One of my own tenets of software engineering is to iterate, iterate, and then iterate some more. By iteration I mean design, build, test, ask for feedback, and repeat if necessary. The feedback part is important. When I’ve strayed from this path of iterating and asking for feedback – something that I’ve done way too many times – I’ve always been bitten. Hard. When I do follow through though, I’ve found that my projects come out more robust and functional. A product that works and does what the end user wants makes everyone happy.
I’m bringing this up because of this article I read about Panjiva, a startup that built a search engine that allows businesses to search for and vet suppliers. Part of their story is how they spent over a year building their search engine only to find out that it didn’t do what their customers wanted. Imagine if you were the VC who just gave them a $5 million infusion. Quote a commenter, “After months of development, it never occurred to either the Harvard guy or the MIT guy to test their code with a real query? An investor had to suggest it? Hello? This is not giving me a warm and fuzzy feeling about the folks graduating from America’s elite universities.”
Luckily for Panjiva, they went back to the drawing boards and cranked out a search engine that worked. Lesson learned: ask for feedback earlier in the development cycle. It’s a painful lesson to learn and one that we sometimes forget about in the heat of development. Just ask Google.