Product development process: From idea to code

A story about product development.

In this article, I’m going to describe the product development process of focusd, a zen-productivity app that I’m currently building together with André.

The order of the sections in this post corresponds to the steps we’ve been through so far. Don’t misjudge this as a waterfall process though. We’re going back and forth between certain parts, and will continue to do so. Hopefully, this post will be useful for anyone interested in building digital products, or just curious to know what it involves.

Warning: This is a long post, so go grab a cup of coffee (or tea 🍵) before you dive in.

André and I are both Indie Hackers. We’re bootstrapping products together. We try to stay lean and scrappy as we don’t have the luxury of external funding. We’re actually not interested in getting funded at all. We’re after sustainable growth and freedom, not growth at all costs!

Ideation, brainstorming, and design sprints

We started our journey by running a few ideation sessions in pure brainstorming mode. We took inspiration from the Design Sprint 2.0 method but didn’t do a full-blown design sprint. We hacked our way through the process.

Since we live in different countries, we decided to used a shared Figma FigJam file. This has allowed us to draw freely, add Post-It notes, comments, arrows, colors, screenshots, etc.

During this exercise, we focused on:

1. What problem(s) the app would solve (i.e., define our challenge)
2. How we could solve those (i.e., research, find inspiration, and produce solutions)
3. The processes behind our solution
4. Storyboarding

Our first brainstorming outputs

Thanks to this step, André and I have created a shared understanding of what we set out to fix/build, and we’ve explored potential ways to solve the issues we noticed.