Building your next
Open-Source
Product
— by Vipul Gupta, RGB fanatic, part-time traveler, and does occasional cheesecake reviews.
〞
Step 1 is to build something that users love.
– Sam Altman
This presentation isn't about
How to come up with ideas for great products?
1.
How I built a great product is now has a million customers?
2.
Non-actionable meta advise about product building that all ends up with the quote
It depends...
3.
A product is
... is an object, system, or service made available for consumer use as of the consumer demand.
What an open-source product all about?
Solves a problem faced by many
1.
Can be used as platform to build upon
2.
Enables a community to contribute back to
3.
Project
Management
Approach
Product
Oriented
Mindset
Meet Meetbot
Solving a common problem by first principles
#1
What can be an ideal mission for
Meetbot
〞
A Google Meet bot to make meetings frictionless.
– Meetbot
- Ask tons of questions
- When documenting, also document the pain
- Figure out the friction & how your product can make that its USP
Build something people use
In the end, like any self respecting developer you spec it out.
- Google Meet was missing auto-record for meetings (friction)
- No audio transcripts from Google (pain)
- No real user-audio validation to see you audio setup is working
- Our team wouldn't move away from Zoom without these features (need, because Zoom sucks on Linux)
Problems we faced
A Google Meet bot to make meetings frictionless
Meetbot
All the questions we asked, we reused to list out as product features.
- Focus on integration
- User documentation
- Informative README's
- Contributing guides
Build it for the community
Documenting
Whether that's in-line comments, or writing readme's to providing context in issues to making your specs public.
Quality over time is critical
It's a real privilege not to have deadlines & raging customers as prioritization factors when building valuable products.
- Find the problem, come up with a mission statement
- Research, ask yourself questions, iterate statement
- Reach out to the target audience, document friction.
- Start writing a spec for MVP (foundation for docs)
- Finalize mission statement, start building
- Iterate your understanding along the build, complete MVP
- Reach out to customers, enable tight feedback loops, iterate
- Write docs, README, final touches. Release MVP.
- Get more feedback, iterate, involve people to contribute, repeat
Steps to build an
open-source product
The moment you realize the power of product thinking!
Your idea is your product. NOT PROJECT
And, that's about it!
Questions?
Vipul Gupta
Reforming IoT testing one step at a time @ balena, runs Mixster, and volunteers for PyCon India!
@vipulgupta2048