Rethinking product development to fight against the feature factory
Tags: ai, productivity, showdev, startup
Published: 2024-02-18 22:06:31

[https://meetsquad.ai](https://meetsquad.ai)

Over the last decade of building software, we've faced the same recurring challenges. When speaking with peers in the industry, the consensus seems clear: many product development processes feel bloated, leaving teams going through the motions rather than creating with purpose. More often than not, we find ourselves building features to satisfy the whims of the highest-paid person in the room or the loudest voice at the table, neglecting what’s important — focusing on our business and customer needs.

This reality leads to what many of us dread: becoming part of a "feature factory", where we're churning out enhancements and additions without a clear sense of purpose. It's a cycle that breeds frustration, with Gantt charts aplenty but little confidence that we're creating something genuinely needed or wanted. My colleagues and I have always believed there's a better way, favouring approaches focusing on outcomes, and goals, like using the [Opportunity Solution Tree](https://amplitude.com/blog/opportunity-solution-tree) for product discovery.

The past year, however, brought with it a glimmer of hope. We saw Generative AI becoming an accelerating force for a trend towards democratised software development. From advanced no-code solutions to GPT-Engineer Agents, many walls around creating software are coming down.
 
And so, an opportunity appeared. We didn't like the tacked-on AI approach of incumbent PM tools that assumes AI will provide the perfect answer on the first run. Instead, we wanted a tool that allows for manual refining and inline editing of AI suggestions that could keep all previous ideas in context. This way, a user can iterate towards a robust solution step by step instead of trying to get it perfect on the first try. This approach is aligned with how you'd typically approach product discovery as a human. AI is then used to help save time and reduce admin, instead of replace the expert.
 
After speaking with over 100 Product Managers we’re excited to show you the outputs from their feedback by opening V1 of Squad for beta testing. 

## The ELI5 on what Squad does:

1. Creates alignment that empowers bottom-up software development whilst keeping executives in the loop
2. Increases confidence that you're building what people want – data-driven by default
3. Speeds up the time from idea → execution by ideating with you on an experimentation approach
4. Gives PMs time back to focus on strategy (currently, stats show they spend 75% of their time on admin and 25% on strategy)
 
To date, we’ve onboarded a Wealth Tech 100 company with a growing waitlist of >600 users. Our Product Hunt cracked the top 10 on launch and we’re excited to use all this new feedback to make Squad something awesome! We firmly believe that the most successful businesses have a user-centric development philosophy. So naturally, dogfooding the app from day one helped to ensure we didn’t over-engineer and kept feedback at the core of everything we built.
 
## What we learned:

1. Frequent and early feedback is critical when building a tool for others
2. Your technology stack is just an enabler; focus on the problem!
3. Low-code/no-code tools are great for early and quick product validation!
 
All our initial technology choices were aligned with reducing time to user value and finding product market fit. We landed on:

- Vercel for out-of-box CICD and edge-served performance
- NextJS for full stack web app capability and developer efficiency
- Vercel’s AI SDK for model agnostic, turn-key chat functionality (OpenAI day 1)
- AWS for CDK infra-as-code in a common language with the UI (Typescript)
- PropelAuth for SSO, user management, and built-in waitlist
- Pipedream/Zapier for integrating feedback sources such as Typeform
 
Check out [our website](https://meetsquad.ai) and see if Squad’s mission resonates with you – we love feedback!