The Product-Minded Engineer

Chapter 7. Discovering Your Product Through Simulation

You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.

Steve Jobs

In Chapter 6 we discovered our customers. We wanted to learn who our customers were and what their problems were. In doing so, we refined a product thesis, our high-level claim of what an awesome product would be for those folks.

But we held off on thinking too much about solutions.

In this chapter, we’ll open the floodgates and turn our attention to product discovery.

That is, considering the character and the simulation that make up a user scenario, we only have the character so far. Now it’s time to write simulations.

But this product or feature you want to build—​it doesn’t exist. No story has ever been told about it. If we have any hope of getting it right the first time, we must tell miniature science fiction stories that predict how users will navigate the new superpowers we’re giving them.

Thus begins the great journey from product land to system land.

From Vision to Requirements

One of the bugbears of software development is late-breaking product requirements that we didn’t notice up front. Sometimes we get them from user feedback and sometimes we just notice more things as we design and implement. This delays roadmaps and increases scope. A huge reason for such unwelcome surprises is insufficient discovery work.

To minimize ...