Product development with Claude AI, lessons learned
For the past five years I have been an angle investor and Board observer to a startup company. The company has been doing well developing and marketing its B2B services. However, I’ve been advocating for a B2C product, as well. After several conversations with the Board and founders, I offered to take the lead on developing the B2C site as a sort of skunk-works operation, thereby allowing the founders and the company to stay on task while we explored this opportunity. In short, I’ve taken on the role of acting Product Manager for a new product line. This will be the first of my posts on the project.
In order to minimize impact on the company’s day-to-day operations, my plan was to gather specifications and hire outside developers to build an MVP site, launch it, drive traffic to it and see if it proved my thesis right. If you are a follower of my site and show, you’ll know that I have a background of over 25 years of software development experience on large-scale enterprise projects, as well as experience being the COO of several successful B2C companies (and a few not so successful, too). I’ve learned that you need to get something out to market quickly, see if it gets traction, and use the data to determine whether to keep it going or kill the project.
So, I set out to develop specifications that I could hand off to a couple developers to get a quote for building an MVP site. To do so, I created a detailed Visio diagram showing the entire logical process flow (sorry, the attached figure is low-res to maintain confidentiality). Along the way I had to create documents to explain the Visio diagram and produce the ancillary text, define lookup tables, determine what elements we’d build from scratch and decide what services we would offload to 3rd party vendors via APIs (i.e. credit card processing, sales tax processing, persistent storage, analytics, A/B testing, etc.). As I got to the point of seeking bids, I thought to myself, I wonder if an AI tool might be able to build the site for me? I’ve heard good things about Claude, so I thought, let’s give it a try…