The best products and features emerge naturally from within your subconscious.
la·tent: lying dormant or hidden until circumstances are suitable for development or manifestation.
There’s something special about a good product. They’re malleable and composable within its intended use while holding onto some opinions. This doesn’t mean that they are full of features. In fact, it’s often the opposite. Many have few features which tend to be quite simple. A great product doesn’t have to do many things. It just needs to do all of the things it does exceptionally well.
What happens when you let ideas simmer in your subconscious? Their rough edges start getting slowly sanded away one by one. But something more important happens. You arrive at an inflection point where it feels right in ways the original version of your idea didn’t. Sometimes it’s a single breakthrough idea and other times it’s the culmination of many smaller ideas. This is the point where you really fall in love with it. Fielding questions you’ve never considered before will feel natural and your confidence talking about it will increase.
I get pitched a lot of ideas and I almost always encourage people to think deeper about them. Not in a forced way though - that does not yield novel results. Then how, I wondered. This is what’s worked well for me.
- Take breaks often while working before your brain feels overloaded.
- Perform activities which require low mental attention like walking or showering.
- Start your morning with something relaxing like sitting on a couch drinking coffee (no devices).
- End some evenings early and to go lay down in bed before your tired.
The common thread is that latent thinking will happen naturally when your brain is in a restful state for 15 minutes to 30 minutes. Not much to ask for great ideas.
Latent product development is easier to do on smaller teams where everyone pays attention to craftsmanship. You can tell if the craftsmanship is ingrained into every aspect of the product including what the user does and does not see. I’d say it’s part of the team’s culture.
If your product has a well defined 24 month roadmap, forget it. There’s no room for latent product development. The entire product is extruded through the machine. The incentives are aligned elsewhere for reasons that are important for some.