Your Dream Product. Sales?
Allow me to share a dream I had…
I have spent a fair share of my time since 2013 working on android projects, web apps, and the backend systems. Some freelanced, some for my employers and some of my very own.
It takes a bit of courage to tell you that the ones I built out of my own interest, are the only ones which helped me in my interviews.
Every other project that was a pure effort for money, never actually came up during the interview conversations.
One might argue that it can be because of my own lack of interest. But, I would say otherwise.
Today, I’m going to talk about a particular project that was quite at the intersection of my interest and effort for money (employment). One I dreamt off as a product that would make it big, because I could imagine a lot of use cases for it.
But my employer only saw one particular use case. Their own.
The initiative started off as an effort to build a proof of concept. A concept that could help monitor integrations between large software systems, distributed across the organization.
From a meta perspective I loved to call those systems as self contained micro services. A lot of coworkers disagreed. Nice pissing contest.
So the concept kicked off with me and a preexisting utility written by some senior engineer on the team a year ago, and also my manager, obviously. I was pretty excited. Mostly because of my renaissance attitude. Excitement about the unknown!
While I was building the concept and talking to some of teams of those legacy (heritage) software, my subconscious was already dreaming of a product that was so flexible to fit not just the use case my manager and his manager had in mind, but also a lot outside of the organization. Which sometimes is a different world altogether.
The concept was successful in all technical aspects. 1 high value integration onboarded successfully to test it. With 1k events/sec at peak.
Long story short, it didn’t make it into an actual product the business would use.
Why? You might ask?
Because for one it was too complex, and would need a team to maintain and support. Built on the event-driven system design paradigm, apparently nothing of that sort was ever tried in the team before.
A kick ass startup product, I think.
And second, the integration maintenance team had already built something. A slow, old, but working solution. Too tightly attached to each integration which unsurprisingly was not a problem for the employer. And here I was, building a generalized system.
The prime fact that the integration team built it themselves killed mine.
Anyways, the dream product that I had in mind is kinda close to what https://amplitude.com/ is doing (told ya, a kick ass startup idea). With that sleek UI for events correlation. Added support for all sorts of connectors with Kafka, cloud pub-sub, segment, kinesis and so much more!
Now that I come to think of it, I just had to sell Amplitude. No technical baggage. But passing business data onto somebody else’s server, scares certain companies. Which I think it should.
Talking about my dream, I even had a plan 2.0. Which would include automation to correlate events with about similar objects. And a 3.0 with AI for auto correlation.
I wasn’t just dreaming about the stars, you see. The whole great big bang was drafted here.
A good thing that came out of it, the technical success of the concept helped me during some interviews.
Moral of the story, spoken out of experience-
Technically fancy projects with billion use cases only succeed if you have (wait for it — Drumroll please) good sales!
So if you see me taking sales and marketing courses in this pandemic don’t be surprised.
