From Everyday Frustrations to an Idea for Building an App
From my need for an app that could specifically connect a project with its timeline, progress, documentation, and even reports on the problems that come up, an idea was born: build my own app that fits what I need right now.
Intro
As time went by, I started to feel that it's just plain tiring to hop between so many apps only to update progress, check a timeline, or read documentation. Although yeah, in some apps I could probably do some custom setup to make them show the data I need.
Say I use Jira to manage projects. Yes, it works for managing tasks, and we can do a few "tweaks" to make it show progress, or maybe even build a timeline, but yeaaaaah, it's still not what I was hoping for.
So basically, I had a picture of what I needed, and it turned out to need yet another round of customization.
A "Click"
Naah, in the end this is what pushed me to say, okay, let's go, let's just try making something, at least for my own team to use so our day-to-day work is more organized.
The final push came when I needed a PRD for a discussion and ended up scrolling through group chats and my email, still not sure which one was the latest version.
With my mind made up, I slowly started exploring: what are the main needs I have to prepare for?
I started asking a few of my coworkers:
What difficulties have you had so far in managing projects?
Can you easily access all the information related to a project?
If all project information could be accessed from just one app, would you be interested in using it?
From these casual chats with my coworkers, I came to the conclusion that it would be great if all the basic, main information about a project could be accessed from one single app, where even from just one page we could get almost all the data we need.
I think that's amazing.
Limits
And of course, with this restlessness of mine that I'm trying to turn into an app to solve my own problem, I'm not trying to build something to replace existing apps that were made to answer specific needs in a team.
For example, I'm not trying to build a Jira rival, big nooooo.
I'm not trying to build a Notion rival for writing documentation either.
I'm not taking ClickUp's share of work tools.
I'm not trying to beat Miro at diagrams and whiteboards.
It's not within my capacity to build a competitor to those big apps above.
I'm not trying to position myself as a rival to those big apps. I'm just building an app that brings all the basic functions of project work tools together into one.
The Design
With all the limits I tried to set so I'd end up with an app that answers specific problems, I tried to draw a small box as my playground for development.
Simply put, I set the limit that the app I'm building only needs to answer these questions:
How many projects do we have this year?
Which projects are running this month?
What's the progress percentage of project A right now?
What work do we have this week?
Is there any task that needs a follow-up today?
Is a project currently considered healthy?
What issues are keeping a project's progress from reaching its target?
What does the business flow for project A look like?
What were the meeting agreements for project A?
What milestones are there during the project's development?
From this small idea, hopefully it can answer the basic needs in the application development process.
To be continued in the next story...