Case studies are nice.
But a working prototype product is 10x better!
Because it shows you have gone through the journey of building a product, however small a scale it is and tried to apply product thinking at every stage.
When you build a prototype product, you are showcasing
✅ how you frame a problem
✅ how you spend time understanding the problem
✅ how you explore the solution space
✅ how you break down the preferred solution into a logical sequential micro roadmap
✅ how you pick a component and translate that in to nanoPRD and execute it
✅ how you go through building and deploying it
✅ how you evaluate success & failure
✅ how you explore iterations.
That's quite literally the product lifecycle
👉 Discovery
👉 Definition
👉 Development
👉 Deployment
👉 Evaluation
I have looked for such differentiating "spikes" where the candidate is going above and beyond than what most people do.
You are wondering, how do you even do this, given you are not a techie!
Well thats where the tides have turned in your favour this era. With generative AI tools like Replit, Loveable.dev, Bolt.new and other such generative ai tools which help in simply using english language to build products, you are only limited by your imagination and effort.
It is the difference between watching youtube videos on how to cook/swim & actually try cooking/swimming.
And when you combine case studies+product prototypes, you stand out 100x more.
Does it mean that people won't then be concerned about my college or prior work.
No it doesn't negate those sadly.
But it does improve your odds a lot more amongst an ocean of vanilla resumes.
So go ahead and start building.
If not anything else, you will learn & learn better.
P.s, in case you are feeling overwhelmed on how to kick start this activity, I am doing a 6 hour buildathon where I will make you build 3 prototypes and in that process learn to use these tools effectively.
You can check out the event here : https://lnkd.in/gXT2X4QM
productmanagement productcraft productsense productthinking productsense
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