As a lead software developer at Position Logic, a leading B2B location-based services provider, it was business as usual for Andres Hernandez doing test driven development, implementing a bunch of classes, and fixing bugs. Looking to improve his own skills and his development team’s, he started following blogs and magazines that covered design and startup trends. One day he received an email newsletter from Amazon’s best selling “Design for Hackers” author, David Kadavy. While reading the newsletter, Andres caught a glimpse of our Ship It course in which Kadavy is one of the design instructors.
After taking a look at the syllabus and it’s emphasis on technical team management Andres decided to enroll. Besides the lecture on technical team management, Andres has started to see much more value in customer development, discovery, and in particular usability lectures. Going through the in-class assignments during the usability lecture he started approaching some of his clients asking more questions on how they used stuff and why they would use it.
Andres shares that before the course he wasn’t able to articulate the value of the features that his company was developing for their clients. Thanks to the course, Andres is able to put the pieces together. It has allowed him to see more depth in the various parts of the product development process, which has in return saved him and his team time!
Andres has applied the exercises from the course to his development processes at work. His team feels good about the exercises, and see the payoff within the company. For example they have switched to creating wireframes and use them to make faster decisions, ultimately saving them valuable development time.
“The first concept that I applied right way was validate your hypothesis at each step. By using this concept with my team, not only did we save time on development, we also reduced our frustration because we were building only what we already had proof would work.” – Andres Hernandez
As Andres continues learning and receiving mentorship from our instructors, he is excited over the results, and the impact it has had at work; improving productivity and efficiency. He is also excited about the other courses that Femgineer provides such as Web Product Development and Mobile Product Development.
As new hires come onboard, Andres plans to share the knowledge and skills he has learned from the Ship It course with them, to continue to improve the development process and increase his team’s productivity!
If you’re like Andres and want to improve the software development process learn more about the course here. Applications are due this Friday February 12, 2016!
