AMA: Asana Director of Product Management, AI, Rodrigo Davies on Building 0-1 Products

There are many potential signals – just one of these is enough! * You're starting to hear the same problems repeated in a lot of your research * You don't have a clear view of feasibility of the solutions you're thinking of (you need to start prototyping) * You have a potential customer willing to pay for the solution you've shared with them Bear in mind that bringing eng resources to the project isn't a binary, and you should be partnering with an eng lead from the start of your discovery so they can pressure test your ideas and explore potential architecture/approaches in parallel. You'll need to prototype and validate before an entire squad starts building, of course. Think carefully about how much engineering resource you need - always start as small as possible, as larger teams have more operational overhead.

1 Waiting too long to talk to potential customers. Start with just your idea of what you think might be compelling. Can a potential customer immediately understand and get excited about it? 2 Waiting too long to prototype a solution. What actually works well in practice? What's hard? This is especially true with AI products. 3 Not paying enough attention to the competition - including the other ways people get the job done, e.g. on paper!

There a several great frameworks out there, e.g. RICE. I like to prioritize problems against feasibility (e.g. RICE), and then against their alignment to the company's overall strategy. Being able to articulate why the problem(s) you're solving support company strategy is a key part of building stakeholder alignment around your idea, if you're operating in an existing company. When evaluating potential strategies, I like Gibson Biddle's DHM model as a starting point.

It sounds like you're potentially looping your designer in too late. They should be there early to help you think through competitors, potential inspiration in the market, and help you learn from users. Getting a user's first explanation of their painpoints is one thing, but you will develop your understanding of their painpoints by showing them potential solutions (that you and your designer work on together). That all said, if I'm short of immediate inspiration, I like to look laterally, outside my immediate product space, for inspiration. For example, when I was working on how to make individual work rewarding in Asana, I looked at how fitness apps help users feel a sense of reward and achievement. If something works in another use case, there's likely something you can learn from and adapt to your use case.