Technical brainstorming is tempting. Too tempting. Once you have a problem to solve, rushing out to find all the possibilities out there is fun.  It is so fun that it turns into bloated “sprint zeros” and one-year “MVP”s.  Don’t do that.

However:

You have my permission to enjoy technical brainstorming.
My app – tentatively named ShareLighter – has lots of exciting technical possibilities.

The process of bringing the right product to the right people is both art and science. I swear I don’t string together new word groups for intentional buzzwording. I’m learning how to bring an idea to market and sharing it as I go.
Hypothesis-driven backlog prioritization? Audience-first monetization? Analogs and antilogs?
If that’s too many words that you think are just meaningless buzz, I know how you feel. That’s why relationships are so important. Shared experiences.
Once a platform dedicated to highlighting and sharing the most meaningful words of a book is created, the platforms, SDKs, and APIs out there are thrilling to think about! Goodreads, Twitter, Hashtagify, Instagram, OCR, Amazon? It could meaningfully consume and give back so many great things! It gets me excited to read API documentation.

Seriously. All of it.
So let me just say, if you want to start a company and you have great technical chops, especially if your the one expected to wear the engineering hat, I give you permission to get excited about implementation possibilities.
You need an audience full of people can care about and understand as well as a framework for knowing if you’re solving their pains or scaring them away.
But don’t let that steal the joy of learning what you want to learn, as an individual and as a team. Get that 20% time, go down the occasional rabbit hole, experiment, make hackathons as important as your sprint review.
I’ll talk about the importance of building the right thing, but I know you love building it right. So do I. Go ahead, geek out.