| Making time for professional development can be tough - especially when it comes to the “soft skills” often needed to progress in your career like: Giving and receiving feedback
Addressing problems in your team, or even
the simple art of how to say no when you’re overloaded with requests Courses or training programs in this area tend to be super generic as well, so our small startup team set out to create a personalized, micro-learning app to help people learn something new + relevant in just a couple minutes each day. We called it an AI leadership coach. We launched it in 2020 and things were going great, until we started running into some major issues: We had built at a furious pace just to get the app out in the world and see if people wanted it at all, but we piled up tech debt in order to move fast
Because we had decided to prioritize new features over quality, we started getting a TON of bug reports and complaints about loading times. We knew we were making a tradeoff, but the impact on user experience escalated faster than we initially expected.
Every time we fixed one bug, we introduced new ones, so fixing what seemed like a simple issue would end up being a major rabbit hole We realized at some point that we weren’t realistically going to be able to develop on top of what we had built (at least not as quickly as we wanted), and made a tough decision to re-write the app entirely, even though we knew that this is the kind of project many teams have started but few actually finish. While we managed to pull it off, it took longer than we initially hoped. In total, it took over 6 months (though we were also maintaining the “old” app). We ended up moving away from SwiftUI and Combine to instead go with UIKit and RxSwift. We also decided to build a backend API and moved away from using Firestore directly as well. I don’t think I would advise others to go down this path, but I’m happy to say we shipped the new app, and so far: our speed of development has increased massively - we’re now shipping ~once a week or so and able to work on meaningful features. Crashes and bug reports are way down, as are loading times. Curious to hear what HN thinks of the new app, and any questions about the process! |