The feedback book as infrastructure

I believe that the only way to practice the multidisciplinary virtue of a polymath is through habit. That's why I have my own feedback book: a commonplace where I write about mistakes I made in the past and reflect on them. Furthermore, this same book serves me as a collector of ideas that appear distant from the start.

In terms of creativity, I usually have ideas when I am completely relaxed or even bored (during a hot shower, long walks, or just by staring at the window looking "clueless"). The habit to write these ideas down (no matter how crazy or absurd) helped me develop a commonplace where I can integrate them in the future.

That happened a few weeks ago. I was thinking about how to keep improving the UX of Amaru Invest (the value investing intelligence for all), a product I developed using Lovable. The whole mission of Amaru is to empower people to make investing decisions independently and eliminate all obstacles related to bad perceptions towards the stock, bond and commodities markets and the overall procrastination to act now.

After +10 meetings with real users in the last two weeks I was especially eager to help beginners to learn how to invest by doing. After collecting and reviewing individualized feedback from each user, the first thing I thought about afterwards was the feedback book. There I found a brainstorming I wrote down for an old project, "Mentorisable", an idea I came up with during my academic years at the Pompeu Fabra University (2023): a personalized learning platform that replaces the one-size-fits-all model of traditional education with a system designed around how each individual actually thinks, learns, and makes decisions. In this brainstorming, I was very critical to the traditional educational system and its procedures.

After extensive readings, I captured three takeaways that I thought could help me with my current product:

Learners are not the same. Some need step-by-step algorithms and structured plans; others need freedom, external reminders, and gamification. The profile you adopt depends on which typology covers the largest share of your target audience.

The central challenge is designing a system where people want to continue, not because they are told to, but because the process itself generates real rewards. That requires mechanisms that make progress visible, connect today's effort to tomorrow's result, and turn original thinking into a source of social recognition within the group.

Mutual recognition of biases among peers is the most powerful tool for raising the intellectual level of a group: critical and empathetic complementarity, where diversity of perspectives produces solutions that no isolated individual could generate alone.

These old lessons from another project inspired me to improve a new product today, not only to enhance the onboarding process for beginners in Amaru (a hot topic during demos in the last 2 weeks) but also to remind me what principles I believe in and what is the true soul of anything I want to create. I can summarize it in three categories: deep personalization, human-centered workflows, and radical personal and community-based accountability.

A very simple habit keeps my mind open to possibilities and creative enough to keep improving new projects across time. I realized that my feedback book is actually an infrastructure: every idea you capture is a resource you can deploy somewhere else, years later, in a context you cannot anticipate today.

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