Fishtail Product Lab

Here's my quick story about how I understood what proposal documents really are! 📋💁🏼♀️ Recently, I had a promising lead from Munich’s business ecosystem. They could have gone to any IT service provider for a quote. Why me? I knew that they were price-sensitive, so I knew I needed to prove to them my value of "premium product management" - in a way that big fancy agencies, dev-only offshore providers, and UpWork freelancers wouldn’t - but how? This is what I did - before any commitment from my lead: 🔖I asked tons of questions—hoping to not annoy the customer, but knowing they would see the value in the end. 🔖I mapped out my insights by outlining user personas, user flows, technical requirements, assumptions, limitations, open questions, and concerns (before actually stating budget & timeline). 🔖Turned everything into a detailed, structured offer document - so comprehensively and precisely describing their app idea that they could theoretically take the document straight to another developer to request a counteroffer! Was it a risk? Nope! This written offer was my first tangible opportunity to demonstrate how I think and work - and to build trust. Even before signing any deal, I helped the customer understand their own idea and guide them on their way through early-stage product development. And that was my game-changer in competing against cheaper or bigger players. So, flipping the perspective: That's how I understood that written offers are the customers' early warning system against bad deals! If you get a proposal so good that it is already a valuable product document for your new product endeavors, stay with that development partner‼️☝🏻 PS: I put together a short PDF guide (German) with more insider tips on how to identify the right app development partner - genuine and definitely not written by ChatGPT 🫠 Link below.

I stopped trying to learn things from books 🙂↔️ But: When it comes to my favorite topic as a product person - user research & discovery - there are some pitfalls & best practices that I picked up from books years ago that I still remind myself of today: El numero 1️⃣ Pitfall: You stop thinking about problems as soon as you start building solutions. Better: Work on understanding problem & solution in parallel - bit by bit. (I believe that any solution - a mockup or even a real feature - is hardly more than an attempt to learn more about the problem.) Numero 2️⃣ Pitfall: You see user research as a once-in-a-while burden. Better: Build a habit of talking to users frequently and regularly. (Like avoiding the dentist for months, then booking an emergency appointment when you're in pain and now it's root canal time.) Numero 3️⃣ Pitfall: You head straight into „asking them some questions“. Better: Prepare, conduct, document, analyze your experiments wisely (There‘s a difference between understanding your users vs. believing everything they tell you.) Numero 4️⃣ Pitfall: You exclude "non-product" people from user research activities. Better: Get engineers involved in talking to users. And in service businesses - bring in your customers. (I, for one, am not a good idea machine, but I know how to filter and nurture the right ideas from everyone else.) So, I guess the bad news is: User research is harder than it seems...Good news: With some real practice, anyone can get good at it! 🙂↕️😎

Was haben schriftliche Angebote und Product Discovery Phasen gemeinsam? Beides sind Wundermittel, um einen App-Entwickler noch vor einem großen Vertragsabschluss zu testen. Das ist wichtig, denn: Viele kleine App-Unternehmer scheitern nicht an der Idee, sondern am falschen Entwicklungspartner 😱 Ich hab einen kleinen PDF-Leitfaden erstellt, der kleine App-Unternehmer vor teuren Fehlern bewahren kann – mit echten Insider-Tipps, garantiert nicht von ChatGPT 😜 Im PDF findest du… ❌3 Arten von Anbietern, die du meiden solltest ✅5 Top-Merkmale, die einen Top-Entwicklungspartner auszeichnen 🔍 Insider-Tipps, um den Entwickler noch vor dem Vertrag zu testen. 👇Link im Kommentar #AppEntwicklung #TechTips #StartupLife #Entrepreneur #NoMoreFailures 💻

My BIGGEST sales promise in app development? Your app will always have bugs! 😆 App development is not glamorous (not even with AI 🫠) It’s messy, unpredictable, and full of surprises. If you’ve ever built a real digital product, you know… 😅 I tell my clients these 5 (painful) truths upfront — because they separate a fun, nerdy idea from a successful product: 1️⃣ As long as your app exists, there will be bugs. 🪲 No matter how good the development is, bugs are part of the game. And before you can even fix a bug, you need to understand the exact cause – which can often drive you crazy. Even the biggest tech companies release updates to fix bugs. 2️⃣ Timelines and estimates are always subject to change. Underestimated technical complexity, changing requirements, misunderstood features, or sick team members – no matter how well you plan, unexpected challenges are part of the process. ⏳That’s why it’s crucial to factor in buffer times. 3️⃣ Many efforts are invisible to app users. Technical tasks like code refactoring or backend optimizations often stay hidden from your users. But these purely technical tasks take just as much time and money as shiny new features. 🔧 Without a solid foundation, even the most stylish app won't last long. 4️⃣ Progress must come before perfection. If you spend too long polishing the perfect first version, your app will never go live. The truly amazing feature ideas will come over time, once users provide critical feedback. Some things in your app won’t be insta-worthy right from the start. 📸 5️⃣ Your involvement is essential. We need you (our customer) as an active part of the team. Just like we’re available for you, you need to be available for us. Without your feedback and decisions, your vision can’t come to life. 🙅🏻♀️ #AppDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering #TechTruths #ProductManagement #StartupLife

