How we built Dojo Learning - part 2

This is part two of a series of posts about how we built Dojo Learning (click here to read part one).

Understand your users

Before you can prioritize which features to build and what ideas to focus on, you need to really know your audience. When you're just starting out, that's the first thing you need to figure out. It took us many months, several iterations of our software, and lots of testing and feedback to fully understand who our users are, who they are not, and what their needs are.

Now we're pretty confident we're building a killer set of features that all provide significant value to our users, because now we get it, or at least we have a much better understanding. And that makes prioritization a lot easier.

How we got to understand our users

We started Dojo in partnership with a company, the Centre for Education and Work, who provide services related to training in the workplace and adult learning. This gave us a good leg up, but we still had to decide: are we building an employee training tool, a higher learning tool, something for online trainers and consultants, or something else?

Initially, we went back and forth quite a bit and had to explore each of these areas. Fortunately, there was one group of users who had similar needs in each of these categories: the learners. A learner needs certain tools no matter what company is using our software, and so right off the bat we could focus on the learner experience and add value there while buying time to figure out who our target group was.

We were also lucky in that we were able to harness our partnership to do testing with learners from all across Canada. That provided amazing feedback, and was our equivalent to the "release early, release often" philosophy at that stage.

But you don't need a partnership with an existing company to get that, you can ask your friends, family, acquaintances and contacts to test it out, you can solicit users online to be beta testers, and you can even approach companies directly and just ask them: Do you want to pilot some new software?

Prioritize by value

Once you get that down, any time you think of adding a feature you can hold it up to this measure and see how it stacks up. If it doesn't add real value for your users, then it's clearly not a keeper. If it only broadens your audience and makes it less clear who your software is intended for, that may actually hurt your marketing too. But even if it doesn't, it still wastes time, and time is your best weapon early on.

I look at writing software like writing a story or a movie: If what you're adding doesn't move the plot forward and isn't central to the story, then you should leave it out. Have the confidence to do so, it's tough sometimes but worth it.

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