They say that every journey starts with taking the first step. But you've never started a product or a game from scratch. Sure, you have ideas, we all do.
But you've probably already found out that between having an idea and actual implementation of that idea, there's a lot of unknown ground to cover. How do you even begin to map that territory, figure out where there are those unknowns, and mitigate some of those risks?
It's really tempting to just jump in and do design, or code, or pull together infrastructure that you think you'll need. Hey, I get it - it's a tempting impulse. While your heart is in the right place, your energy (and you'll need a lot of it) is better placed elsewhere first.
Let's pretend for a second that we're just having a conversation about your idea over coffee. We need to figure out what that idea really is and start putting in some guardrails to the conversation. If not, we're going to be here forever and there's not enough coffee for that amount of time.
So, what is that vision? Let's flesh out the idea a bit, and let's work through a few questions.
- What is the goal of the product?
- What are you trying to have the user experience?
- Talking about the user, who are they?
- Don't give me demographics, we can get to that later. Who are they? Describe them to me. What are they craving? What analogs exist for them today?
- OK. So what's important to them and how does your product interact with that?
- I see. And, since we're talking about what's important to them and how you're trying to address that, why this product and not... anything else? What sets you apart from everything else in this red ocean that you want to jump into?
What we're trying to do here is get to a point where we can identify a few things in a "single" statement: what, who, and why. If we can't walk away from this conversation without clearly, concisely, answering these three things (as a bare minimum) I guess we'll keep asking the same questions until we get there.
/r
