A4 Product Storm
I’m moving house in less than 4 weeks. We have a baby due in October.
In other words, there is a lot of work in the home coming up, so if I
don’t get busy on my first product, I’m gonna end up doing some of this
work.
I thought I’d start with a nice technique. When you do a product
brainstorm with a big team, it’s all white boards and huge flip charts.
As I know myself (and my foibles) reasonably well by now, I know that I
am prone to overreaching myself, so I knew if I used anything bigger
than an A4 piece of paper my project would involve writing a
replacement for the .Net runtime, and so it came to pass that on the
zeroth day of this great project, an A4 product storm was created.
The definition of the product is in the centre, the USP
directly beneath, highlighted in green. The items highlighted in red
are already performed by that insidious, malevolent force – the competition!
<Hubris>It was a really useful exercise for me. One positive
that I took out of it was this – there isn’t as big an overlap with the
competition as I thought. In fact, his (insert epithet – suggest
miserable) app is starting to look a little wan.</Hubris>
Here I would welcome a little advice. My Agile roots are telling me
to ignore the competition, and implement the bits of functionality in
order of market value. Would you agree? Should I consider the
competition? Should I implement the overlapping bits first? Last?
