Preparing your view…
Product & Venture
Framing risk, learning from real users, and building the smallest useful solution.
Most product ideas arrive fully formed: an app, a platform, a feature. The solution is vivid, which makes it easy to skip the questions underneath it: who has this problem, how do they cope today, and why would they switch?
Restating the idea as a problem and an audience turns a pitch into something you can investigate.
Every idea rests on several assumptions: that the problem is real and frequent, that people will pay or change behaviour, that the solution is feasible, that it can reach its users. They are not equally risky.
Rank them by how much the idea depends on them and how little you know. Test the one at the top first, because no amount of good design rescues a product built on a wrong assumption.
Conversations about past behaviour are more reliable than questions about future intentions. Ask people how they handled the problem last time, what it cost them and what they tried. Look for workarounds: they are evidence of a real need.
Where possible, ask for a small commitment, such as a sign-up, a pilot or a deposit, rather than an opinion.
When evidence supports the opportunity, build the smallest solution that makes a real difference to a specific group of users. Measure whether they come back. That signal, more than any plan, tells you what to build next.
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