KyXu, a full-time independent developer with four years of experience, has 17 independent development works on shelves. Long-term commitment to help engineers get a second income beyond wages – beat the income of product managers around ten times a hundred times.
If you are an engineer, I want to tell you not to “mythologize” your colleagues in product managers, operations, and marketing departments. From now on, you can make a dozen of ten: through simple learning, product, operation, promotion and other fields, with technology as the core, part-time independent development, to build a real income system of your own.
You need a dozen or ten.
Himself, and technology is pretty good, up to now also didn’t reach the state “full stack engineer”, however, because in the product design, operations, markets, and other aspects and independent development has dabbled in related fields, the self-styled “all dry engineer” – I built 17 App, in addition to the individual product has cooperation with others, Generally, the whole product from development to design, to promotion, copywriting, are completed by me alone.
One of the easy things about being an indie developer is that you don’t have to be a master at everything, you have to be a master at everything. This is in line with the 80/20 law, 80% of common knowledge in any field can be quickly acquired with 20% of the time and energy.
What is the difficulty of programming on Zhihu? – Alexis’ answer, which includes the following passage:
Professional engineers have great advantages to quickly learn the basic knowledge of other fields and become all-round professionals step by step.
Presumably most of the readers of this article have also had technical interview experience, most of which is the process of “interview building aircraft carrier, actual combat turning screws”. The same is true of your colleagues who are interviewing for product manager or operations planning positions. There is no lack of a large number of talented people in these positions, but it is also important to know that many fresh graduates from the computer major, just because they can’t program, they went to do such a job.
After entering a big company, they just need to follow the boss’s instructions step by step at the beginning. But some of them will make wrong decisions, and through the technology of engineers, directly communicated to users, which is why we often see a lot of stupid design in the products of big factories.
As engineers, in addition to the “full stack” as a goal, I think at the same time, you should also be guided by income, create belongs to own a small industries, a small product, with a dozen ten, fast acquisition around you and your work colleague have different knowledge, so as to gradually become an independent developers, “dry” all engineers. If you can learn from them, you can learn faster.
You want to know, you have been to programming as a profession, this is a real threshold, it is not beyond your place, your other colleagues to engineer as a starting point, the rapid development of independent developers (even a part-time), the feasibility of the matter is very high, this is you than give you the requirements of product managers, with a real advantage.
One dozen ten, easy (How to be an all-work engineer)
Starting a new field is like putting an elephant in the refrigerator. There are three steps: open the refrigerator door, put the elephant in the refrigerator, and close the refrigerator door.
Open the refrigerator door
The first step is to know what other fields are concerned about and what you can talk about with insiders. Take the product manager I interviewed for wechat Pay as an example (I passed the interview, but did not join the company) :
As the interview department is wechat Pay, which belongs to tenpay under Tencent, it mainly connects merchants to access wechat pay. Through various searches on the Internet, I learned that they encountered the following problems in their work:
- Big retailers like Carrefour and Walmart want to build their own CRM and are not willing to hand over their data to wechat Pay
- Services like smart scenic spots did not form a real impact on OTA, for example, they did not help scenic spots solve the problem of gate scanning
- Smart scenic areas and other businesses cannot cover the giant scenic area industry such as Disneyland
Find the problem, sometimes the product class article is to express convenience, sometimes is to install X, there are often OTA, CRM, toB, toC, CPM, GMV, PMF and a series of terms, just like programmers know MVC, MVP, MVVM…
It’s not hard at all, but you don’t know a word, so you probably haven’t looked at these questions properly, so the next step is:
Put the elephant in the fridge
Figure out all the questions you want to know, look up all the words you don’t know, and you’re ready to start researching the field.
These words are conceptual, and you can learn them by simply introducing concepts and giving examples. The design patterns-related vocabulary we mentioned earlier is something that can only be mastered through code practice, which is the “threshold” problem I mentioned earlier.
And as you try to build your own small product, think about these questions: is your product toB or toC, what is the monetization model, is it a niche or a mass market application, what pain points are addressed…
In this way, you can have an internalized knowledge base and know where to look for problems in the relevant field, even if you have no idea, rather than being confused. Let’s say you have an App that has a lot of installs, but very little activity. Instead of looking at “How to delete your App”, you’re looking at “How to improve retention”, and you’re looking at “next day retention”, “7 day retention”, “30 day retention”…
Close the refrigerator door
In the end, we should put our knowledge into practice.
After analyzing what kind of product to make, or how to improve the existing product, you are ready to become an all-in-one engineer.
3 days introduction Photoshop, Sketch: Make an App design by yourself learn simple skills of ASO: write a list of App keywords by yourself learn simple data analysis model: make data burying points and analyze user behavior by yourself
Let’s do it (be a real do-it-all engineer)
In order to have a second income in addition to your paycheck, an after-sleep income (not just money for your time invested, but income while you sleep), you might want to try going all-in on the long road to full stack.
Try to create my first product, try to communicate with product managers and operation planners in their professional language, try to effectively deal with user feedback, try to do a simple design, even if it is just to draw an icon for my future products.
About the author
KyXu, with years of independent development experience, has long been committed to helping the majority of mobile developers to realize, own their own products and become independent developers.
Public id: KyXuIndie
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