I've rebuilt Walden for the fourth time. We're officially launching V4! When I started building Walden, I was thinking through a decade of engineering experience and common problems that stem from the software development process. Anyone that's worked with me before knows that I'm always talking about process! I always look for the bottlenecks... What slows teams down? What creates rework? What falls through the cracks? I've tried dozens of workflows, experiments, and design sprints. I'm a product-minded engineer and I've always tried to understand my users, stakeholders, and fellow engineers as best as I can to make the most impact. I wanted to build a tool that helped product teams collaborate, ask the right questions and ultimately make the best product possible. At the start of building Walden, I prescribed to Shape Up as the methodology for completing work. I've been testing Walden with users the last few months and I got great feedback. I can say, that trying to sell a product that has a prescribed methodology for completing work was tricky and it didn't feel like it was solving the right problems for modern builders. Not everyone has the flexibility to move their team from Agile to Shape Up and from Jira to Walden. I started to realize I was asking the wrong questions, even though I love the core values that Shape Up stems from. Version 4 of Walden is now complete and I really put the foundation and values of Walden to work! I stopped building and went back to the drawing board. I asked more deliberate questions and got to the problem space that I think product thinkers are really dealing with today. AI is certainly making building software crazy fast. You can prompt once and get full features built in a matter of minutes. The scarce resource isn't build hours anymore, it's judgement. If you rely on AI to make your tickets, manage work, create designs, and build, you may not end up with the best version of your product. UX is usually a mess and the codebase quickly becomes a mess too. It's fast, but that surface is now something that you or your engineers will have to maintain. I know it's hard to slow down in this new AI era, but I think that we have a responsibility to our users to build good software, and build deliberately. You can check out Walden if you're curious about what I landed on; for a tool that helps you build better software and solve the right problems. You can build your pitch, get a second opinion (with our built-in tools or while collaborating in real-time with your team). It helps you consider edge cases, it can have context of your codebase to maintain patterns and decisions you've already made, and lets you know what you might be leaving out. There are also spaces to help you visualize your problem space and ideate on UX. I'd love to get your feedback. You can use Walden for free to build a pitch today. Start your idea book! https://walden.so

Walden

The idea book for product thinkers

The idea book for product thinkers