Product thinking
You may have an idea for making a product. You may build a version of it. But unless you have a chance to continuously work on it, it dies on the way. To make your product live you need people paying for it. That is when you get the time to move from that initial idea to a more concrete usable product. Google when it started threw some better links at you. Not like the way it can answer questions as it is today. It has taken two decades to reach that point. This happens with scale. You need a large number of interested users to reach this point where the demand on your application is continuously increasing to make the original idea better.
Many applications are bad because there are not many users who are interested in them. This is an issue of over supply. Few applications have a great demand while an enormous number is not even looked at. Yet there are humongous needs to automate things. We have enough tools invented to do the job in terms of programming languages, frameworks or machine learning. What is missing is the will to automate something and the right way to think to fix that.
Why we keep hitting nails everywhere is because we don’t know the exact spot to hit. That’s why we have a million Apps unused. It is a hard problem to define and understand a problem to the point it can serve the needs of the users. You can start somewhere and iterate with the intended users. But then it turns into a problem of recruiting the users who will take the journey with you. And still you can go wrong.
You can build products when someone comes up with a problem statement or you find one and build it. The former almost always ends up as a point solution due to lack of product thinking. When your friend comes to you the great programmer to write a program to track his inventory, you develop one that will be adequate for his needs after several iterations. But unless you begin to think how that will be applicable to others beyond your friend, it dies as a custom solution. Most custom solutions have a great case for becoming a product.
Making a product involves imagination. An ability to think beyond what is told to you about a problem. It involves connecting disparate points. Let us say, you want to improve something, say, the traffic condition. It is a very broad problem statement. You cannot find a solution to it because you never defined the problem in a way you can work on a solution yet. So you go on thinking about it in various ways. May be the roads have to be laid properly. May be there should be fast and slow moving lanes. But then you realize all of this are not in your control as a person who sling code for a living.
You go on thinking until you find a way say to simulate everything on a map. Every user can tell their source and destination before they leave their home on a map similar to the way they will book an Uber. Now this program models the conflicts and tells them the route to take for most fastest route and alerts them to start and continues to dynamically navigate them. Now thinking like this moves you towards making products. Something out of the box, yet doable. Something that eliminates a lot of vagueness on the problem being solved with a nifty answer.
But just finding a better answer does not move the needle by itself. A lot of spade work is in order to get the users to use it. It is a continuous journey like you are trekking through the mountains. When you reach the top of one, you find another peak to scale. There is no magic. There is no silver bullet. It is just a very long walk and you have no other choice than walking.
We have problems galore to be solved in this country. From weather predictions for our farmers to routing goods or teaching kids or helping elders. If college education can gear our students to open their eyes and look at this, the opportunities are enormous.
While we occasionally get to see some student building a Robot that cooks food or drones that pluck fruits or a 3D printer that prints low cost housing, unless there is a concerted effort to make them really solve the problem at scale what it was intended to solve, all of them die as prototypes with nice videos shared on social media with the students involved getting accolades and marching on further in their lives with pride that does not generate jobs or cycle back funds to grow the economy in a sustained manner. In other words it does not generate any tangible benefits for this country other than photo ops.
Students have to go further in thinking of scale. The ability to get their work beyond the lab into the hands of real users. For that real problems around us have to be explored, imagined, redacted and solved. All that Science and Engineering gives you are the tools to imagine, think on well defined surfaces. If you cannot employ those adequately to identify real problems that can be solved, our Education is not hitting the right notes.