Weekly Check-In (Week 49 - All welcome!)

[Last Week]

• Finished the redesign for the website. The most important bit is that one can now request a free issue. @vimalin, @davey: If y'all have a chance to poke about for bugs, it'd be appreciated!
• Finished redesign of email template to match the website.
• Wrapped up email automation for folks who check out the free issue.
• Content, content, content.

[This Week]

• Find a hunter.
• Gather all the Product Hunt goodies for launch.
• Launch.
• Content for the newsletter.
• Content for the LinkedIn scheduler.

[Goal for December]

• Be positioned to launch on PH by 4 December.
• Have email automation in play for folks captured via LinkedIn.

[Goal for 2020]

• Milestone 1: 30 paid subscribers (Dec 15)
• Milestone 2: 60 subscribers (Jan 9)

[Side Hustle]

Diversity Decoded: A weekly newsletter of pragmatic, actionable insights to build and retain diverse engineering talent.

Last Week

• Set up the prototype of the initial back-end services for Browse Me Later
• Continued building in public tasks to gather more interest

This Week

• The Holiday week last week here in the USA slowed progress on reaching out to current sign-ups. So, planning to dig into that more this week.
• Start being intentional about interacting in some relevant productivity communities in hopes of building more signups.
• Start roughing out a prototype of the web app.
• Begin prototype development of the Chrome extension

This Month

• Likely not going to hit my goal of 25 sign-ups by the end of today but made it about 2/3rds of the way. Goal for December is to have a working MVP and have at least 5 paid early users.

Browse Me Later is an email reminder to help you set aside focused time to check out articles, websites, and videos.

Last Week

• Completed the OpenAPI part for the HeyForm app, so it now can connect to Zapier with thousands of apps.
• Finished a brief product introduction video.
• Set up CDN for the dashboard for better loading performance.
• Talked to several enterprise customers and collected their demands, drafted them into prototypes.

This Week

• Release DingTalk and Wecom Integrations for Chinese customers.
• Start to improve the UI/UX for the app user flow.
• Adding case studies to the website.
• Content for the newsletter.
• Learn, research and think.

Goal for December

• Find a nice hunter and launch on ProductHunt.
• Complete the new UI/UX design
• Get the 1st paid user

About HeyForm

HeyForm is a web-based form application that allows you to create beautiful online forms and collect information from users, without any technical knowledge or skills.

It can be used for a survey, quiz, job application, event registration, contact form as well as many other ways. It doesn't require any technical skills to efficiently create online forms that look and behave in a professional manner.

Announcr MVP Goals

1. "I come home and am announced over a speaker on arrival in my driveway and when I walk in the door"
2. "I walk into a Target store and am announced over a speaker in a grandiose manner"
3. "I can use the custom announcement feature to advertise something about myself that I want people to know"

Overall
I'm feeling excited again. I'm honing in on a value proposition which feels STRONG, beyond the "MAKE THE WORLD SMILE AGAIN" objective, which is also strong. The job search is going slow but starting to show some promise.

Last Week

• Put Lift Academy on mothballs
• Dusted off the Announcr project and got the location client, server, and mobile app running
• Moved some of the pieces to a better stack for scalability
• Got the location client device to run for 3 days with no errors, calling it "stable" for now
• Finished the week off by running a successful test of the whole system
• Simplified the audio message generation and delivery to the location client device (works much more like an Echo device now)
• Worked out a better user flow for the mobile app
• Started on a business model which demonstrates revenue generation ability for a certain kind of customers. Need to poke holes in it but it seems viable. Will need to test the market

This Week

• Make the UI for the new mobile app user flow
• Make a user flow UI/server code for custom Arrival AND Entrance messages
• Create some new landing pages for the market testing I need to do soon

Goal for November
Trying to get to a demonstrable MVP soon so I can make a video of it and see if the implementation of the concept is as cool as it seems in my head.

I have finally posted my first interview of a product owner. I have a few ideas to help POs. They are severely crushed for time and their plates are always sky high. I would like to give them more control into their day to day functioning. Burnout and the rest of the problems arise when we lack control over our environment. My desire is to provide Product Owners the peace of mind that they know where exactly they are in any given situation. The clarity can also make decision making much easier. I would like to talk to lots of Product Owners first to know what are their most pressing issues. Along those lines, I haven taken the first step with my first interview of a Product Owner.

https://prodjeeves.com/transitioning-into-product-owner-role-interview/

Wish me luck!

And more importantly, if you are a Product Owner and willing to be interviewed, please let me know.

Also if you are an aspiring to a product owner role, and would like to ask questions to people in the field, send me your questions!