Given how much fun we all had last time we had a discussion, why not do it again?! Today’s discussion topic is simple epiphanies. Share your product/engineering realizations that were so simple yet profound. One of those moments when you slap your head with your palm and go, ‘Of Course!’. I will share mine.
A long time ago, I was a developer working on a product that enabled 401k rollovers to happen online. Adobe Flex had just burst into the scene, so we built the product using Flex. I was super proud of the product. It was slick and shiny with none of the jagged edges HTML had back in the day. The only minor concern was that customers had to download and install an Adobe plugin if they didn’t have it installed on their machine.
We launched the project with much fanfare aaaaannddd…it flamed out spectacularly. After launch, we realized that most of our customer base was over 50. They had aging desktops (this was before the time of Smartphones) and struggled mightily to install anything. It was so bad that the customer service reps just started sending them pre-filled forms for them to sign and send back. We ended up re-writing the product in HTML.
Simple Epiphanies
Given how much fun we all had last time we had a discussion, why not do it again?! Today’s discussion topic is simple epiphanies. Share your product/engineering realizations that were so simple yet profound. One of those moments when you slap your head with your palm and go, ‘Of Course!’. I will share mine.
A long time ago, I was a developer working on a product that enabled 401k rollovers to happen online. Adobe Flex had just burst into the scene, so we built the product using Flex. I was super proud of the product. It was slick and shiny with none of the jagged edges HTML had back in the day. The only minor concern was that customers had to download and install an Adobe plugin if they didn’t have it installed on their machine.
We launched the project with much fanfare aaaaannddd…it flamed out spectacularly. After launch, we realized that most of our customer base was over 50. They had aging desktops (this was before the time of Smartphones) and struggled mightily to install anything. It was so bad that the customer service reps just started sending them pre-filled forms for them to sign and send back. We ended up re-writing the product in HTML.
So, what is your simple epiphany?