You’ve found a customer segment who really needs your product, developed a minimum viable version of your product and have launched to your market. Your customers are purchasing your product with roars of cheer and glee. What you do next is what you’ll be doing for the foreseeable future of your business; maintaining your product. While extremely important, maintenance of a single product can sometimes become repetitive. It can be great to switch gears from time to time.
Today, I’ll run through a few ideas on how to avoid the repetition as much as possible.
Dedicate specific time for specific tasks
When scaling your product, there are often repetitive tasks, or routine tasks on your list on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis. Examples of these are listening to your customers (daily), managing your current development sprint (weekly), managing your feature roadmap (monthly) and managing your financials (quarterly/yearly). Dedicating specific amounts of time to these tasks enables key focus on that specific task, with the knowledge that you can soon switch gears and move on to another task.
Be accountable to someone else
While this may seem odd, being accountable to someone else helps you to recap the tasks you’ve done and where your focus has been for a defined period of time (say, weekly). This can also be done passively via updates to your team.
Dedicate time to learning
Spending a bit of time each week on learning (work or non-work related) can help to get your brain jogging in a different direction. Whether a course of Code School, Treehouse or on YouTube, there are many great online resources for learning just about anything you desire. I quite enjoy Skillshare, Treehouse and Code School.
Know where you enjoy spending your time
If you don’t enjoy creating financial statements, spend only as much time there as you need to (or outsource the task, if you prefer). Spend your time on the tasks which help you to feel fulfilled, rather than the items which simply sit on your todo list, waiting to be done. Spending your time in this way ensures fulfilment, while also encouraging more time spent on the tasks you enjoy, which are also coincidentally tasks which can help to grow your business.
The main thought I’d like to share today is to be aware and to question yourself. Know what you enjoy and spend some time prioritising all of your tasks with this in mind. This ensures the tasks get done, while you also get to enjoy the time you spend doing the tasks.
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