A Grand Unified Theory of Product Ideation | Hacker News Reader

A Grand Unified Theory of Product Ideation

jakobgreenfeld.com

You would do well to read the rest of the Pirsig quote you used.

> This eternally dualistic subject-object way of approaching the motorcycle sounds right to us because we're used to it. But it's not right. It's always been an artificial interpretation superimposed on reality. It's never been reality itself.

Pirsig continues:

> When this duality is completely accepted a certain nondivided relationship between the mechanic and the motorcycle, a craftsmanlike feeling for the world, is destroyed. When traditional rationality divides the world up into subjects and objects it shuts out Quality, and when you're really stuck it's Quality, not subjects or objects, that tells you where you ought to go.

Pirsig concludes:

> By returning our attention to Quality it is hoped that we can get technological work out of the noncaring subject-object dualism and back into craftsmanlike self-involved reality again, which will reveal to us the facts we need when we are stuck.

What Pirsig is saying, in this case, is that trying to have good ideas isn't helpful because you're still stuck in a mindset where you are distinct from your ideas. Instead, you need to embody your ideas somehow; you need to remove the barrier between you and what you're thinking about.

This is an important framework for locating where your current approach is and finding what works in it. The success stories of people negotiating the territory without a map is pure survivor bias.

I think some of the snark about ideas like these comes from how we all get so heavily invested in exploring territory that when someone asks if we've looked at a map lately, it's an affront to our lived experience, especially if we've been walking in circles for years.

I've done the bottom-up organic approach of building things to scratch my own itches, and have been a PM for the sales-safari approach companies and have failed in some very predictable ways. The challenge of being someone who lives in the future and just building what's missing is that the rest of the world is literally designed around being future-proof. I think that altruism is the story we tell after. When I'm successful, I'm sure I too will be very grand.

The top %5 of wealth I have seen get made had two criteria. 1. they made a big bet that someone else was wrong, and 2. they made an amount of money inversely proportional to the amount of actual work they did.

If you are burned out from over work, how smart could you really be? I've come to suspect that suffering is nature's way of telling you that you are being stupid, and that it is usually better to be right than persistent.

A product is just something someone else actually wants. The only question is whether you have a someone else that can want a thing. Enterprises and institutions are famously clusters of non-individuals who only not-want things, and "for everyone," almost always reduces to "no one." I don't know that there is product idea advice to give other than it is probably best to have more acquaintances than ideas, and of the problems to solve, that seems like the smartest one to solve for.

Has the author built anything substantial themselves? This might goes against HN wisdom to appeal to authority, but I'm highly skeptical of any product ideation advice from someone that haven't built anything significant themselves.

I completely agree with you.

Honestly, I think one should be skeptical of anyone who’s (1) giving advice and (2) don’t have the experience (knowledge itself is not enough) to back it up.

It looks like he's launched two products that have gotten a little traction on Product Hunt[1].

I agree with you. I wouldn't give this the time of day. If he hasn't built out a successful product before, then he has no track record(as you say experience) to back up his ideas.

[1]: https://www.producthunt.com/@jakob_greenfeld/made

I’m the author and I can answer your question with a clear: no. (Not yet!)

I’m currently in the middle of a learning experiment and wrote the article to get some clarity in my own thinking. One part of the experiment is that I want to learn how to come up with great product ideas. I spend the last few weeks reading everything I can about the topic and the article is the result of this deep dive.

There’s no strategy in the article that I came up with myself. They are all from people who have built something substantial themselves. This is explicitly shown in the image at the beginning. All I’ve done is synthesize their thoughts and put them in a coherent context.

I think the vertical axis is confusing. I would rename organic <-> inorganic as myself <-> other people.

I disagree on this segmenting for many reasons, but particularly because the idea that you are solving for your own problem while also building for the future are not mutually exclusive.

Same with top-down/bottom-up. I'll use my two start-ups as examples.

Firstly, at https://soundmind.co we're setting out to help you get the best sleep possible.

1) Scratch your own itch - I'm an insomniac and even when I do sleep, I never feel rested, so I'm solving my own problem

2) Idea Extraction - I then spoke with other people who have the same problem, and even people who don't have the problem, to understand what they want. This built on the initial idea, and how to market it.

3) Idea Safaris - Not knowing much about sleep I dove into research and speaking to experts to understand more about the problem they are trying to solve,

4) Live in the future - I realized that everything we do around improved sleep is focused on affecting our physiology, but sleep is neurology, so we're focused on using the latest in neuroscience to improve your sleep

My other startup https://ayvri.com we create 3D virtual world maps, mostly for sports.

1) Scratch my own itch - as an avid outdoorsman, if I want to share my adventures, or prepare for an event like a race, there isn't a good way to visualize what the terrain and experience is like

2) Idea Extraction - speaking to other people, we found out that if you were a paraglider, pilot, wildlife researcher, commercial drone operator, you had similar issues, but of course, these brought more ideas and feature requests to the table

3) Idea extraction - Though we spoke to people in the mapping space, and some in video, there wasn't really an area of expertise, so I don't think this really qualifies

4) Living in the future - we recognized that what we had built was a low-level volumetric video experience which could be made by anybody with just a GPX file. This brings us to the future of any photo and video captured in the outdoors can be made into a 3D volumetric experience.

That's how I look at it. Why would you limit your ideation to only one quadrant?

> However, the usefulness of organic, bottom-up ideation depends heavily on the kind of life you’re living. If you’re living an interesting life, full of intellectual adventures, you’ll have no problem spotting opportunities.

Quite the opposite! If you have an "average life" you will be faced with the same problems as many others, giving your ideas and solutions a practical market.

I find the distinction between organic and inorganic a bit too harsh in this example, theres also your tribe or subculture you're immersed in. Focusing on problems you've heard about in some online forum vs. problems people around you have experienced can't be both cassified under inorganic, tribal ideas are more like in the middle of the quadrant.

Paul Graham was mentioned 4 times, there is no other product visionary out there?

mentioning Paul Graham. not mentioning anyone else.

Two different things. PG has inspired many. So, I don't think there he needs a "sensitivity reader" for a blog post.

Uh oh, is this guy questioning PG worship on HN? Get him!

This was something that stuck out to me like a sore thumb when I proofread the article. After all, the whole point is to highlight the various product ideation approaches, not just Paul Graham's favorite approach. But it's just that Graham is so damn quotable.

I did not read the PG link, but I did read a book once by a leading sociologist of science. One kind of example he cited involved the unusual number of Nobel prize winners (in different fields) who had been college roommates. As I remember it, his argument highlighted or presumed a shared strategy: smart people seeking out exposure and conversational opportunities at the leading edge of new fields.

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