An app with two users

Last weekend I built an app with two users: me and my husband. It's the third app I've built for myself, and the first one that changed how I think about my actual job.

It's called Diario. It takes everything the school already sends us (the schedule, homework, lunch, what happened today) and puts it in one place we can read on a phone before coffee. It's private, just for the two of us.

I've spent my career on products used by hundreds of thousands of people. Building for an audience you live with is a different job. Every question that normally takes weeks had an answer in the room. Should this be on the first screen? I knew, because I'm the one looking for it at seven in the morning with a child asking whether he needs his swimming kit.

What surprised me was not the speed. It was how much I removed. When you are the user, you feel the cost of everything you add, so you stop adding. Nothing shipped because it was on a list. Nothing survived because someone senior was attached to it.

Most of our craft exists to manage distance from the user. Research, personas, discovery, prioritisation frameworks, quarterly planning: all ways of reconstructing something we can't reach directly. It's real work, and I'll keep doing it. But when the distance went to zero, I could see how much of the apparatus was compensating for distance rather than adding anything.

What matters now is the standard. The gap between generic software and software that fits is becoming visible to ordinary people. Once someone has lived with something built for their situation, they can name what's wrong with everything else, and they stop quietly accepting the average.

Products built on a real, specific, felt need get stronger. Products built on a need averaged across a segment get weaker, and their numbers won't show it for a while.

The question I'm taking back into client work is not how to ship faster. It's how close we can get to the need, and what we would build differently if we could feel it the way the person living with it does.

Somewhere in the week I noticed I wasn't building software. I was solving a small daily problem in my family's life, and the software was the by-product. That's the order most roadmaps have backwards.