What can quilting teach about building a product? Step 1: Planning
What do opportunity cost, personas, and use-cases have to do with quilting?
Hopefully the intro to this series made an interesting enough case that quilting can teach you a few things about building a product. Each article will dive deeper into different phases of building a quilt to provide more specific examples.
A quick overview of building a quilt
If you’ve never built a quilt before, here is a quick overview of the steps.
Step 1: Planning — Deciding what you want to make and who is it for
Step 2: Piecing your quilt top- This is a fancy way of saying making the top of your quilt usually this what most people think of as quilting. Gather your materials and get started.
Step 3: Quilting — Taking your quilt top, backing & batting (the fluffy stuff that makes a quilt soft) and sew them together.
Step 4: Binding — Creating the edging & finishing your quilt.
So how do you get started?
When building a product or making a quilt you are immediately faced with a choice — do you focus on what you are building or who you are building it for? Figuring this out can be tricky and often these two decisions are intertwined.
Quilting personas & use-cases
When planning a product build, often planning can start with what to build rather than who you are building for. In the case of quilting, since I’m not selling my quilts (and have zero desire to) I’m more focused on the user persona and I’ve found that if I start with who rather than what, I end up with an extremely different quilt. I think there’s some important product lessons that can be gleaned from that.
When you are creating a quilt, it’s advantageous to think about who will be using the quilt and how. A quilt made for an infant could end up being displayed in the nursery or it could be used for tummy time. These are contrasting use-cases even though they are both for a baby. A quilt made for display doesn’t need the same qualities; it will rarely need to be washed and extra soft fabric choices aren’t necessary.
Similarly, if your product roadmap only includes what you’re building, but not who you’re building it for (or why they even need it), there’s a better chance you’ll wind up with a really cool piece of technology that can’t or won’t be used in its current form.
When I start the planning process of a baby quilt with a specific family in mind, I try to find out if there is a nursery theme or even just the color scheme that I can work with — as well as how they might plan to use the quilt.
Similarly, when planning to build a new product, knowing just who you want to build for isn’t enough information on it’s own. Without additional context, similar to how I should know more about how a baby quilt would be used, it will be hard to build a product that truly fits the needs of either your buyer or user persona. Taking the time to better understand the personas of both your user & buyer can help you create a product that addresses the problems of a potential user and is valuable for a potential buyer.
For a baby blanket, I have two different users- the baby and the parents. Let’s be honest, the baby isn’t really giving much feedback at the planning stage, so that leaves me with my friends, the future parents, as my user persona. From here I could subdivide into a few different types of parents if I needed to get more specific — first time parents vs current parents for example. This quickly becomes tailored to the individuals to help figure out what to build.
Here are just a few examples:
- A couple I play Dungeons & Dragons with every week — has to be something nerdy.
- A close friend who loves foxes — woodlands design w/ super cute fox fabric.
- A co-worker having a second boy while their first son loves trucks & trains — I wanted to do something with Disney’s cars
- My mentor sent me all the details on their nursery bedding — I wanted to stick with their color scheme
So how is this different than when I start with a specific idea of the quilt I want to make?
In the last 6 months, I’ve changed how I quilt pretty drastically, for better or worse. It started when my husband reminded me that I hadn’t finished the quilt for the two of us and that if I kept making baby blankets I would completely miss the window for our warm snuggly winter quilt. We live in Texas so a super heavy warm blanket is never going to be used during the summer no matter how much I love it.
Ultimately, this was the push I needed to wrap up my projects for other people and spend time quilting for me. This may sound a little crazy, but in my several years of quilting I had never actually made anything for me. This applies to organizations as well. When you are building a product, it’s really easy to focus on your external users/end consumers. One of the things I love about RigUp is that internal users are included in the product process.
When it came to what I wanted, I would often find a design that just spoke to me. It was so nice to just look at something and say “That’s awesome,” and then just do it. Of course my husband is still a key stakeholder for me since I don’t want to make something that he doesn’t want to use or put up somewhere in the house.
