Product Development Tools

Most products follow the same pattern. They start with an a-ha moment: you come up with an idea and sketch it out quickly. Then the product becomes incredibly complex, and you are dealing with bugs, different mobile experiences and all the other details of a fully fledged product.

In this talk at Mind the Product in 2015, Ryan Singer, who designs interfaces and manages product teams at Basecamp (formerly 37signals), says the key is to identify the capabilities a product needs that are orthogonal to each other. If you can separate one thing from another and work on it, you reach a state called done, and you can check capabilities off one after another.

Singer then breaks each capability into the component pieces needed to design, build and deliver it, which becomes that capability’s to-do list. This gives clear visibility of the whole project: instead of piecemeal work, you see exactly what’s done and what’s not at any stage. He demonstrates the method by drawing out an example project live on stage.