I said no to more revenue — and built a better product instead! We’ve been building and expanding a fitness & nutrition app from scratch 🥑 📲 A recent challenge: Integrating a 3rd party ingredient database API to reduce manual effort for admins and expand ingredient variety for users—sounds simple enough, I thought. Before jumping in, I focused on feasibility first (before even thinking about viability). The must-haves: ✅ Re-enabling existing core features ✅ Integrated barcode scanning ✅ German ingredient search & supermarket products (To be honest, at first I assumed this wouldn’t be an issue — my big mistake 😆 ) What I found though... 🚫 Commercial ingredient API providers (Edamam, Spoonacular, Nutritionix): No German coverage. 🧐 Open Food Facts (open source and the only one with German data): Unreliable, noisy AF, and focused on branded foods—meaning the admin (my customer) would still need to do lots of manual QA and curation. 💡 YAZIO (THE market leading food tracking app): Instead of relying on external providers, they built their own manually curated database for high quality and accuracy. Turns out, this is a major competitive advantage in the German market. So what I told my customer... 💡 A high-quality ingredient database isn’t just a backend task—it’s a marketable asset and a real competitive differentiator. ❌ DO NOT integrate the open-source database —it would reduce product quality and still require manual work. ✅ Instead, double down on manual curation (what the customer was already doing). What's the outcome of that? ➡️ Less revenue for me, but a better product, happier users, and a stronger business for my customer. For me, that’s product management in a service business - to build something that lasts I need to turn down the quick wins sometimes 💸

“What is the one thing that every great app needs?” 🤔 Last week someone interested in app development asked me this question. I loved the question because it took me by surprise. I didn’t love my answer though 🫣 My answer was stuck in thinking about products on a superficial level of UX and features. Intuitively, a great app starts below that surface. So I kept on reflecting about that question after the call. So, what *is* the one thing that every great app needs? It needs someone who thinks beyond contractual scopes, budgets, and deadlines. Someone with overflowing empathy, structure, communication. One who will say NO to useless and YES to genius and and will convince the undecided of both (and change minds of the decided, too). Someone who will confront with facts and connect through stories. One who knows when to speak up immediately and when to think it over for a bit. Someone who knows when take a risk and when to be safe. One who digs deeper and thinks further. One who breaks things apart and puts it back together into cohesion. Many folks call that a product manager. I simply call it what I’ve been doing at my business and how I intend to make more customers and users happy 🫶 It’s what will set us apart from tech services in a similar niche that, as I learned, often don’t even offer product management beyond pure development services - that approach might be right for some who see their app as a nerdy hobby. It’s not right for businesses that see their app as a growth engine. #productmanagement #appdevelopment #mobileapps #ux #productstrategy #tech #startups #business

Remember grinding through backpropagation and recurrent neural networks? I do. I spent all of 2017-2020 understanding deep neural networks, fighting with overfitting, and optimizing hyperparameters for my MSc in Computational Linguistics (NLP/LLMs), including research at BMW. And now, every other day, I find myself feeling like a grandma not knowing what an email is when a friend tells me about the latest mind-blowing image generation model that got released like “yesterday”. It's humbling (and slightly frustrating)—spending years learning the details, only to see that the game has totally changed and I am struggling to catch up. Running an app development business and reading all those LinkedIn posts in the past week about how AI might or might not replace developers, my feeling of needing to catch up turned into a realization though: the rise of GenAI is a validation of my core philosophy in how I make apps (and definitely not a threat). Because, as everyone has been saying, with development becoming more accessible (cheaper), strong product management becomes even more indispensable. And this has always been the foundation of Fishtail Product Lab: bringing apps to launch with budget-friendly, high-quality development driven by strong product management (which I personally oversee). Also that's precisely why our name isn't Fishtail Technologies, but Fishtail Product Lab. GenAI simply amplifies our ability to deliver on that promise. So, to me, it feels like the perfect time to be building apps—and building them right. Fishtail Product Lab #GenAI #AppDevelopment #ProductManagement #NLP #LLMs #AI #Tech #Business #Innovation #FishtailProductLab

