When you plan an innovative digital product, how do you determine what features to build first? One useful guideline is to ask yourself: Are you building a product or a prototype? I first started to think about this during my bachelors degree, when we designed and built an e-book reader for the collaborative reading of scientific books.
If you are building with a product mindset, your goal is to build intuitive, usable software first and innovate second. You prioritize standard features and must-haves and include a small improvement that shows what you aim to do better. Your e-book reader will meet user expectations by allowing them to change font size, create notes and highlight passages. Some small improvements like community highlights might give a hint at innovation, but users will have to largely imagine where your project might go.
If you are building with a prototype mindset instead, you’ll want to build the innovative features first and ask users to deal with missing functionality and bad usability. Differentiating, new features will have priority before what would be must-haves if you were actually planning to build a complete product. Your e-book reader will be clunky to use and miss a lot of standard features like changing font sizes or creating notes. But a deep integration of collaborative note-taking with reward-based community help will let users try out the innovation you are aiming at.
For anything that is not yet clear to you, either because you are unsure how to approach a problem or do not even know if you are even able to solve it, you should lean towards building with a prototype mindset first and fill out any standard features second. This will allow you to tackle the interesting problems first and make sure you do not waste any effort implementing standard features. It will also allow you to find answers to your known unknowns and get to know your unknown unknowns ;).