Explaining His Role on the Awards Advisory Board
I am responsible for the Conceive phase in product development for awards. At the same time, I’ve also lead a lot of the interviews of the other four Awards Advisory Board members and listen to their thoughts on the different stages that are their responsibilities.
I’ll also help nominate the products that we’re going to evaluate and the different categories. I’m sure there’ll be more that goes on to help make sure everything flows smoothly.
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How Does the Conceive Phase Fit into Product Development?
The conceive phase is one of the most critical phases to helping a company or product go from zero to one and then leading ultimately to the success that you want to have.
When you’re thinking about the conception of a product or a solution, it’s a really difficult phase. I think that’s one of the things that attracts me to it because you have to learn about your audience. There’s a lot of learning that’s happening about the customer segment that you’re working with and the pain points that they have.
There’s an active process of trying to question your assumptions and test your hypothesis—it’s a challenging stage, but I think it’s worth it.
It’s one of the stages that take some of the biggest risks off the table for a company. If you think about it broadly, there’s a customer and product risk: am I going to build something that people want? There’s a technical risk: can we build this product and is it going to work the way we intended. Then, there’s a business risk: are there enough people out there, can we serve them and be profitable, and is this a business worth building?
I think it’s a special stage in the product development life cycle.