Limiting Thought

A number of real world factors limit your thought, none of them worth limiting your thought. Why?

Budgets, feasibility, market readiness, customer adoption, funding, skill availability, technology …. the number of factors are quite a few. But none of them should limit your thought,even though they might limit your current execution. Lets try to understand with an example.

Apple products had keychain as a feature for number of years. Key chain is a mechanism to store passwords to accelerate authentication and logging into a Mac etc. Many years later, Apple implemented finger scanner authentication mechanism ( Touch ID). Subsequently face recognition ( Face ID). As you can see , this is a progression of the maturity of authentication mechanism to make user experience better and better. It might be pertinent to note that each of the later features use/leverage earlier features. Did Apple only think of Keychain when it developed it first? No. They certainly had a vision of improving user authentication though they wouldnt have thought out everything related to FaceID.

Not limiting your thought based on current limiting factors , helps you the following ways:

1. You can develop the first set of features/product as close as possible to the future vision to reduce re-work/non-compatibility etc.
2. Articulating the vision to the product teams/partners helps them align/enhance their skills in a timely manner.
3. The unlimited thought also helps you prioritise in terms of where the market /competition is headed and what gives you differentiation in longer term.
4. It also brings clarity to you on what is not worth pursuing, when you cannot see too far with it.
5. A consolidation of these unlimited thoughts is your product roadmap.

In more ways than one, it is a competitive differentiator.