Building an MVP teaches you how to create.
Getting your first users teaches you whether you created the right thing.
That's the phase I'm approaching with nanoLabs.
nanoLabs is a Laboratory Information Management System I'm building to help medical laboratories manage their workflows digitally.
The product has reached the point where I'm preparing for its first five laboratory deployments.
And that changes how I think about development.
When you're building alone, it's easy to test according to your own assumptions.
You know where the buttons are.
You know how the workflow is supposed to work.
You know what every feature is supposed to do.
A new user doesn't have that context.
They don't know what you intended.
They only know what they experience.
That's why the next stage of development isn't simply about adding more features.
It's about observing.
What I'm testing
I'm paying particular attention to:
- User roles and permissions
- Laboratory workflows
- Test and result processing
- Patient result updates
- Auditability
- Authentication
- Database response times
- Error handling
- Overall usability
The goal is to find problems before they become problems for a laboratory.
But I'm also preparing myself for something developers don't always talk about enough:
The product will probably change.
Real users will challenge assumptions.
Some features may need to be redesigned.
Some things I thought were important may turn out not to matter.
Other things I completely overlooked may become priorities.
And that's okay.
An MVP isn't supposed to prove that you have built the final product.
It's supposed to help you learn what the final product needs to become.
For me, these first five laboratories aren't just potential customers.
They're going to be part of the product-development process.
Their feedback, frustrations, questions and workflows will tell me what nanoLabs needs to become next.
So I'm not entering this phase expecting everything to be perfect.
I'm entering it expecting to learn.
The code got me here. Real users will show me where to go next.
Top comments (0)