by Joel Limardo
Sun, 12 Jul 2026
Development Methodology
For development projects my primary goal is twofold: a) figure out whether something is worth actually building into a complete product and b) identify what functionality will be most impactful to the user base.
From Concept to Tangible
I use various tools on my website but I start with the diagramming and analysis techniques chronicled in Web Business Engineering by Nick Flor. I was taught to just dive into writing code or to use engineering-specific digramming techniques (UML, etc.) but over the years I realized that lots of functionality is driven by a) who asks for it the loudest or b) (semi) educated guesses. WBE solves those problems. You draw a directed graph where the edges have container:content annotations; assign costs to the interactions, then refactor and compare the financial results. Done correctly you can identify big wins that you can translate directly into white papers post initial deployments.
There may be some time and several iterations between raw concept and what I refer to as 'model readiness.' These will result in aforementioned diagramming but also some scratches of the UI built in various tools. Depending on how much feedback I am getting from prospective users I may (or may not) be able to publish all of this intermediate work. Do not be surprised if a diagram or two changes drastically.
From Tangible to Market Fit
There's an old saying that no plan survives the first minute of battle so there is a temptation is to pivot the MVP depending on who shows interest. However, after watching some interesting videos from Harvard Business I learned about a new term -- a minimum viable (market) segment (MVS). The idea behind an MVS is to avoid changing the product at all -- even to resist changing it and look for customers that have the same or nearly identical problem instead.
Market Timing versus R&D
This weblog is more about research and development than 'external market psychology' and 'entry windows' that one would expect to find in most discussions about product development. The focus here is on capability building and long-term innovation. Some projects take months, sometimes years, to get the 'green light' which is 2-3x cost/benefit ratio which covers all of the adoption costs (training, migrating data, etc.).