From Cloudy to Clear: How to Define an Idea into Something Shippable and Guarantee Success
From clouds to dirt...and everything in between
For as far back as I can recall, I've been executing projects, many of which were actually products. Even when I ran a digital strategy team at a small agency, we were often tasked with building apps or CMS, and I'd take on the role of a product manager, though I didn't know it at the time. As digital transformation sweeps across almost every industry, it's becoming increasingly clear how projects are evolving into products and how all functions and titles are involved.
This reminds me of the age-old wisdom from Zig Ziglar to the effect of: "Everyone is in sales, you just haven't realized it yet." I believe everyone is in product; they just haven't realized it yet. So, I thought it would be helpful this month to break down some ways I think about going from the clouds to the dirt.
A bit of an aside—something I'll write about in the future—is the importance of knowing your superpowers. I know that term is very Silicon Valley, but understanding your core strengths is essential to being successful. For me, I formalized that knowledge later in my career than I would have liked (partially through StrengthsFinder). My core superpowers are distillation and focus. I know what matters, how to tease it out, how to rally people around it, and how to get it done.
So, I thought it would be helpful this month to share some ways to think about delivering projects/products for people who are not product managers. This is by no means a course on the mechanics of product management—you can find that elsewhere (like
newsletter)—but I'll share how I think about things, a few helpful frameworks, and ways to bring this into your work without being too formal.Here we go!
1. Define the Idea
The first step in taking a cloudy idea and turning it into something actionable is defining it clearly. I can’t stress this enough—clarity is everything. Without a clear understanding of what the product is and what problem it’s solving, the chances of success reach near zero.
So, take the time to ask yourself and your team:
What is the core problem we are solving?
Who exactly are we solving it for?
What does success look like?
How will we know we’ve solved the problem?
One helpful tip here is to start with the end in mind. Amazon calls this “Working Backwards” they have a formalized process for this called PRFAQ, but for our purposes, just really visualize the finish line, what would success look like.
Don’t skip these questions. It’s easy to get caught up in features, scope, or shiny objects, but at its core, your product needs to solve a real problem for a real person. Nail this early on and you’ve laid the foundation for everything else.
2. Refine the Idea: Rocks, Pebbles, and Sand – Prioritize Ruthlessly
Once you’ve defined your idea, it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty of execution. The key to refinement is ruthless prioritization.
In product management, I love using the "rocks, pebbles, and sand" analogy to help refine an idea into something that’s manageable and deliverable (also works well for prioritization of roadmaps). Think of the rocks as your "must-have" features—the absolute core of your product. Pebbles are the "nice-to-haves" that add value but are secondary. Finally, sand represents everything else: things that are distracting, unnecessary, or beyond the scope of what will guarantee success.
In your refinement phase, focus on the rocks—those essential features that will get you the most bang for your buck. Prioritize ruthlessly and don’t get distracted by the pebbles or sand. If you keep your eyes on the big rocks, you’ll avoid scope creep and keep your team focused on the most important things. This is especially paramount in the age of AI products.
This may seem super obvious, like 'duh, dude,' but I can tell you it’s rarer than you think. Very technical people, by nature of their superpowers and skill set, tend to jump straight into the sand and solution. It takes a great product mind to step back and say, 'Hey, wait, folks, let's focus on moving these rocks’.
3. Check for Leaks: Does It Pass the Smell Test?
I’ve seen many products go off the rails because, while they were built with sand in mind, they missed the mark on the most important thing—do they solve the problem?
Here’s where I like to bring in the "smell test." Before you get too far into development, pause and ask yourself: Does this product pass the smell test? In other words, does it actually meet the needs of the user? Is it delivering on the promises you set out to make? If something feels off or doesn’t quite align with the user’s core problem, it’s time to pivot or refine.
Product management has very formalized ways to do this, where user stories or jobs to be done (JTBD) are rolled up into acceptance criteria, but let’s not get into that detail.
For all of you who are building without being product managers—maybe you’re just brought in to give your opinion on something—the key thing here is: Hey, that problem we talked about solving, did we actually solve it?
4. Understand Why It Fails: Pre-Mortem
One of the most valuable exercises you can do before building a product is the pre-mortem. This is the opposite of a post-mortem, where you look at a product after it fails and try to figure out why it failed. A pre-mortem involves imagining that your product has already failed and working backward to figure out why. There is a cool more formal template for this here, but for our purposes, let's keep it high level. Just like we looked at what would success look like (working backwards) now we need to figure out, what would failure look like? Gather your team and ask questions like:
What could go wrong with this idea?
What assumptions are we making that could be false? (blind spots)
What external factors might derail this project? (risks)
The goal here isn’t to be pessimistic but to proactively identify potential risks and mitigate them before they even happen.
Here is an area where you can formalize this by using a red team and blue team approach, or more simply, you could just assign a devil's advocate to argue against the idea. Alternatively, if you're in a position to do so, you could just strawman it a bit. Try to find neutral people to do this. If the project is something you’re heavily invested in, despite your best efforts, you’re unlikely to be able to argue against it effectively.
5. Build, Test, Ship, and Iterate
This is where the rubber hits the road. Once you’ve gone through the defining, refining, and risk-checking stages, it’s time to build, test, ship, and iterate. But remember: this is not a linear process. Building products is messy and rarely follows a straight line for more on this read Scott Belsky’s Messy Middle.
At the end of the day, defining and shipping a successful product comes down to a few core principles: clarity, focus, ruthless prioritization, and constant iteration. It’s a process that involves making decisions, being comfortable with ambiguity, and creating alignment to move forward
Keep these principles in mind, and while it won’t remove the difficulty of building great things, hopefully, it will make success much more likely. After all, we're all in product.
Growth Corner
Good Courses:
I took an amazing Product Strategy Workshop with
, former Head of Product at Netflix. He also has a great Substack you can check out. Being in the room with so many talented product managers and learning some of the best strategic frameworks for product was awesome. Highly recommend!
I'm trying to level up my understanding of agents from first principles. If you're in the same boat, this free course, Introduction to AI Agents from Hugging Face is a great intro to the basics of agentic AI
Good Listen:
Lenny's recent podcast episode with Ryan Singer the former Head of Product at 37signals was fantastic. He shared his methodology for shaping great products, and you can grab his book Shape Up for free or purchase here. I've been a fan of 37signals (aka Basecamp) for years and really admire Jason Fried's approach to running and scaling a company. Highly recommend giving this episode a listen!
This
podcast Unbundling the BPO: How AI Is Disrupting Outsourced Work highlights how Agentic AI is poised to disrupt business process outsourcing, replacing managed services while potentially impacting large consulting firms. As a product person, I see this as a critical example of the rapid innovation reshaping traditional business models.