Taking products from ideation to launch is a lot like building LEGO Technic sets.
If you missed a key piece 20 or 30 pages ago, you’re overcome with dread in how much time and effort it’ll take you to go back and fix it. (Even more if you’re dealing with the pinch risk of pieces that shall not be named.)
This is why it’s important for product managers to be crystal clear on what value their initiatives will deliver. What problem are we solving? Why does it matter to us? To our customers? To other stakeholders? What do people gain if we solve it? What happens if we don’t solve it?
It’s questions like these that need to be addressed upfront before engineers, UX/UI, marketing, sales, etc. get knee deep into development; because missing any of them can lead to a metric ton of backtracking (even in Agile teams, mind you) not only in terms of time and effort, but also cross-functionally in terms of awareness and responsibility. That’s not to say that something can’t change along the way, but instead that when you start an initiative, you want (and need) everyone to be on the same page.
I mean, unless you like playing the odds between building something valuable versus something no one was looking for. Your call!
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