Wend

A big aspect of Wend is having a structured tagging system. I've seen a lot of systems fail because, over time, you wind up with 10 tags that represent the same thing -- "coke", "Coke", "coca-cola." So, to make our lives easier and get to customers faster, the only type of tags we allow are structured (e.g. "Customer > Coke"). One benefit of this for us is how easy implementing "search" has been.

We only support two types of search:

1. When you create or assign a tag you can "free search" through your tags, but what we're really doing is looking for any tag that starts with what you type
2. The first version of our "find a note" search functionality just lets users check off which tag(s) they want and then searches the database for the relevant notes. It's < 20 lines of code!

Hooray! 🙌🏻

Let's talk about technical debt though...

Just like other types of debt, technical debt can be used for good or bad.

You can use debt to accelerate life-changing events (buying a house) just like you can use technical debt to accelerate product-changing features (like search).

Take on technical debt with the same wisdom as you take on actual debt which is to say have a "smart" amount of debt allocated in the right place.

Thanks to @volkandkaya and Versoly, we got the first pass of our website up.

Lessons learned:

• Perfect is the enemy of done: our copy could be better, we could have more images, etc, etc but having the page up is better than not.
• Writing is clarifying. It's amazing how trying to write a few paragraphs about a product forces you to be clear in your intentions
• It's a marathon, not a sprint. I'm someone who can easily get discouraged and down on myself. Having little accomplishments like getting our landing page up is a huge motivator to me.

We reached out to 8 PMs / designers we know and interviewed them about their product discovery process. We found:

• Large product teams struggle to share info
• Product / design have some mistrust of each other
• Current solutions aren't quite right