Product Design

Be vivid, be actionable, be testable with design thinking. In 20 minutes, you can be marrying empathy with creativity and start your practice as a design thinker. The material here instructs on the practical use of personas and the pairing of ‘problem scenarios’ and ‘alternatives’ to refine your ‘value proposition’, among other topics.

Looking for ideas? Or to supercharge one you have? Or to make it actionable for the rest of your team? The two subsections below will describe best practices in ideation and then walk you through some primers and tools you can use to apply the those practices. If you’re inclined towards slides, you can start here:

Product Design

This document is a template for organizing your findings about a market or user community and packing them into an actionable, implementation-ready framework. The template is based on a discussion of the process in the book ‘Starting a Tech Business’. The techniques themselves are anchored in best practices around customer development and lean management.

The example content in this document is based on the findings of a fictional company, ‘Enable Quiz’ about their product/market fit. In some places it’s just a template and instructs the user to ‘put [x] here’; in other places, it has example content. Wherever something is left to the user, it’s enclosed on brackets, ‘[ ]’.

1.1 Who’s it for?

This template is for anyone who’s looking to organize information about their product/market fit (or product/user fit if an internal IT project) with an ultimate goal of packaging those findings for a development engineering team to implement. While you may discover a few ideas about things you want to learn about your market, if you’ve been developing an idea you probably have most of what you need already. This is just a better way to package it.

Note: Your project does not need to be a new startup company. This material is equally applicable to IT projects within existing businesses.

Go to the Template