with Kurt Krumme
Odds are your ideas will fail. While the Lean Startup is great, it's not really a product strategy. Try, fail, pivot: might work for some but you'll do better with an actual strategy. Build first and ask questions later is not always the best plan.
Make something people want. This is a great goal and you'll succeed if you do this, but you need a strategy to get there and figure it out.
Strategy vs Tactics - a strategy is "what we are trying to do" and tactics is "how we are trying to do it"
##Step 1: Take Stock Review what you have already, gather it together and internalize that knowledge.
- is there a business plan?
- revenue streams
- advantages
- opportunities
- do you have research?
- competitive analysis
- ethnographies
- market research
- see book Just Enough Research
- anything else?
- brand strategy
- prototypes
- etc
##Step 2: Hypotheses Outline the belief you have about a premise and the result. State your claim and explain a little bit about why.
- test your assumptions, your hypotheses must be testable and test your riskiest assumptions first
##Step 3: Product Vision From Crossing the Chasm: For (target customers) who (primary opportunity), (our product name) is a (product category) that (key benefit, reason to buy). Unlike (primary competitive alternative), our product (statement of primary definition).
##Step 4: Outcomes What will things look like when you finish? What will your product change? What will the market look like after you've succeeded? A feature just says what it does, while an outcome says where it's going. Outcomes can guide the features you need to get there.
##Bonus Points: Design Principles Outline the kind of feeling your product is going to have. Figure out "Who your product is?"
"Think about why you want to build it before you figure out what it is."
If you are on your own, or a small dept, you want "just enough" strategy to build up the confidence in what you are doing. Don't spend months on this.
Having an idea is easy, executing that idea is SUPER hard.