The Product-Market Synthesis: Beyond "Vision" and "Feedback"

A product cannot be built from vision alone or from a list of customer requests.

Customers can describe the friction they experience. They may also propose useful solutions. The builder contributes technical judgment, product coherence, and a view of what could become possible.

Bring those forms of knowledge together:

1. Observe the problem in context rather than collecting feature requests alone.
2. Identify the assumption behind a proposed solution.
3. Build the smallest useful test.
4. Watch what people actually do with it.
5. Revise the solution, and when the evidence warrants it, revise the original view of the problem.

Neither customer use nor founder conviction proves that a product is right. Each test adds evidence to the next decision.