First Steps To Transform Your Product Idea Into A Reality

Get the first steps right so you can start building a successful product.

Photo by Jorge Reyna on Unsplash

All too often innovators start building their solution without first ensuring they have the right information and a clear direction to follow.

That usually leads to a long and uncertain process of designing and building a product that shows a clear disconnect from what users need, packed with tons of features, many irrelevant or with little value to the majority of the users.

My clients often come to me with a product idea they want to develop. Some have a more clear view of what they want, others have a rough concept in their mind.

We begin working together to interpret their thoughts and organize the information they have. The first thing is to understand the purpose behind their idea.

Start with the problem

Therefore, we want to start with what they are trying to solve for their users. We need to know what the problem is and why they want to solve it.

Define a problem statement that helps to identify the target user and the particular problem that prevents them from achieving their goal (desired outcome). Here are some recommendations to define a good problem statement:

• A genuine problem that they have experienced or are experiencing
• Use a concrete problem and situation where it occurs
• Include your target customer
• Do not include your solution or features

You can think of a particular use case or situation in which you can put the user in the context of the problem to better understand their pains and struggles with a specific situation.

Down the road, a use case helps to define priorities and features to focus on.

In a recent project, one of the user’s needs could be solved by several very different technologies. By defining a use case (or a couple) we managed to narrow down the potential solutions to the one that best resolved that particular use case.

Extract the user needs

The problem statement above is still rather generic and while it is important to know what we are trying to solve, it is not very actionable when developing the actual product.

That’s why we want to translate the problem into specific user needs. For that, we can simply use the sentences from the problem statement and extract the user's needs from it. Then adapt the sentences to reflect a need based on the problem or pain they have.

Let’s imagine that an extract of the problem statement is “…public transportation costs are too high…”. From this extract, we could rewrite a user need as “An affordable transportation alternative.’’

See how this way of defining the needs helps to start thinking about potential solutions without yet talking about any solution in particular.

Lastly, you would want to order the user needs by priority, for that, you should really understand the priorities of the user either from your research or directly talking to them.

Define your solution

With a good understanding of your target user’s problem and related needs, you can better define a solution that will address those specifically.

Describe what your solution is and how it resolves the problem for the user. This should be better described as a high level, you shouldn’t go into a lot of detail yet.

Derive the features from the needs

Now you should be able to define individual features of your solution directly from the user needs. Keep them related to your solution and linked to each individual need.

Do not describe the features in a very technical way nor describe them with technical values at this point. Keep them easy to understand for anyone that looks at them.

Put it all together

Finally, I suggest to keep all of this information together and in a way that is easy to visualize and work with.

For that, I created the Idea Brief Canvas which is a tool that facilitates the process to define the details of your idea. It is essentially a one-page document that includes a section for each of the above items.

The Idea Brief Canvas template

Furthermore, the Idea Brief Canvas lets you define the technical requirements linking them to the features, and also other important aspects surrounding the product such as competitors and external factors.

The Benefits of Using the Idea Brief Canvas to Link the User Problem to your Solution Features

The Next Steps

If you have the above items clear from the beginning your chances of building the right product for your users increase dramatically.

Use the Idea Brief Canvas to help you organize this important information and you can expect the following benefits:

1. Build the right features for your product
2. Prioritize your goals and features during development
3. Have a single place to go back for any design decisions

If you want to know more about how to start with your product idea and start building the right product, I have created a 5-Day Free Email Course for you to follow. It includes access to tools and resources such as the Idea Brief Canvas for you to use.

(Kickstart Your Physical Product Development With Our Free Email Course)

Abilista guides innovators to develop their product ideas from concept, prototyping and all the way to manufacturing following our own step by step framework. We are already helping several entrepreneurs and startups to build their ideas by giving them access to simple and agile tools and expertise on-demand.

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