Nosce

I have so much to say that I'm having a hard time understanding where to begin. First of all, I need to say that I'm writing this on January/2023, despite marking the post in 2018. I'm doing this because I want to wrap up everything that made me build this product. In fact, I can remember quite a few moments of my life (mostly professional, but it's another topic - and doubt) that together compose my idea of what I've built so far, but the problem is that I'm not sure about the order or chronology of that, so I'll need to tell the story in another way. Hope you can enjoy my journey (and maybe help? 🥺).

That said, I need to confess one important thing before talking about the product. For a long time I've wanted to post it here (or maybe on other similar sites - I would love suggestions haha) but I've always been kind of ashamed about the lack of some important parts on the product, as I built that by myself (and I'm not a dev - also a topic for another post so I can get some advice). This particular moment of my life made me create the courage to open up about what I've done and also say my doubts and fears (maybe most of what I'll write, but let's see what happens).

One day, probably in 2018, the company that I was working for hired a consultant company to apply the DISC test on the employees. After doing the test on their website, I received in my mailbox a PDF with a description of my personality and was instructed to print these pages. In the next few days, a meeting with a consultant from that company was scheduled and she explained what each letter from the acronym DISC meant. At that time, I already knew the DISC from another company I worked for when I was a marketing intern, so I had no surprises about what she said. But I had a sparkle of an idea there, not well formed, still raw, but some kind of an idea.

Some days after, out of nowhere, I thought about exchanging the results with my boss (a particular one that had taught me a lot of soft skills, and I don’t think that she knows the importance of that). At least in my mind, doing this would help us to work better with each other, as I would know how she "thinks", what motivates her, what she likes to do, and that she would probably know something similar about me. And I think that worked well. We created a powerful bond that made her know me so well that she indicated me to another position (kind of startup inside the company) and that was a milestone for my growth as a professional (and person too), looking now from the distance of the past. We also managed to work together again later for a year, which was another good experience.

At another point in time(due to my lack of memory order), I was on a startup that had some tool of the HR team that sent questions as feedback for the company about how you were feeling. As it wasn't anonymous, I had always felt some kind of constraint on what I should/could reply there (too neurotic? Again, another topic haha). For important matters, I always preferred to ask for a 1:1 conversation with the person involved to have an honest discussion.

The head of the area I was working also had his way to "metric" some kind of feedback from the team to work better together, a fair motive, but we noticed after some time that he was usually hiding some topics (polemics or that he had a decision by himself and didn't want to discuss). Well, that worked for some time but had its flaws.

Other lessers sparks of imagination lead me to the product, but I'll let that for maybe another text. But with all this (meaningless?) context, I've started to build an idea of MVP. At this time, my main idea was to use "technology" to create "structured feedback" where you can reply about yourself to understand how you perceive yourself and then ask some other people with that you have some relationship and see what these perceive about you (or maybe your actions only). My main focus at this time was the workspace, so I decided to use the DISC method and then started to learn how to develop an MVP (decided on Ruby on Rails, maybe I'll talk about this later).

The first version was really poor in every way you can imagine (especially design/UX) but did its job. The MVP was just the regular DISC test (nothing new, as dozens of websites do the same for free) but with a question in the end: "Would you share a personal link of you to ask people you know to reply about your personality?". That question was my only objective, so I started a journey to get users that were wanting to make some personality tests so they can reply to my question at the end of the test.

After some effort, I had enough replies to assume that my sample was ok for my purposes. I remember getting impressed with the number (and excited) and that was a milestone to continue learning development and also try to organize better what I would do (despite later knowing that the number I had was a good indication of the needs I was trying to discover but the way I created the question - as I'm not a research expert - had its bias so it doesn't really meant I "had a business").

The next months I kept working on my day-to-day job (and learning some Data Science programming skills, which also helped to learn the development part) and improving the webapp (maybe I should call it just a website) with some features, new ways to see the results, some payments and lots of learnings, but all of these are stories for a next post.

In the end, I think I just want to share my story and receive feedback, maybe inspire someone to try something new and, if the product works, I hope to help people to know better themselves and each other and maybe that can be something good. Period.

#buildinpublic