What’s a Skill Hoarder?
Much of life can be summarized as a process of gathering new skills, and there’s certainly an endless list to choose from.
At Skill Hoarder Labs, the term Skill Hoarder is simultaneously a philosophy, a personal identity, and a job description. In short, we love learning how things work, and applying that knowledge to build new things.
Our Process
We believe every successful project can be abstracted into 3 general stages:
Ideation, Iteration, and Integration:
Ideation
In the ideation stage, you’ve just got an idea. And likely you’ve got a lot of ideas. There are worlds of potential. You’ve thought of an amazing solution to a big problem, and there’s so many things to try.
The goal of the ideation stage is to gather and organize all of these potential solutions, and make a plan to get clarity on how to move forward with breathing life into the concept. The plan must be tempered with clear design goals that comprise realistic projections of available resources, technologies, timelines, and knowledge before moving fully into the Iteration stage.
Iteration
In the Iteration stage, the initial goal is to validate and/or disprove any assumptions that were made in the ideation stage. Often we don’t know we’ve made many of these assumptions until a prototype informs us that we have.
Real world data must be gathered by putting prototypes into the hands of real users. This generally results in the discovery of new requirements, benefits, and identification of unnecessary features, and the design goals must be adjusted as necessary.
By planning to iterate through the addition or deletion of dependencies and complexities, we are following a process that gracefully welcomes the unexpected. Simply put, reducing the number of unknown variables per iteration increases clarity of purpose while reducing wasted resources.
Iteration is complete when the prototype embodies all critical forms and functions while remaining in balance with the design goals and technical requirements. This is the foundation of a successful product.
Integration
At this point, a product design has been defined and validated. Now the design must be put into production or deployment by integrating the known requirements with the appropriate manufacturing technologies, software stack, cost requirements, timelines, etcetera.
A product produced in the hundreds will require a very different approach than a product produced in the hundred thousands. Server architecture, tooling investments, training and documentation, procurement, distribution logistics, etcetera, must all be aligned and integrated.
In short, this is how your idea becomes integrated into the world.