How do you build a product that scales without buckling?

Boomer's development philosophy: generalise and validate

The challenge in software development

How do you meet every customer request without losing sight of your vision? It is a question every growing software company wrestles with. When you start a product or a company, you have a clear picture of what you want to make. You build from that picture, fast and a lot, all of it from your own experience and judgement. At Boomer our vision came out of years in the events industry. We saw one legacy scheduling tool after another with serious flaws: poor design, frustrating UX, and far too many features. Those tools are the result of over-eager development teams with a purely functional focus. A customer asks for a feature? It gets built. And rolled out to every customer at once.

The danger of feature creep

What follows from that? Existing customers feel helped at first, and tied to your system, because their specific wishes get integrated without question. It sounds like free development for everyone, but in practice you soon end up with a system buckling under the weight of its own features. Countless workflows that have to be maintained, a codebase nobody can keep a grip on, and a user experience that is dreadful. But hey, it has that one feature you needed so badly. We see this development philosophy at a lot of companies and it worked for a long time. It also makes innovation slower and harder every year, because you have to keep maintaining all of it.

With AI, development gets exponentially faster. In theory you can ship features even faster to make your product more "functional". That sounds great again, but this way of working sends your product towards the wall at full speed.

The other end of the spectrum

One answer would be to stop building anything custom at all. You devote endless design, vision and strategy sessions to building the perfect software. You launch and that is that. Your product stays clean and easy to maintain. A lovely thought, but in practice everyone works differently. So you have to find a way to introduce features that are available to every customer without carelessly bolting on parts until you have created a monster.

The Boomer approach: validate and generalise

At Boomer we found that balance. We stay in close contact with our customers and make sure every request is processed in a structured way. We ask questions actively and we like to test, following the familiar lean startup method: build, measure, learn. Validate by building, and build in order to validate.

Only once a feature is validated does it get rolled into the product. During design we ask ourselves: how could this be set up generically? If we take one extra step now and design the feature so it works in more than one situation, it cuts both ways. That is how we keep the product clean while it still fits your specific preferences. Want to do it differently later? The tool helps you, because it can also work the other way. We do not lock you into one workflow or pull you deeper into it, we keep you flexible.

The future with AI

Going forward we are taking this further by internalising what AI makes possible inside our system.