The Maker’s Edition

Resources to develop an initial roadmap

What’s the story?
Start with your why
Come away from this with inspiration? Shortlist the values you’re seeking to bring into the world with your product.

Explore your customers’ why
If you’re not hearing detail from your customers about the problem that your work is solving, then you may not have found the right audience yet. When you do, use these details to validate the problem.

Competition in the solution space also helps validate the problem. Take a close look at what they’re doing, then note – what’s distinctive about your approach?

Take the values you shortlisted from your ‘why’ + the values from your customers’ needs and develop design principles. Check out some examples:
A Master Designer’s Universal Principles
Specific Product Design Principles
More Inspiration from Dieter Rams

And now, the proof of concept–
We need to visualize how our product will function, so we’ll develop a prototype. The prototype is an interactive model of the product that gives us a sense of its design–its form and its function.

We also need to leverage this prototype to test assumptions that our product is a viable solution for solving our customer’s problem. The smartest way to get through this with only a little sweat (no blood, no tears… well maybe a few) is to limit the prototype features to just enough detail for testing (and hopefully validating this concept!)

There are so many possibilities in tools and frameworks to prototype a product, and our choices are of course dependent on the type of product. Here’s a list of some of my favorites (prioritizing those with low or no licensing fees, for the sake of experimentation)–

Sketching
Inkscape
Tinkercad

Digital Interfaces
Figma
Webflow
Draftbit

Manufacturing
Maker’s Row
Thingiverse
Shapeways
SparkFun

Testing
dscout
Hotjar