Vision: Defining and Refining Product Ideas

Vision: Defining and Refining Product Ideas

visionOnce we’ve found a potential business opportunity, an idea we think may have a market, the next thing we need is a vision. As engineers and designers, our instinct is to go right to a solution and prototype, and skip the vision. But here at Novation Tech, we take the time to do it right and look into the future to define our vision.

That’s right, we’re time travelers. Well, not exactly time travelers, but we try to envision how our idea might come to life in the future. We try to imagine in great detail, the final product. The look. The feel. As they say in design school – the form, fit and function.

We try to imagine how our customers might use our product, what functions it must perform, and how well it must perform its functions. We don’t worry about how we can make it happen yet; for the time being we assume we build it to do anything we need.

One valuable exercise is to design a one page advertisement for your future product. A sketch, a description of the product, a list of its capabilities, some specifications, and anything else you might look for if you were going to buy the product. It is a great way to define your vision.

Since you now have an idea and a vision, in the next entry we’ll discuss how you get from idea to vision.