Product Development is Like Predicting the Future

We do some marketing these days and as a consequence I get to speak to a lot of people in small businesses. I have one particular person in mind as I write this.

This guy is in a specialist niche. I am trying not to go into detail here. Let's just say that he is in the business of offering experiences to people who would normally be unable. It's his life's purpose. It's why he gets up in the morning. It's personal.

We were talking and while we were talking an idea started to emerge. I'm not going to tell you much, because who knows. It's a modest idea, but one which is going to allow him to scale his business up so he can quit his day job.

This idea has already taken a hold of my brain. I envision people having fun with our product, looking forward to the next incentives we offer. There will be future instalments, we will tease them like that. I see the contours of the user interface, the pastel colours and curves.

It's that bad. It's not even my idea. We talked for an hour online and I am already hooked.

How to move from this emphemerous, airy-fairy, mere wisp of an idea into something we can look at, try out, measure, is not the object of this article.

My advice would be to follow every best practise you can find about product development. For us, being software developers, it is creating an MVP (minimal viable product). Other industries will have their own methods. A quick search delivered me this article from wikifactory ↗? for a piece on hardware MVP and also this article right here on Linkedin ↗? for the more usual rant on software MVP. There must be thousands like this. Or roll your own using a GenAI.

From the reddit user storysherpa on r/startups:

If you know that there is a customer segment that truly believes there is a problem, and you solve that problem, then it doesn’t have to look or perform great. As long as you are solving that base problem.

Why the image of the movie Arrival. And my point.

The movie is an adaptation of a short story by Ted Chiang. The story is called "Story of Your Life". Reading the story is somewhat like watching the movie, in that some scenes from the story, some lines, are repeated verbatim in the movie. For instance the anecdote about Captain Cook and the word for kangaroo. Subplots are added to the movie, presumably to make it more palatable for viewers. Violence are brought in, explosions. Nothing of the kind is found in the story.

The story is much more theoretical. It includes things like contrasting causal explanations with teleological explanations. It makes sense that it's theoretical, because when you look at the author's notes he says that the story grew out of his interest in variational principals of physics. Look it up on Wikipedia ↗?

But moviegoers, or readers of the story, don't have to understand the variational principals in physics in order to come away with the basic premise.

Think of your expected life span represented as a series of blocks, maybe one block for each decade, and then divide the blocks into smaller blocks, and then smaller still. Each block contains all your memories of that period of time. You set them next to each other, in linear order. Let's say you are now 25. Mark that spot.

The blocks ahead are memories you have not experienced yet.

Now grab a block from the future and place it on top of your year 25 block. You now have a "memory" from the "future" in your mind.

What have I just done? I created a picture. The picture is in my mind. And if you have followed along, you have it in your mind too.

We create pictures in our mind all the time. Everyone does. We talk about them, describe them, draw pictures, calculate outcomes. Every time around the picture grows, becomes more clear. Sometimes we will get exasperated, move it to the side. And sometimes that will be for the best.

It's some sort of wonder if you think about it. Ted Chiang describes the way the story took hold on him. It was over a period of years. Chance encounters enabled him to connect the dots and to finally write it in 1998. Then, years and who knows how many encounters later, the movie was released in 2016. I think I first watched the movie, then read the story. I am not quite sure. Doesn't matter. The premise has now found it's way into my brain, and there it is to stay.

And our guy whose idea is sitting in my brain next to it might never get to realise the product he envisioned. Or maybe I envisioned it, and his brain did the math. Also doesn't matter. If we move forward, we will talk about it with others, with potential users. We will draw pictures, calculate outcomes. We will set it aside, because other issues are more important. Then, after years, we will come back to it. And it will finally be launched, and become a great success.