03: Learning On The Job
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If you spend enough time in Indie Hacker Twitter, you’ll eventually see people talking about the importance of shipping only the bare essential feature set for an MVP. The motto is “ship, then iterate”.
It wasn’t until recently that this message really drove itself home, though. At my job, I am basically an internal Product Manager; my current project is to roll out Sharepoint across the company. The plan I settled on was to ship a small feature set, just like my favourite indie hackers preach. But in a meeting today, there were calls to add a few “small” features. Things that are not core functionality. I managed to talk them into waiting until after the initial launch happened.
It’s funny. At work, I’m trying to keep scope as small as possible but in my personal projects, my tendency is to spend too much time on adding features. I eventually get bored and never launch anything.
I’ve started using AI to scope projects before I start coding anything. I love Claude, but it’s too agreeable and always tells me that all my ideas are brilliant and proceeds to add them to the plan.
To be successful with a small bet approach, i’ll need to get strict with myself and keep scope to an absolute bare minimum. And definitely tell Claude not to indulge all my ideas.
This post (03: Learning On The Job) was last edited 4 months ago.