Missed Opportunities
Yesterday I posted my second YouTube video 😇
It feels surreal to attempt to realize a daydream I’ve had since I was a kid.
Yet, at the same time, that same surreal experience feels so completely routine.
Creating. Learning. Iterating. Repeat.
To be a beginner at something requires an incredible amount of brain balancing.
I have to balance being driven by the vivid daydreams I have, while enduring the lack of skills that prevent me from achieving those visions.
And even though my outputs at times feel underwhelming, I can’t help but balance that visceral sensation with an equal amount of gratitude that I’m making those outputs exist in the first place.
In the video, I mentioned how, when I was a kid, my mom made me a coupon booklet that I cherished. It was filled with a bunch of handmade customized coupons with benefits for things like movie nights, grounding cancellations, pizza nights, and cuddle sessions.
I remember loving that gift so much. But when I look at it now, I’m confronted by an abundance of unused coupons.
So many people talk about Memento Mori and the objects they keep to remind themselves of the brevity of life. But less discussed are the objects that remind people about the ephemerality of opportunities.
There were many times when I wanted to use my coupons. But I was a cautious kid. I’d think to myself that I should save it for the future when I might want to use it even more.
I fell victim to something called the specialness spiral: when waiting for the perfect moment adds so much pressure to that moment, that we delay it even further.
If we’re not careful, the promise of a future can feel like the fruition of that future.
We are currently living in a time where a lot of people have heard about how AI makes it extremely easy to create a new app. How it’s democratising coding skills and how a lot of people are building really cool things.
And now they want to build a product of their own. But they don’t know what to build and they don’t know how to build it.
And like every other time when we’re tempted to wait for the perfect moment when we have more knowledge or skills or better ideas, more and more people are at risk of delaying the opportunities they have in front of them right now.
One of my goals with my YouTube channel is to help make product design feel more approachable.
Because in my experience, it is.
Beginner’s Mindset
I’m no stranger to impostor syndrome.
Before getting hired for my first tech role as a frontend developer, I was pretty much only equipped with a psychology degree and a portfolio of personal projects I hoped would persuade others that my autodidactic coding education qualified me for a job.
Those projects included apps like an AI grimoire full of magic spells I sourced from Charmed and an algorithm to predict the next most likely contestants to be evicted from the Big Brother UK house. So I owe a lot to my first employer for trusting me with their codebase.
One of the benefits of being a self-taught beginner is that you don’t know what rules you’re breaking when you break them. Which means that you’re not limited by convention.
Ignorance inspires innovation.
The convention I was most ignorant of when I started my first job was just how many hats the first frontend developer at a small startup would wear.
Everything from product ideation, to wireframing and prototyping, to designing, and pitch writing, and user interviews and analytics, not to mention, of course, the actual frontend coding… It wasn’t too long before I switched my title from Frontend Developer to Product Designer and Developer. And from then on, I continued to learn everything I know about product design directly on the job.
But now that I’m starting up a YouTube channel about product, I feel a similar sense of imposter syndrome to my first day in my frontend role with a portfolio full of oddities behind me.
I feel so inspired and motivated when I watch other people’s videos about how they created their own successful products. The portfolio of proof they have to bolster their expertise is a product of their own creation. My on-the-job learnings somehow feel less substantial.
I’m telling myself that it’s natural for a beginner in anything to spotlight their differences. And that it’s those exact differences that add unique value to an ecosystem.
Honestly, I kind of like this feeling of being a beginner. It makes me feel more empathy toward everyone else trying something new and chasing their daydreams.
And considering it’s the people who feel out of their element in the product world who I want to help through my YouTube channel, I have every excuse to appreciate what it feels like to be a beginner again.
How to think like a product designer
In my latest video, I offered some ideas on how to think like a product designer. I proposed that if the future is in fact one where people strive to build products of their own, then it could help to experiment with some of the mindsets and practices that I’ve benefited from during my work as a product designer.
One of the most important shifts being to start thinking about products as sources of value, as opposed to sources of money.
Perhaps I’ve fallen victim to the golden hammer bias, where people tend to rely too much on the tools they’re most familiar with, but I look at almost every friction I fix, or opportunity I chase, or any system I create through the lens of product.
When I had the idea to start a YouTube channel, my biggest pain point was a complete lack of comfort in front of a camera. So I created an experiment to privately film myself talking to a camera for at least 10 minutes a day for 2 weeks.
That system I created to solve my pain = product.
When my partner and I noticed that the grains in the glass jars on our kitchen shelves were being discoloured by the sun, I decided to sew up a couple of noren curtains for the pantry.
Those curtains which we have no intention of selling = product.
The way I see it, the future (and even the present) is full of people replacing products they used to pay for with products they created themselves. No money is exchanging hands. But a lot of value is being created.
To think like a product designer is to notice where value can be created.
And thankfully, our everyday life is filled with those opportunities.
Which is why for anyone who wants to start building their own products, my first suggestion would be to start building products for your own life.
It doesn’t have to be anything impressive. It just has to solve a problem.
So for one week, just keep track of all of the frictions that you experience. Then, at the end of that week, go through your list and label each item based on how impactful to your life it would be to resolve that pain. Pick a mid-high impact friction from your list and create an experiment around it.
To create an experiment, try this same template that I use for all of mine:
Hypothesis: Every experiment should start with an expectation. I use the following format: “If I do x, then I expect y.” It’s a simple way to explicitly state how you expect your solution to solve your pain.
Duration: A good experiment doesn’t last forever. It’s a short-term intervention to see if your solution works. I tend to keep mine within a few weeks at most.
Considerations: Think ahead and consider how it could look if things go right and if things go wrong.
Potential frictions: List predictable barriers that could impede your experiment.
Defining success: Set the tone and daydream about the best-case scenario.
Methodology: Plan out the details.
Procedures: In the form of a step-by-step plan or a checklist, list out the main actions you’ll need to do.
Metrics: Decide on the data you want to collect to prove or disprove your hypothesis.
Data: Track your metrics.
Outcomes and observations: Once your experiment is done, reflect on what you learned. This is the most valuable step. Without it you risk forgetting or exaggerating the impact of your experiment in the future. This is the step that’ll help you figure out whether this experiment would benefit from further iterations.
Hello hello, I hope you’re doing well!
I just want to thank you so much for taking the time to read this one. I appreciate you 🤗
See you soon,
Lamar
Thank you for this post, Lamar! I was thinking this morning about the "going with the flow" approach and how common - and also how sad - it is. The beginner's mindset you propose is quite the opposite. There is nothing more important than crafting one's own environment. If there is one thing that needs to be handmade and custom-made for you, by you, it is your environment. The experiments you describe help us take small steps toward creating a better environment. I know you have developed a holistic system around this idea, and I cannot wait to see you share more details about it.