Sprint 24 :: Ludus, from zero to hero
Developing an idea from your imagination to a fully fledged functional product is something very few have had the privilege to do. Being so close to achieving this at a very premature stage in my career, I feel compelled to discuss the process behind the utter madness that was this whole endeavor.
Now, if you’re an avid reader of Product Land, you might have already noticed that I’m not the usual article guy. My name is Lucas, and I’m not really a product manager—at least not professionally. Still, I’ve made a few moves in the past as an attempt at working in a product team without much success, and at some point, one of the blog owners noticed this and invited me to participate in the Ludus’ discovery phase as the sole product person. No point in calling yourself the CEO if you’re also the guy taking out the trash. 🙄
For those of you wondering what Ludus is, let me quote our business development and marketing guy, Fred: “A social media app for gamers that also happens to be a game itself.” For the highly sophisticated PMs reading this, I’ll translate the simplistic take to a more lingo-heavy definition: “Ludus is a niche social media platform focused on the gaming content market. It is heavily gamified with the aim of driving engagement and increasing micro-purchase consumption.” Very fancy stuff, eh?
In this article, I’ll discuss the joys, tribulations, and most importantly, what I learned while developing Ludus for the past year. I’ll try to make it as fun and entertaining as possible. After all, there's no reason to turn serious work into boring work 🤪.
Walking the walk before talking the talk
Over the last year, I have noticed an increase in online discussions, particularly on work-related platforms such as LinkedIn, emphasizing the significance of technical skills in product management. Education is often brought up in an elitist gatekeeping tone or ostracized as being utterly useless. In my personal opinion, both takes are completely wrong.
See, understanding what you manage is of the utmost importance. A Product Manager who can’t understand the "what" will be terrible at the product, and the ones who don’t understand the "how" will be terrible at the management.
Understanding the "what" is being able to identify what hole in the market the product aims to fill, what is the product supposed to do, what kind of user is the product aiming to capture. Setting the vision requires knowing the market, that is, your competition, user demographics, current trends and so on. It’s not a technical skill, it cannot be taught, it’s not given by someone at a college lecture hall. It’s gained through time and exceptionally attentive observation, a holistic skill, the ability to see all the pieces come together before the puzzle is completed. For most "whats," you won’t need a college degree.
Understanding the "how" is rarely a matter of perception or long and careful observation. In order to acquire the "how", at some point, you’re gonna have to roll up your sleeves and take a dive in the shit. I’m not by any means suggesting that you should have extensive professional experience in all the roles that you’ll eventually coordinate during a project. However, a surface-level understanding of what is being done will go a long way when it comes to bridging the tech and business side of the job. Having this in your toolkit will facilitate communication with the rest of the team, allow you to easily identify limitations and opportunities for the product and most importantly, understand the product’s competitive landscape, ensuring it stays relevant and competitive in the market.
So, what is my conclusion here? I wish that I could write an article about how an obscure branch of Agile can make you the next tech millionaire, but like all things in life, there's no all-encompassing formula that can predict success. Shit gets weird in a matter of seconds, and all you can do is understand the obstacles and devise a strategy to overcome them. In my humble opinion, the ability to learn and adapt is the strongest trait someone taking on a challenge like this can have.
Product management vs Product design: Compromising between the what and the how
It’s 3am and you can’t sleep thinking about that vector who does not perfectly fit the pixel grid. I’ve been there.
Conciliating cold and practical management and the artistry of crafting a beautiful and usable product is one of the toughest challenges I’ve ever faced. Your team needs the mockups to begin building the interface and you not only don’t have them, your muse is nowhere to be seen. The inner artist refuses to deliver something mediocre, but deep down you know you can’t have your developers on hold until inspiration finds you. If you can relate to this, these tips that I discovered can be of some use.
Simplify design
A product's design should be simple, clean, and intuitive. Avoiding unnecessary or complicated features will prevent confusion for the user and greatly reduce development time. Less is always less, and that is a good thing, don’t be afraid to strip down features to their simplest form, debloat the bloat, pop the balloon.
Seeking new perspectives
To develop products effectively, it's helpful to have a diverse team consisting of designers, engineers, and product managers. Including people from different backgrounds into key decisions brings balance and offers a new perspective. Moreover, involving non-product team members can increase their sense of ownership and engagement with the project, they’ll not only be happy to help, they’ll be super proud of seeing their idea come to life.
Accept imperfection
If you’ve taken your time to visit our land page, you’ll see some pretty badass screenshots of the app, you’ll probably not know that it once looked like an amateur app.
Product development is an iterative effort. Things can be built on things, and not everything will fall together simultaneously as people often think. Be prepared to admit that what you have now might be pretty shit, and learn to recognize the future potential in faulty features. In other words, chisel first, polish later.
I hope these tips helped you
Content creation, formulaic creativity and overcoming blocks.
God, I hope that this chapter doesn’t spawn one of these “art as a product” conversations, but for those of you wondering how this is relevant to the purpose of the article, you’ll be surprised to know that I was not only responsible for managing and designing the product, I’m also the content creation guy.
See, one of the ways we allow our users to express themselves, is with the use of some cosmetic items. For our MVP1, we envisioned a couple of options:
Avatar frames and profile background can be chosen by the user in order to add more flair do their profiles, giving a a final result that looks like this:
From the outset, we planned to develop these cosmetic items entirely in-house. As such, I took on the responsibility of creating a content creation pipeline for these items. If you're interested in this sort of thing, you'll enjoy hearing about my approach to this challenge.
Initially, I had intended to create hand-painted drawings for the items. However, this proved to be too time-consuming. I realized that I needed to devise an alternative approach that would be more efficient.
Fortunately, I had extensive experience with 3D modeling, so I decided to model something for the first test, an arcade machine. Here's the result:
I rendered a greyscale version of the model:
Which I then colored using multiple clip masks, in case you’re wondering, yes, I drew some inspiration from Tron:
Drawing something like this from scratch would have taken an extremely long time, but by relying on an existing skill, I was able to achieve a very satisfactory result in approximately an hour. This method of content creation was later used for a variety of different art needed for the app, so by seeking creative alternatives to the traditional approach, I ended up establishing a new and faster way of creating cosmetic items for MVP1. Prioritizing consistency and content output in this case was the goal, so even though I didn’t get to hand draw all the cosmetic items as initially planned, we still got very cool results in a fraction of the estimated time.
Wrap-up
Ludus' development has been a journey filled with numerous noteworthy moments, and I could have easily written at least ten articles discussing them all. However, I have chosen to highlight the top three main talking points, and I hope you, the reader, have found them meaningful and entertaining.
As we continue to work towards our launch, there is much left to be done. Perhaps I will have the opportunity to write for Product Land again in the future. For now, I hope you have enjoyed this sneak peek into my thought process and approach to development.
Visit Ludus Landing page ☞ ludusgamingapp.com
Lucas Pequito & The Product Land ⛰️
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