Watch out, politically incorrect opinion piece coming along 😝 I recently reposted someone’s take on offshoring teams. Now I went back to reading some of the comments there: “But what about ethics?”, “What about quality?”, yada yada. To me, this reflects a familiar pattern - a tendency to view anything outside the West as inferior or ethically questionable, even paying great money for great work to people outside of the West is judged as ethically wrong 😑 And yes - it is great work. When I first started my business based on a collab with an Asian team, I was insecure myself because of everyone’s warnings - my insecurity stopped when I briefly stepped back into employment and saw how onshore teams struggle. The most frustrating experiences I’d had in my offshore team were still more satisfying than the best experiences I could imagine with any onshore team. True, there are huge challenges when it comes to communication, structure, processes - and it is “the Westerners’” responsibility (who might be the product managers or project managers) to solve if they don’t like the way things are done by the locals. I find that offshore teams bring an exceptional deal of flexibility and openness, they’re not stuck in “that’s how we’ve always done things” inertia. Use that to your advantage. Be clear, be direct (don’t think Asians cannot handle directness 🤭), expect to see that many people on the team would probably be our boss if they had been born in another country 😅 - and mostly be open for compromise and have trust that things will work out in the end - like with any business partner, colleague, or friend. There will be an awesome collab resulting from the mix of your drive for sticking to deadlines & data protection regulations and your offshore team’s unstoppable hunger for more. If your offshore collab sucks, first take a hard look at yourself. It might be because you yourself need to do much better 🫠 (Or maybe I just got lucky with the particular offshore team I work with. Haha.) #OffshoreCollaboration #GlobalTeams #CrossCulturalCollaboration #RemoteWork #Teamwork

Thinking about launching your own app in 2025? 📱 I've been working in app development for 3 years now – I launched my own investor-backed product startup and now I help my customers, like other startups and small companies, bring their app ideas to life. So, I've learned a few things about what works (and what doesn't). One of the most important things is choosing the right development partner. If you cannot decide on the right app development team, ask yourself these three questions: ❓Are they offering actual custom development or just dressing up a template? I've seen agencies – some of them crazy expensive – that basically just recycle the same old code. You end up paying a fortune for something that's not really built for your business. ❓Do they truly care to understand your business and your users? I've seen discount providers from overseas try to convince me of their services without understanding the local nuances. While my team at Fishtail Product Lab works internationally as well, we offer local clients a local product lead (for our German clients, that’s me, hello! 👋). ❓Do they have experience and references that are really relevant to you? It’s experience and references from customers just like you. I’ve heard stories (and unfortunately seen some cases myself) of freelancers disappearing mid-project, or not having the right experience to handle the complexities of a production app. You want your app to be a long-term commitment, not just a one-time coding project. You need a partner who sees it the same way. (Edit: Now that I read it, this last line kinda sounds like dating advice 😁) #appdevelopment #entrepreneurship #tech #germany

😰 Hiring tech talent in the US and Europe has become a nightmare. Those $175,432 Silicon Valley salaries (Glassdoor US, 2024) are enough to make any startup founder or CEO lose sleep. 🕒 Costs are skyrocketing, and the time it takes to fill positions drags on for months. But here’s the kicker: savvy companies are discovering that Southeast Asia is home to a goldmine of tech talent, offering the same quality of work for a fraction of the cost. ✨ Here's what smart companies discovered in 2024: 💡 Indonesian and Vietnamese developers are delivering the same quality work at one-third the cost. We're not talking about cutting corners; we're talking about graduates from top engineering schools who’ve probably built apps you use daily. Take a look at what you actually pay: - Indonesian senior developers: $54,000-72,000/year (Deel Report) - Vietnamese senior developers: $48,000-65,000/year (Michael Page) 🤔 "But what about quality?" you’re probably wondering. Well, Google didn’t set up a tech hub in Vietnam and hire 60 engineers there in 2023 just for fun. Their projects actually moved 35% faster (Google APAC Report). The talent pool is deeper than you might think: 🇮🇩 73% of Indonesian tech workers excel in English tests (ETS Report). 🇻🇳 85% of Vietnamese graduates come from STEM programs (Ministry of Education Vietnam). Both countries are churning out mobile apps and AI projects like there’s no tomorrow. And here’s a pleasant surprise: while your US office is sleeping, your Southeast Asian team is working. 🌏 You get 3-4 hours of overlap for meetings, and the rest is just bonus productivity. The internet? It’s probably faster than your home office. Ho Chi Minh City clocks in at 102.4 Mbps, and Jakarta isn’t far behind at 98.2 Mbps (Ookla, 2024). Best part? While your competitors spend three months trying to hire one developer in the US (DHI Indicators), you could build an entire team in Indonesia or Vietnam in less than a month. The secret’s getting out. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google aren’t just hiring there. They’re building entire development centers. And while they have endless budgets, they still choose Southeast Asia. Makes you think, doesn’t it? 🤔 Your next great hire is probably in Jakarta or Ho Chi Minh City, sipping their own morning coffee, ready to build something amazing at a price that’ll let you keep your coffee budget intact - and help you sleep better at night. 😌 #TechHiring #GlobalTalent #RemoteWork