New Mini Apps for product teams you can build and use at work

🧠 Knowledge Series #69: Build a SaaS subscription spend tracker, Appraisal performance review feedback collector and more…

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AI is making it easier to spin up simple product prototypes, and in some cases CEOs are now mandating that product teams use AI-generated prototypes to free up engineering resource and get ideas into the hands of users.

But there’s still some way to go before non-engineers can ship fully fledged, complex apps to production. It’s certainly possible but we’ve all heard the horror stories of the past few weeks where ultra confident vibe coder newbies push a new product to production, only to realise a few days later that they’ve also shipped something which seriously compromises their security.

For now, it’s still much safer to stick to smaller mini apps and prototypes that you can ship for your own use.

And in this Knowledge Series, we’re going to do just that by picking up where we left off a few weeks back and explore some new simple, mini apps you build and use at work. They will be added to the Mini App Library that we created previously which included an OKR tracker and more.

These mini apps are designed to be used by product / tech teams with specific work-related use cases in mind. In this new edition, we’ll build an appraisal feedback collector that allows you to keep track your colleague’s achievements, a SaaS spend tracker to keep track of all of your company’s SaaS product subscriptions, a note taker with a difference and a new way to encourage colleagues to get to know each other and resolve conflict.

Coming up, use AI tools to build new mini apps including:

• An appraisal / performance review feedback collector

• A SaaS spend tracker to monitor your SaaS product subscriptions

• A note taker with a creative twist

• A Coffee Roulette tool to encourage colleagues to get to know one another and resolve conflict

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The Knowledge Series

Appraisal / Performance Review feedback collector

In the briefing recently, we featured the top 100 use cases for generative AI and one of the top use cases right now is the use of AI for writing appraisals and performance reviews.

For this mini app, we’re not going to focus on writing the appraisal itself but instead build a tool which allows you to keep a record of specific actions of your colleagues so that by the time appraisal / performance reviews come around, you’ll have a nicely categorized collection of feedback you can explore and add to your performance review documents.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a line manager or not, keeping track of the performance of your colleagues can be a helpful way to build closer relationships. The trickiest part of giving kudos to colleagues is remembering what they did in the first place. Using something like this should help.

Here’s a quick snapshot of how it looks:

And here’s a more detailed overview of how it works:

The core functionality of this mini app includes the ability to add and edit colleagues in one place and then give each of those colleagues feedback which falls into one of the following categories:

• Getting Stuff Done (Projects and Deliverables)

• Teamwork and Helping Others

• Creative Ideas and Problem-Solving

• Leadership

• Learning and Growing

• Making Clients or Partners Happy

• Kudos and Recognition

• Nailing the Day-to-Day

These are just categories that I’ve decided on as defaults but the categories are fully customizable so you can add / remove the categories as and where necessary.

You can also view a dashboard which summarizes the different types of feedback for each colleague, as well as the ability to export the feedback as a json file that you can then use in other tools if necessary.

To build this, we’ve used a mix of Grok for prompting and Lovable for building. This is the prompt we’ll use to get started:

Create a single-page web application to track and manage appraisal feedback for colleagues, enabling efficient preparation for work appraisals. The app should provide a clean, intuitive interface to log achievements, organize feedback by predefined categories, and generate insights for performance reviews.

The full prompt then gives Lovable explicit instructions on how each part of the app should behave. This mini app uses local storage which is saved in the browser but it is possible to also connect this to its own dedicated database using Supabase. More on that when we look at the SaaS subscription spend tracker. For now, we’re sticking with local storage for this example.

You can grab a copy of the full prompt plus the functional version of the mini app to try here:

• Prototype - https://preview--stellar-appraisal-hub.lovable.app/

• Prompt - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CAnza-CS4NAjIlSWtCXknGNsu8wTzwVMTvslLO78OmY/edit?usp=sharing

SaaS spend tracker

Next, let’s take a look at a mini app that will keep you on the good side of your CFO: a SaaS spend tracker. This will allow you to add whatever SaaS products your company is using and then track the monthly spend of that product.

Some products offer API integrations that allow you to track your monthly spend automatically but for this simple mini app version, we’ll stick to the manual way of tracking subscriptions by entering the monthly amounts of each product to get a summary of our spending habits.

Here’a a snapshot of what it looks like: