Turning ideas into insights efficiently

Here’s how my brain works: I get an idea, get excited, and then I need to start building to get feedback.

I want to show it to people—the real thing.

If you’re a bit like me, you know this process well. The problem is that it takes too long to get feedback. And, if you are building a digital product, time is the one thing you don’t have.

A few years ago, I was at a startup. We had seven engineers, one product person, and one designer. Because product and design were sitting at the same desk, all our prototypes were production-grade.

Then they came to engineering, and I chopped up their idea with my Guestimator 2000. They returned to the drawing board with half the features and a frown.

We were slow going from idea → customer feedback. It took months for every feature.

When you want to be agile in the word’s true meaning, you’ll want to tighten all feedback loops.

That means only proceeding to the next step once you’ve juiced out all the value from the previous one.

It sounds obvious, but I needed to print this out and stick it to the wall to stop myself from going from the bottom up instead of the top down.

P.S. Your prompt for today. Think of a situation where you’re skipping a step to jump to something tangible. What if you started from the top down instead? Let me know how it went.

Best regards,

Taj