Plum Development Diaries, Episode 05: What Value Are We Giving To Our Customers?

We’re a building a work management software for remote workers and we’ll be sharing details of the development process with our community. If you want to know how it all started, just check these blogposts before you move forward:

Introduction: We’re Building a Tool For Remote Workers Plum Development Diaries, Episode 01: Why Build This Tool? Plum Development Diaries, Episode 02: Do’s and Don’ts Plum Development Diaries, Episode 03: Asynchronous communication by default Plum Development Diaries, Episode 04: Choosing the Javascript Framework

There’s a particularly bad side of working with talented and smart people: good ideas and potential scenarios overflow every single day.

While producing our Project Plum, I was baffled by the amount of ideas that came from all team members. All eager to take ownership of the product, to draw possibilities of usage and how can we offer solutions for that.

Eventually, it got to a point where we began to be saturated by ideas and needed to ask one single, important question:

What value are we delivering to our customers?

It was the best exercise we could’ve done.

It allowed us to see the project with different eyes. To be able to reach back to our initial, core concepts, and what were we trying to accomplish before we got enveloped in a tight, busy schedule of pouring out improvements and feature after feature.

It was time to bring a nice, sharp pair of scissors and start cutting.

So, what value are we delivering to our customers?

Helping Remote Workers to Get Things Done

That’s it. Simple as that.

Simple, but there is a degree of complexity behind that statement.

If you look around, pretty much most companies in this business are trying to build products that help workers get things done, faster. But after months of intense testing of our competition – if only to, initially, find a product that I wanted to use with my team -, I saw that all of them were asking too much of me.

To learn complex systems, predicting that I would fall into dozens of different scenarios.

To ditch most of my common knowledge towards self-organization, and demand me to learn complex methodologies on project management.

To spend half of my worktime tweaking with hundreds of options, customizing an endless number of screens, and having to, sometimes aggressively, remind my colleagues on a daily basis of unanswered messages or unfinished tasks.

This was wrong.

To address this with Project Plum, we decided to build a simple workflow based around Tasks and Discussions.

The idea is to combine the simplicity and clarity of a minimal UI with a strong, intelligent system automating important pieces of the workflow.

It’s a promise. We will deliver.

That way, we want to offer remote workers a tool that is going to empower them to achieve one of the most important aspects of remote working:

Clear Asynchronous Communication and the Power of Documenting

But, this is a topic for later.

So come back and check again in a few days, sign up to our newsletter and follow us on our social media channels.

There’s a lot to talk about.

The post original written by Geraldo Figueras

Originally from Brazil, living in Tokyo since 2017. Remote worker since 2012. Favorite thing about remote work: My 5 seconds commute from desk to couch when work time is over; being able to crank up the air conditioner as I see fit.