Refine Your Idea and Define Features for a Breakthrough Prototype

This is a guest post by Justin Knowles, Founder and Principal at Facture.

In the last article, we provided a primer on the five main steps to develop a solid prototype. In this article we will focus on the first two steps: refining your idea and defining the feature set.

Refine Your Idea

In order to refine your idea, it is critical to utilize user research to best understand your target audience, align the product with market demands, and create solutions that address real user needs. Remember, our goal is to answer the question of why do people want to buy this product and what problem does it solve, or what need does it fulfill?

There are a few different research methods you can use and often a mixture provides the best results. You should select a mix of research methods that will provide both qualitative and quantitative data to answer your research questions. These are the methods we suggest:

• Surveys for gathering quantitative data
• User interviews for in-depth qualitative insights
• Field studies and observations for contextual understanding
• Focus groups for group discussions and idea generation

After you’ve selected your methods, you will need to recruit participants. These ideally are people who represent your target audience and also are not your friends and family so you can get the most unbiased results possible. We suggest defining a basic persona on who is your target user and recruiting based on that.

Once you have your participants and methods ready to go, it is time to execute on your chosen research method, keeping in mind these best practices. 

1. Take more notes and record the sessions if possible so you can go back to them later
2. Try to ask open ended questions when possible
3. Employ the “Five Whys” technique to drill down and uncover more about the question
4. Ensure you are not leading or providing bias to participants

Now that you’ve gathered a bunch of information, it is time to make sense of it all. Again, we want to understand why do people want this product and what problems does it solve? Look for patterns or trends in the data, answers and feedback. It is often best to document the results of this effort in a short list of the top insights you found. 

Define the Feature Set

You should now have a better idea of your product’s core value proposition based on the specific pain points, needs and gaps that currently exist. Now it is time to map these to features and prioritize them so that we have an ordered list, by priority, of what features the product should have. There are four main types of feature that we like to categorize everything into according to the MoSCoW Method:

1. Must-Have Features – Features that the product shall have that directly address the user’s primary needs and are critical to the product’s functionality.
2. Should-Have Features – Features that are important but not necessarily essential to the product or its core functionality. They might enhance the user experience or provide additional value.
3. Could-Have – Features that are desirable but could be deferred to a future version of the product at a later time
4. Won’t-Have – Features that are not only a priority for the current version but may never be important enough to future versions

Go through each potential feature, referring back to the results of your user research insights, and put them in the correct categories.  The hardest part will likely be determining what is a Must-Have or Should-Have feature. There is no magic bullet here but ideally you only have a couple must-have features – ask yourself, if this feature didn’t exist, would users want it? 

Once you have a draft of this, gather feedback and adjust as necessary. Also, remember that this list isn’t necessarily final either. You might learn new things in the coming steps that cause you to change this list but having a good starting point will make the remaining steps much easier.

In the next article we are going to dig into categorizing risk and getting ready to build your first prototype.

About Justin & Facture

Justin Knowles is the Founder and Principal of Facture and has been an engineer and entrepreneur within manufacturing and product development since 2002. Facture is a multi-disciplinary product design and development firm that partners with startups, entrepreneurs and established companies to bring both simple and audacious products, machinery and services to life.