As building gets easier, deciding gets harder
The more you can build, the harder it is to decide what to build.
Over the last 18 months coding agents have changed how we build software and how product teams operate.
What took weeks now takes days. Features that were pie in the sky are now on the table.
The result is a lot more options. Tantalising options.
It's exciting, but it doesn't guarantee better products.
If users don't need the thing you've built, it fails. And if it doesn't fit into their lives, it fails. No matter how many bells or whistles it has.
The more you can build, the harder it is to decide what to build.
Every option looks possible. Every stakeholder has a favourite. The roadmap fills up with shiny things.
What's to be done?
Same as always: create value for your users and find a fair way to capture some of it for your organisation. That means:
- Understanding users and the alternatives they have, and deciding where you can win
- Making solutions and iterating until they're proven to work
- Developing a commercial model that works for users and the business
Focusing on these fundamentals has never been more important. To take advantage of the capabilities of AI, teams need a clear, shared understanding of what's most important to their users and the business. So they can deliver winning solutions first. Without that, they just build the wrong thing faster.
We're here to help with that. To help teams get clear on what matters and accelerate their delivery. By providing new insight into unmet needs, by asking questions only outsiders can ask, by generating fresh ideas that might just work, and by facilitating alignment around a shared vision and path towards it.
And we can now go faster and further than ever before.
AI speeds up market analysis and helps us make sense of research data more quickly. Though we would argue there's still no substitute for talking to users directly.
AI enables us to deliver working software in the time it used to take us to make a clickable prototype in Figma. That means more credible feedback from users sooner. We can literally build with users in the room and get feedback on the spot.
Testing commercial options is cheaper too. Smoke tests and multivariate tests help find the right price and package faster and more efficiently.
And when the direction is clear, we can build the real thing: robust, maintainable software at the speed AI now allows.
So if you're struggling to choose from the plethora of options you could take, or if you need to refocus on what matters most, book a call with Alastair.