Build It Before You Build It

Several years ago, we were wrestling with the next version of our product. Would it be designed for DIYers? Was it going to be a lightweight version of our then current device? Was it going to be a B2B iteration of our product?

We struggled for a few months until we converged on an idea that we thought was the best version of what we could come up with. That struggle involved a lot of debate and late hours and long parliament-style meetings that sometimes got heated. However, it wasn’t until we picked the idea and started working on it before we realized was going to be a flop.

In building out the campaign for the new product, it seemed shallow compared to our first version and it was clear that it was missing a lot of components that were demanded by the market. The first product we developed was audacious. The second one was practical and even we didn’t really buy into it. The exercise of trying to build it is what helped us realize that wording the benefits, positioning it relative to other products, and pricing appropriately just didn’t work.

Building the product page before building the product made us realize the correct path. That said, doing the same for the first version of our product helped us see that it was something very different.

We weren’t the first to invent this. Architects model their buildings first. App designers create wireframes. There’s even a great story about the set designer of Friends:

Amazon also practices coming up with the press release for the product first, years in advance of its release. Here’s a great article on this practice by Werner Vogels.

The best thing to happen in this process is realizing that the product is a dud. You can suss this out very quickly by building a bit before building a lot.

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