Buildspace S4 Article 2: WAYB? WIIF? WDID?

When undertaking any new product development project, it's crucial to start by clearly defining three key elements: what you aim to build, its purpose, and the target users. Having a laser focus on these fundamentals from the outset provides the direction and validation needed to build products that deliver real value. This article will guide you through the critical process of articulating what you're building, what problem it solves, and who it serves. Defining these components upfront and revisiting them often is the secret sauce for launching impactful, purpose-driven products.

Future-Proofing Your Product: Crafting a Visionary Product Roadmap

What are you building?: Define Your Product's Vision

Having a clear, inspiring product vision is like having a map to guide your product development. Your product vision encapsulates the fundamental purpose and future state of your product. It's the anchor for all strategy and decision-making.

A strong product vision has several key elements:

• Focused on Users: Describe the change you will bring to the lives of your users. Avoid generic vision statements that could apply to any product.
• Future-Oriented: Envision the future context and needs of users 5 years out. You should anticipate how your product will evolve.
• Purpose-Driven: Articulate the problem you are solving and the outcomes you enable for users. Aligns with your company mission.
• Inspirational: Gets people excited about the future you envision. It stretches the imagination but is grounded in customer insights.??
• Memorable: Distill the essence into an eloquent, vivid statement that sticks. For example, Tesla's vision is "Accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy."
• Ambitious: Goes beyond incremental improvements to paint a picture of a dramatically better future state enabled by your product.

A compelling vision is more than words on a page. It should actively guide decisions at all levels. From product design to marketing campaigns. Revisit it often and evaluate if your product roadmap is bringing this future vision to life.?

In the next sections, we'll cover how to identify the emerging user needs that shape your vision, along with translating your vision into core product features.

What Does It Do?: Identify Emerging User Needs

While a vision looks ahead, you need to balance future-gazing with understanding users' current context. Regularly researching emerging needs ensures your vision is grounded in real user insights.

Some techniques for identifying emerging needs:

• Customer advisory boards: Consult your most engaged users on how they foresee their needs changing. Early adopters are attuned to future trends.
• Ethnographic research: Observe small groups of target users in their natural environments to spot unmet needs.
• Surveys: Ask directly about challenges people expect to face in the future. Include open-ended questions.
• Focus groups: Facilitated discussions can reveal needs that surveys miss. Prompt participants to imagine future scenarios.
• User testing: Have prototypers try imaginary future product capabilities that address emerging needs. Gauge reactions.
• Demographic analysis: Study projections on population, income, education shifts that may drive new needs.
• Industry analysis: Research market reports forecasting macro trends, technology disruptions, competitive forces.
• Expert interviews: Consult academics, inventors, authors researching industry futures. Incorporate outside perspectives.

The goal is to develop an empathetic understanding of users' forthcoming realities. As you gather insights, look for patterns pointing to major shifts in consumer values, workflows, and pain points. Use these signals to refine your vision and product roadmap.

Who Is It For?: Translate Your Vision into Evolvable Core Features

With a future-focused vision and insights into emerging needs, the next step is translating that vision into product capabilities. Core features bring the essence of your vision to life for users.

When designing core features:

• Map features to specific user needs and desired outcomes in your vision. Every feature should tie back to making the vision a reality.
• Prioritize the 3-5 features that enable the most important user value. Resist cramming in nice-to-have features that cause feature bloat.
• Architect the features and underlying technology infrastructure to be adaptable. Plan to iterate as user needs shift over time.
• Conceptualize a modular platform that additional capabilities can plug into over time. Think in terms of an evolving ecosystem.
• Engineer flexibility into the tech stack to accommodate future innovations like AI, AR, automation, etc.
• Work with UX designers to craft an intuitive, cohesive user experience across features.
• Develop metrics to measure if each feature is delivering against your vision. Be ready to sunset features that become less relevant.
• Maintain continuous feedback channels with users to gather insights that may necessitate rethinking features.

Aligning features tightly to your forward-thinking vision, helps you maintain focus on the future you are building towards. Core features should evolve along with your vision as the market landscape changes. Continually evaluate if features are propelling you towards your destination.

By constantly connecting back to your core product vision, intended utility, and user needs, you can stay laser focused amidst the chaos of building. This clarity of purpose guides you through everyday decisions, keeping your product on track. Re-evaluate and re-articulate these elements as you learn and grow. With a firm grasp of what you're building, what it does, and who it's for, you gain the foundational understanding required to create meaningful products that make the world a little better.