How to do a Thing A Week

Thing a Week is a philosophy with the main goal of pushing product knowledge to the next level and solving some real-world challenges along the way.

Here’s how I go about it:

Step 1 - Identifying needs

This is the step where I’m going to actually decide what to build. For this, I’m taking the old, tried and true strategy of “If i need it, somebody else might find it useful as well”.

Step 2 - Raising requirements

Here, I’ll focus on writing down every possible use case for the Thing of the Week, and putting it down as a checklist. Long live checklists!

Step 3 - Choosing the Tech

Mostly, I’ll focus on tried and true tech, with the occasional experimentation that makes everything better.

Step 4 - Prototyping

I’ll use Adobe XD for this since it’s free, easy to use and works on Windows. However, I might need to bring in some Illustrator, Photoshop and After Effects into the mix, just in case I need to build some iconsets, illustrations or animations to make it all come together.

Step 5 - Minimum Viable Product

In this step I’ll get my hands dirty with design, code and finally deploying to production. Y’know, boring-old regular programming stuff.

Step 7 - Minimum Lovable Product

Viable just won’t cut it for us. My thingies will need to be fun and lovable, simply because I think there’s not enough fun in the world.

Step 8 - Promoting

I don’t like building things only I will ever use, so I’ll also promote my weekly thingies on sites such as Product Hunt, Hacker News, Indie Hackers and stuff. Hopefully some of them catch on!

Step 9 - Weekly Review

Everyone deserves a happy ending, and mine will be writing about the things I learned and friends I made along the way.

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Yep, all of these steps would have to be completed in a week. It’s challenging for sure, but what’s the fun in doing things when you know you’ll succeed?