Building a product that matters and impactful to people is never an easy task. We need to be very critical, understand the main pain points, and how to develop a solution that will be the main cure of the problem itself.

Especially with a lot of similar products, as a developer, we need to think through what differentiate our platform with others and why we should make our product as an app instead of a website. During the 10 months development process at Apple Developer Academy, I noted down some Do’s and Dont’s to make an impactful products:

✅  Do’s (AICCAT)

Ask yourself: What are you passionate about?

Idea always comes from something that’s closed to us. The key is be curious and pay attention with what happen around us. For example, piles of your college equipment that’s no longer used in the present, or struggling to read google maps are some of my daily life problems that I would like to solve.

Idea validation & research

Once you decide what do you want to solve, now it’s time to deep dive and focus on what to solve first. Ask yourself and your teammates these questions:

• Is this something worth to solve?
• Are there anyone else that’s experiencing the problem beside me?
• What is the majority & main points that should be solved first?
• For whom do we solve the problem for?

You can do this steps from desk research, user interviews, and survey. Don’t forget to set your research objective before questioning the questions above so that your research will not be in vain.

Clear user flow & expectation

When building something, you must be working in a team and therefore ensure that everyone has the same understanding about the initial ideas is very important. Scratch your user journey from the start and share it to everyone on the team. Who knows your teammates might have something interesting to share? 😉

Create clear documentation about every decisions

Document every of your decisions and thoughts into a document that’s accessible & easy to understand for everyone. So that you can revisit your earlier decisions and why did you finally choose it that way. Everyone in the team also needs access to the document so that they can ensure what they build has already met the expectation of initial discussions.

Chunk your backlog to reachable milestones

Ideation has been completed. Now, how about the executions? How to ensure that your team will be able to actualize the end product to reality and finally solve users’ problem? This is when you make miracle happen by chunking your backlog properly and adjust it to your team’s capacity & targeted timeline. Important note → never underestimate the task to avoid messy timelines and production released.