October 2024 Recap - Aligning activities to the problem
My journey to boostrap a company, by myself, from scratch with the help of AI and other tools.
The primary goal for Q4 is to build a working prototype that will:
Get market feedback
Validate assumptions about market problems
Define initial launch features
Guide our marketing, positioning, and launch strategy
I want to focus only on activities that will help me learn these insights.
Let's look at the market problems I'm solving. I'm helping companies know if they're building the right things for their current and future customers. Specifically, they need to know:
What problems they're trying to solve, and for whom
If their roadmap and development efforts are moving the needle
How well their efforts align with market needs and timing
The goal is to make this easier than current alternatives while keeping the entire team and company aligned.
To achieve this, I need to demonstrate these key features:
Product Management: Define what the product is, its market positioning, and sharing capabilities
Persona Management: Define each persona's goals, problems, and adoption barriers
Activity/Jobs To Be Done Management: Define activities, who does them, and link them to business problems
Roadmap Management: Define roadmaps, link them to product strategy and persona problems, and share them
User Stories, Sprints, and Release Management
Most importantly, we need reports that show how well the roadmap and product backlog align with strategy, plus track value delivered to each persona. A stretch goal is linking customers to different personas.
With this feature set defined, I can focus on building the prototype and adjust scope based on our high-level objectives.
Disclaimer: If I had a team, I'd maximize learning while minimizing investment by working with a UX designer and researcher to build a clickable prototype in Figma or Adobe XD. Since it's just me, I'm building a working prototype that lets me iterate on design while reducing the number of tools needed. Both approaches maximize learning while minimizing investment.
Building the Foundation
Product strategy is the foundation, so I started by building a Product/Lean/Business Model Canvas. I handled basic admin tasks like authentication stubs and header navigation, but deferred full authentication since it's not critical for market research.
Using proof of concept code, I built features to:
Create a new product and display it
Create a product canvas where you can:
Write your solution description
Define customer segments and their priority
List value propositions and their unique differentiators
Specify key activities, partners, and resources
Define cost structure linked to key activities
Outline revenue streams and pricing
Document your unfair advantages and distribution channels
I also added the ability to define product features and link them to specific customer problems (coming soon).
A new feature automatically generates shareable product description documents using data from the Product Canvas and Feature list. This helps maintain alignment on what your product does, who it's for, and its value proposition.
Next Steps
I'll be working on:
Customer segment management
Roadmap management
Backlog organization
User stories, sprints, and release management
Linking these concepts together for better traceability and team focus
Please share your suggestions or comments about the product. I welcome ideas, criticisms, and questions about my decision process.
Subscribe to follow my journey bootstrapping a product company from scratch!