I love bringing new ideas to life. From the time when there is chaos to the time when the intangible becomes tangible, I love the idea of reducing the risk of the unknown.
As a software engineer, my favorite thing was to just open up a text editor and start writing code to solve whatever I believed was the challenge. However, over time, I’ve worked to move myself up the value chain as much as I can. From code to design to architecture to requirements to product to business and to strategy.
However, the abstract nature of strategy can make you wonder if you are making any progress and sometimes there is a need to just get started and make something tangible.
So, in my usual framework-oriented self, I have come up with a three-step guide with book references to help me find guidance and get started on my ideas.
Before I begin
Pick a partner in crime
I can’t state this enough, nothing of value ever gets built alone. I started a band in school with my best buddies and they taught me one of the most valuable lessons I learned: the sum is always greater than its parts.
All right. Now that we have someone to check-in with. Here's the rest:
Step 1: Start with the customer
What would the world look like when what I am building is built. If I can’t visualize the impact of my idea on the customer, the output rarely matters. As Marty Cagan wrote in his wonderful product management book Inspired, Outcomes over output.
Step 2: Start carving out the marketing plan:
I like to use Seth Godin’s mantra "People like us do things like this"(This is marketing by Seth Godin) to think about who am I intending to serve and what do they do? His checklist for a quick market plan is great to get started with the idea. With a few of my client’s I’ve used Atlassian’s Cereal Box approach and that tends to cut through the clutter, as well.
Step 3: Build a Prototype:
I love the book Sprint by Jake Knapp to prototype the interaction with the most risk. This book is an awesome text to get to the other side of the idea.
All right. This is how I think of things and my favorite texts about how to get started on ideas. How do you start things? What’s your favorite way to go about things when nothing is known?