Product Design with Limited Resources: Why “Clean Code” Isn’t Enough

It took me years of experience and navigating through numerous projects to realize a hard truth: understanding “market needs” is far more critical than the pristine code I used to obsess over.
As a software developer, I always held a certain bias that “clean and principled code” was the whole story. I believed that if a product was technically flawless, had the best architecture, and used the latest stack, its commercial success was guaranteed.

However, time, project failures, and facing market realities taught me a crucial lesson: A product’s survival is tied not to the beauty of my code, but to genuine customer demand.
The end-user doesn’t care how artistically we’ve coded the backend; they just want their problem solved. When we are dealing with limited resources (budget, time, or a small team), insisting on technical perfection at the start can kill the project.

Today, my approach has shifted:
“First, build a solution that works and that customers are willing to pay for; then, optimize it.”

If you want to dive deeper into this concept, I highly recommend reading “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries. Reading this book served as a validation for all the hard-earned lessons I had gathered over the years.

I am Farhad.
If you are developing a product with limited resources and don’t want to waste your budget building something the market doesn’t need, I can help. As a consultant, I’ll work with you to find the golden balance between “technical quality” and “market reality.”