How to discover Product idea gaps and align the whole team behind the Product Vision

Every Product has a place where it emerged from. Every Product Founder has a set of insights (ideas) or even specified document with the product vision about how it has to embed into the business environment and be competitive.

In business analysis it is called the Discovery Phase and the founder should actively participate so they don’t invent solutions before identifying user needs and product market fit.

At once the Discovery Phase is over and the founder gets a “rough understanding” what the product should be like, the most interesting things are beginning. When I say “rough understanding” it means the startup team is preparing for one big turbulence zone in the form of change requests and new features from the founder from sprint zero to MVP release.

After that, all the surviving team members are invited to the final demo to understand what they ended up with and who needs it. At this moment everything seems to be transparent, but for the founder the overall picture doesn’t match and they received just software with detailed documentation but not the product.

Project documentation and processes are like the laws or rules in your common life — you don't see them, but they are there. At the same time, no one reads the laws, but great things continue to be done — how does it happen? It's the same with product development processes. Founders want and must do great things, not to learn software development processes.

As a founder you should always look for ways to improve communications with your startup team and focus them on really important things. But through the different projects I reached the conclusion that founders are passionate only about their idea and don’t care about nuances of the internal development process and detailed requirements. I think it's obvious, isn't it?

That’s why I believe using a Product Board lets founders and teams integrate seamlessly into the development process, start thinking on the level of product vision and delivering valuable releases.

Combining a custom approach with well-known artefacts of business analysis, a founder can use several tiers of a product board and manage with 2 important things:

If you want to look at a product board more closely or start to use one, follow the link to my template in Miro.

The product roadmap allows Founder to capture the main milestones and development flows without unnecessary detail, but with a sufficient level of understanding of the current state of the project.

To do this, several tiers-flows are embedded in the product roadmap, each with its own role:

For quick orientation on the map, you can additionally use:

Also use comments inside stickers to focus on specific problems or tasks. Communication in this form brings the team and founder closer thanks to the transparency of the process and leads to the desire to get involved and be proactive. And of course, such a whole picture helps you to track the state of the project and instantly change priorities keeping in the board history which tasks were postponed.

Working with this artefact helps the founder to see the whole picture easily. But in this case, the picture is at the level of user stories for understanding a series of events within one large user’s narrative. After all, no matter how well you understand the idea, the user story map will always help to find gaps, understand what tasks the user will solve and which way they will go.

To prepare better for creating a User story map, sometimes it’s good to have an additional End-to-End scenarios at a very high level to understand things like:

In the product sandbox a founder can activate even more communication with the team through visualizing various diagrams, sketches, user personas and other things without waiting for detailed documentation to be written.

Using these visualizations a founder can fuel the interest of the development team for understanding how and why it should work.

Inspiration instead of complicated management — that is exactly what should happen between a founder and their development team. That’s why in addition to the product board, you may follow these 6 essential things for product development to build a rocket and fly on it after the MVP stage:

Written by Alexey Yanushkevich