Product Discovery Maturity Model

The goal of Viability is strategic alignment and conceptual clarity. This phase ensures you are solving the right problem before any prototyping begins. - **Ideation:** Start with a living markdown document to frame the problem, define the target audience, and set initial hypotheses. AI acts as a thinking partner to expand and reframe ideas. - **Stress-Testing:** Deliberately attempt to break the idea with a cross-functional group (Product, Engineering, Architecture, Sales) to identify risks and market fit. - **Convergence:** Force absolute clarity by drafting a PR+FAQ (Press Release and FAQ). If the FAQ cannot be answered cleanly, the concept is not ready to move forward. The goal of Feasibility is to define the shape of the solution and identify early constraints without finalizing the design. - **Prompt-Driven Prototyping:** Translate the validated PR+FAQ into a structured set of instructions (a prompt) that defines user flows, edge cases, and design constraints. - **Product-Owned Prototype:** Use AI to generate a rough, first-pass prototype. This is used to sanity-check the mental model, align stakeholders on scope boundaries, and explore options for incremental delivery. The goal of Usability is to ensure the product is actually desirable, accessible, and provides a high-quality user experience. - **UX-Owned Prototype:** Hand over the validated intent and context to the UX team. They create a high-fidelity prototype focused entirely on design system alignment, consistency, and the end-to-end journey. The goal of Technical Validation is to shift from conceptual alignment to evidence-based proof before delivery officially begins. - **Proof of Concept (PoC):** Engineers use AI-assisted tools to build exploratory code that targets the riskiest assumptions. This phase produces "works on my machine" evidence, defines API contracts, and exposes limits. This forms the validated "seam" that hands off to the Foundation phase of engineering.