olivergajek

This sounds obvious, but it is surprisingly hard. Technologists often start with a “wouldn’t it be cool if…” approach or they just fall in love with a particular piece of technology or maybe just an algorithm. Nothing wrong with that.

But now you have to switch your focus to the customer. Which product will your technology (we’ll call it a feature, because that’s mostly how things start out) be embedded in? And a product is something that usually has a price and some kind of description. And some kind of competition, either direct or via a substitution scenario. 

Useful exercises include drafting a product sheet that describes features and benefits and a price list that describes how the product is paid for. The Product Box exercise is also particularly useful to find out how to position various features and benefits with respect to each other.

Note that this is relevant even if you were not to build the product yourself, e.g. because you license the technology to somebody else. They will then have to answer these questions as well.