When you think about the steps you have to take in building something for yourself, it’s pretty different. Much like building for internal users, you don’t have to go through the same level of guess work on what they want. Often you can be more direct in understanding their needs & pain points. While a super candid conversation with a potential buyer would be extremely helpful, you have to be more careful about the types of questions you ask. You don’t want to come across as tactless or insincere. Similarly, you might not want to be overly direct in asking a friend if they plan on using the quilt you make for them, but quilting is a big time commitment for it to end up collecting dust in a closet — nothing is more sad than the thought of a quilt not being used because it’s too pretty (in these cases at least hang it up on the wall, ok?).
So I now I have an idea of what I want to make or more likely a giant list of things I might want to make, but I have to decide what to make.
The Opportunity Costs of Quilting
Much like building a product, there are opportunity costs in deciding to move forward with a project. This is usually described as the loss of potential gain from the path(s) not taken. When I choose to make quilt A, the opportunity cost is the time available to make quilt B. For example, if I decide to make a full size quilt using a fairly complex design, I no longer have the time to make a baby blanket for a friend.
In addition to time, I need to consider my budget. Quilting isn’t the cheapest of hobbies. Aside from material costs, many quilters will either send their quilts off to be finished or rent time at a local quilting studio. I’ll admit, once I used a longarm there is little chance of me going back to finishing at home so that expense needs to be part of my budget.
Given the constraints of limited time and budget, there is one last factor that I personally take into account when deciding my quilting to do list. A friend of mine described this concept as being “knit worthy” or in my case “quilt worthy”. Quilting is a time consuming and often expensive process if you are giving a gift. Not everyone is going to fully appreciate the time, effort & expense of a quilt with the number of alternatives available. I need to make sure I am investing my time & resources properly. For many, the thought & energy that goes into a homemade gift is a huge bonus and helps your gift stand out from the crowd. These are the people that are “quilt worth”. All this basically means I need to prioritize the quilts I want to make.
When it comes to building a product, there will often be more things you could build than your engineering team can realistically do. Similar to my quilting process, you’ll need to factor your available resources. For an engineering team, you need to think about how many engineers you have, how many hours they work in a day, etc. You also need to consider the time your engineers will spend doing other tasks such as fixing bugs, attending meetings, etc. Even if you had additional budget to just go hire more engineers, there are factors like the time it takes to recruit and onboard new talent. And don’t forget to be “quilt worthy” — if there is a wide range of alternatives at a low cost, you want to make sure you are building for the right audience and your product is differentiated.
The need for prioritization
Ok so now you’ve got a list of potential quilts…err… products that you want to create, but you have to decide what to make and when. Hopefully, based on what you already know about your potential quilt recipients/customers, you’re able to at least shorten your list. This also gives you an idea of which projects are going to have the biggest impact. If your best friend is having a baby at the same time as a casual acquaintance, it probably makes more sense to make something for your best friend.
The biggest unspoken challenge is that priorizations change over time and you’ll need to adapt accordingly. Let’s say I’m in the middle of making a quilt for Halloween and I’d really like to have it done before September, but I find out a my favorite uncle’s health is getting worse and I had been planning on making him a quilt for Christmas. Do I stop working on my Halloween quilt and start on the quilt for my uncle instead? When you are building a product, there will often be similar questions about new opportunities that are identified while you’re still working on your product. You need to find a good balance so you don’t end up with a bunch of half baked products or unfinished quilts.
For me when it comes to prioritizing, I try to come up with a rough game plan, thinking only a few months ahead because things change way too fast to plan out my entire year. Then I remain flexible if my priorities change unexpectedly. Usually this means I should not buy too much fabric in advance — no more than 1 or 2 quilts ahead because I’ll probably change my mind.
Once you have a product or quilting roadmap in place, it’s time to get started. That will be the focus of my next post, when we dive into piecing your quilt top and how that relates to building out your product. Stay tuned!
Until next time, here is a sneak peek at my current quilting roadmap
