Define

Building anything takes time and effort. It might be a lonely journey and it is easy to burn out on the way. Starting to build a product but abonding it because you don't have enough resources or will to continue, is a painful experience. Therefore, in order to make your product building journey more joyful, before you commit to building, take some time to define your motivation, vision, and resources, and as a result have a "meta plan" for building your product.

Motivation

Why do you want to build anything? Think about it. Write it down. Does the answer excites you? If it does not excites you, is it powerful enough to drive you and provide energy to continue when things get tough?

Vision

You can think about the vision as your dream future. How will your life look like when your product is built and successfull? Visualise the future you want to achieve. This will be light that will help you overcome dark days on your journey.

Resources

You have an answer to your why, you have a picture of a success. Now, how much of your time, money and mental capacity can you dedicate to building it? Be realistic, and rather pessimistic with your estimation.

External resources

Take a moment and list all other resources that are available to you or that you might get. Free space where you can focus and work, equipment you might need.

External help

Is there someone you believe could help you on your product building journey? Maybe someone who already built a product. Or someone who will encourage you, energize you, provide honest feedback, or an advice.

Plan

You know your motivation, you have a vision and you know what resources are available to you. You know what you can play with. Let's make a plan how you gonna play it – a meta plan for building your product.

Goal

First, set the goal for launching your product. Yes, you need to set a deadline. This is very individual and it might be determined for you or you can choose it. If you can choose it, make the deadline not far from now. The dealine should not be scary, but it should be challenging.

If the launch date is determined by some external factors for you, then make sure it is not far from now and set different deadline if it is.

Budget

Now, you know when you need to finish and you can calculate how much time and money you are going to spend on building. This is your budget. It is important input when later you will be deciding what to build. But it is useful even if you already have an idea for a product, because it will force you to focus on the most important part of your product.

Example

You want to finish in 8 weeks from now. Every week you can dedicate 10 hours of your time to building, and you have $4,000 to burn. In total, you plan to invest 80 hours of your time and $4,000 of your money to build something.

// Example
You want to finish in 8 weeks from now. 
Every week you can dedicate 10 hours of your time to building.
You have $4,000 to burn. 
In total, you plan to invest 80 hours and $4,000.

Plan

You have a budget, now you need a plan – where you put your time and money you set for building. You can spend hours estimating, but you can also make it simple and dedicate 1 week to each stage. Let's make it simple.

Here is how the meta plan can look like for the example budget above:

• 1 week to ideation (10 hours) + $500,
• 1 week to validation (10 hours) + $500,
• 1 week to design (10 hours) + $500,
• 1 week to development (10 Hours) + $500,
• 1 week to launch (10 Hours) + $500,
• and 3 weeks (30 hours) + $1,500 as a buffer.

Congratulations! You know what you want to achieve, you have a vision, budget and a meta plan. Now you need to figure out what to build, and that what is the next chapter about. Let's discover product ideas!