Think, Ideate, Innovate, Develop and Execute: My team's journey to build a social media marketing app.

Every great project begins from just mere thought before it is transformed into an idea, and then metamorphoses into innovation, then through continuous development, it becomes an executed project. this approach can simply be coined as TIIDE meaning Think, Ideate, Innovate, Develop, and Execute. Each of these steps can be daunting when working on a project without a team. One can get it right from the thought process to the ideation stage, making an idea into an executable innovation is almost impossible without a cross contribution of ideas, insight, skill, and expertise. This is why I want to introduce you to the latest project my team is building.

I belong to a group of young developers who are passionate about providing domesticated solutions to challenges facing us as African instead of adopting imported solutions that may not address our problems to the root. My team set out on a project to build a social media marketing app named SETTERAPP. This app would allow small and medium enterprises to seamlessly manage their social media account to drive organic traffic across all their social media accounts and optimize sales through targeted and customized content just from a single platform. The team comprises frontend and backend software engineers, product designers, and business and marketing experts.

My team begins the development of the project by creating a Functional Requirement Document (FRD) which explains the step-by-step functionality that would be provided in the project and also explained the expected timeframe to complete the project. This process is what we consider the ideation stage of the project. My team proceeded with studying the existing similar products, as well as taking surveys from the potential user in order to understand the pain point of the users. The result of this was used to design the product’s problem statement, value proposition, and user journey, the UI design of the project was made using the Figma app, which gives the frontend software engineers in the team insight into what the product should look like. I learn a great deal about the Figma app during this stage, I was able to do basic editing and modification of designs.

The team proceeded to design the pages of the project using HTM and CSS, then being to add functionalities to it using Vanilla Javascript. This process taught me to be patient, and open-minded and to seek help when I reach a roadblock in coding. I learned how to use GitHub version control well enough again in this process because, this is what we use to push, pull and merge the individual part of the project each developer is working on into a single repository. I also learn some javascript concepts such as localStorage, Regex, and Windows.Location.href syntax among several others which I wasn’t familiar with before the project.

So far in this project, we have implemented, javascript functionality, too a few pages like the landing page, signup page, login page, and analytics page. Since the project is a work in progress through continuous integration of lessons learned in the fellowship, the team is still working on adding more pages as well as deploying javascript functionality to the additional pages, just to achieve a minimum viable product after which the functionalities would be redeployed using ReactJS. I believe that at the end of this project I would have solidified my knowledge of javascript as well as ReactJS.

Oh! You read to this point, you are my MVP. kindly consider reacting to this article, leaving a comment, and helping share to reach a wider audience.