“Imagination is more important than knowledge” — Albert Einstein
It is 2004. We are a team of three doing our Final Year Software Engineering Project. We develop a simple ‘Hostel Management System’.
A Software Product with a typical Client Server Architecture.
A Thick Client acts as a front end that takes inputs from users and stores it in a Flat File Database.
The Product was built (not designed ;-) in 2004) for generating invoices to hostel inmates at the end of every month, as one of its use cases.
Exams finished, we received our Software Engineering Degrees. Off we went on to launch our careers in the IT Industry.
This project of ours was resigned to a CD which we never accessed again.
Cut to the present.
What if we had asked these questions to ourselves in the year 2004?
- How will a Software Product measure Performance of the application down to the code level?
- What skills would people need to build applications of the future?
- What will it take to make the Product secure and avoid possible security vulnerabilities?
- How will the Software Product simulate user behavior?
- How will we measure what a user does on my Product? What features do they use often? How will we measure it?
- How will the Products logs look like? How will we analyze millions of lines of text in logs efficiently?
- Will people still want to run their software applications out of their own PCs?
And look what happened! Turns out, not asking these questions resulted in somebody else starting companies that cumulatively had hundreds of millions of customers and billions of Dollars in Revenue and most importantly generated employment and buying power to families!
Let’s revisit some of the questions again.
- How will a Software Product measure Performance of the application down to the code level? — Application Performance Management (a $4B Market with companies like CA (now Broadcom), AppDynamics and so many others)
- Will people still want to run their software applications out of their own PCs? — Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure (We know how their revenues look like!)
- How will the Products logs look like? How will we analyze millions of lines of text in logs efficiently? — Log Analytics (Companies like Splunk, SumoLogic, The open source ELK Stack and so on…)
- How will we measure what a user does on my Product? What features do they use often? How will we measure it? — User Analytics (Google Analytics, Heap Analytics, and so many others!)
Agreed in 2004 there was no mobile computing, cloud computing, fast broadband services, but hey, if we suspend disbelief for a moment we know that somebody must have imagined those at first and must have come across as totally insane isn’t it?
- For more examples, look at the diagram below!
Lets leave the past behind. Instead choose to do these TODAY, NOW!
- Ask ourselves: What’s not yet discovered for customers, in the technology space like Blockchain, AI & Machine Learning, Cloud Computing, Mobile?
- Imagine better!
- Ask better questions!
- Lastly, how you look at things is important as well. So whenever you look at a Product or better still at your own life, ask yourself ‘How am I looking at this?’ ‘Why am I looking at it this way?’.
For Example: You are looking at a car. Ask yourself, ‘How am I looking at this?
Maybe the car that you are looking at is a Computer on Wheels. Maybe its an unoccupied Hotel Room. Maybe its merely a Container that gets you from place A to place B. Would this new perspective on this product help in sparking new business ideas? Maybe…maybe…just need to suspend disbelief!
Hope this inspires you to create genuine value and the next Unicorn Startup!
To spark Innovation, my top three articles on Innovation
Unlocking the Customer Value Chain
https://medium.com/@feelinspired/unlocking-the-customer-value-chain-thales-s-teixeira-97c8b0e0ca81
Who do you want your customers to become?
https://medium.com/producthood/who-do-you-want-your-customers-to-become-michael-schrage-5a0f634ae2ee
The ‘What if’ dictionary
https://medium.com/@feelinspired/the-what-if-dictionary-e879841f557b
