Prototype to Product

Chapter 4. Preliminary Planning: Can This Be a Success?

Few things are more deflating than putting forth a ton of effort that ultimately has little or no effect on the world around us. It’s like throwing a nice party and having nobody show up. If we develop a product, we want lots of people to use it! We want our product to be successful.

An important part of achieving success is choosing our battles wisely. Digging a tunnel to the Earth’s core with a teaspoon would be incredibly cool, but it would also be a fool’s errand. It ain’t gonna work. There are probably better adventures to set off on that are more likely to succeed.

One of the critical purposes of project planning is to help ensure that we’ve picked a winnable battle. As discussed previously, there are two fundamental parts to the product planning process that answer related questions:

1. If developed, does this product have a reasonable chance of being a success (however we define success)?

2. If it has a chance of success, what will it really take to develop this product (e.g., cost, timeline, people needed, etc.) so we can decide whether the return is worth the effort?

This chapter is about answering question 1. The basic idea is to do a fairly quick reality check to understand whether our product idea is worth pursuing further, or whether it can be ruled out as having an unacceptably low likelihood of ultimately succeeding. In particular, we’re looking for obvious showstoppers, but we’ll also do a few lightweight ...