with GraphQL and a microservices backend." But technology should serve the problem, not the other way around.

Questions we ask before writing any code:

• What problem are we actually solving?
• How are users solving this problem today?
• What would make their lives meaningfully better?
• How will we know if we've succeeded?

Sometimes the answer isn't even software. We've talked clients out of building apps when a simple spreadsheet would serve them better.

The MVP Trap

"Minimum Viable Product" is often misunderstood. MVP doesn't mean shipping something barely functional. It means shipping the smallest thing that actually solves the core problem.

Bad MVP: A half-working app with lots of features, none of them complete.

Good MVP: A fully functional app that does one thing well.

We'd rather ship three working features than ten broken ones. Users forgive missing features; they don't forgive broken ones.

Talk to Users Early and Often

We build in feedback loops throughout the development process:

1. Before building: Interviews to understand the problem 2. During building: Regular demos and usability testing 3. After launch: Analytics and user feedback sessions

The most valuable feedback often comes from watching users interact with the product. What they do matters more than what they say.

Simplicity Is Hard

Adding features is easy. Removing them is hard. The discipline to keep things simple requires constant effort.

Our simplicity checklist:

• Can we remove this feature without hurting the core use case?
• Is this complexity necessary, or are we over-engineering?
• Will a new user understand how to use this?
• Are we building for edge cases that rarely happen?

Every feature has a cost: development time, maintenance burden, cognitive load for users. We try to be honest about these costs.

Performance Is a Feature

Slow software feels broken. We treat performance as a core feature, not an afterthought.

• Set performance budgets early
• Measure continuously
• Optimize the critical path

A product that loads in 2 seconds will always beat one that loads in 8 seconds, regardless of other features.

Launch Is the Beginning

Shipping the first version is a milestone, not the finish line. The real learning starts when real users interact with your product.

Post-launch priorities:

• Monitor for errors and performance issues
• Gather user feedback systematically
• Iterate quickly on what matters most

We've never shipped a perfect first version. The goal is to ship something good enough to learn from.

Conclusion

Building products people actually use requires discipline: the discipline to understand problems before solving them, to keep things simple when complexity is tempting, and to listen to users even when their feedback challenges our assumptions.

The best product isn't the one with the most features or the cleanest code. It's the one that solves a real problem well enough that users keep coming back.