SIMONE PINTO
Product Discovery
What Is A Product?
Most people who work in product can't actually tell you what one is. Marty Cagan, who's spent 30 years training product teams at companies like eBay and eventually founded the Silicon Valley Product Group, has spent a career pointing out the same thing. Most people confuse a feature, a good idea, or a finished item with an actual product.
Here's mine:
a product takes a defined input and transforms it into something that addresses a customer's needs, wants, or pain points. And it must have a bounded, repeatable process behind it, to grow, mature, or adapt when the market demands it.
Picture a sausage maker.
He knows exactly what he wants to eat. Vegan, family recipe, the right size for his favourite bun.
He loves making quality sausages by hand for local customers.
But what happens when the number of customers outgrows his process? He either turns people away, or he stands at that machine every hour of every day, and the thing he loved making
becomes the thing that owns him.
The same sausage, coming out the same quality every time, without him needing to make each one by hand, and able to reach far more people than he could ever make by himself, that's a product.
Most consultants will help you make a better sausage.
I look at the system behind the sausage, the one that keeps the sausage maker doing what he loves.
The 101 Framework® works at every point on this curve, including the parts before it starts, and after most people would have stopped.
The Idea Lifecycle
Every idea moves through natural stages, from Inception to Growth, through Maturity, and into Decline.
But before any of that, there's a stage nobody draws on the chart.
Pre-Inception. Where ideas are defined, shaped, and built, where no audience exists yet, but time still moves forward.
It's the work most people skip, because there's nothing to point at yet, and it's the reason so many ideas that do reach Inception aren't built on anything solid.
And after Decline, there's a stage most curves stop short of naming.
Adapt. Where you use what the market's told you to reshape the idea, rather than watching it fade.
How The 101 Framework® Works
Most frameworks start at Inception. Mine starts before it.
Remember the sausage maker?
He didn't need a better recipe, he needed a process that could carry the weight without taking over his life. That's what the 101 Framework® builds with him, one phase at a time, so the machine can grow without him standing over it every hour of the day.
The 101 Framework® has four phases, built from over 20 years doing this for organisations like Sky and Starbucks.
The phases build in order. But you can enter, or return to, any of them, because that's what real discovery looks like.
e maker? I work with him to review the ingredients against who the sausages are actually going to, then make sure the machine can make them. That's the 101 Framework®, taking him from one sausage in his own kitchen, to a range that feeds everyone at the table, not just him.
Awaken
Surfacing the real asset and its system context. You leave with a locked Product Vision Document, your North Star, something your whole team can work from, human or AI.
Shape
Defining and designing the MVP with clear boundaries. You leave with a professional specification, validated with real customers, that your developer, manufacturer, or service provider can build against.
Activate
Getting your product ready for market. You leave with an MVP that's been built true to spec, and launch plans for the right channels.
Progress
Adapting based on evidence so growth compounds. You get a full review of the data, the original idea, and the North Star, and an informed decision on what happens next.