In early stages, the key to an effective product roadmap is ruthlessly prioritizing based on the severity of customer pain. A feature is only worth building if it solves an acute, costly problem. If customers aren't in enough pain to spend money and time, the idea is irrelevant for near-term revenue generation.

While the goal is to build a platform (second-order thinking), initial single-purpose app ideas (first-order) are critical. They serve as your "golden evaluation set"—a collection of core use cases that validate your platform is solving real user problems and is truly useful.

To get buy-in from skeptical, business-focused stakeholders, avoid jargon about user needs. Instead, frame discovery as a method to protect the company's investment in the product team, ensuring you don't build things nobody uses and burn money. This aligns product work with financial prudence.

Instead of waiting for features to build a story, develop the compelling narrative the market needs to hear first. This story then guides the launch strategy and influences the roadmap, with product functionality serving as supporting proof points, not the centerpiece.

Instead of pitching a solution, create a presentation deck that outlines your core assumptions as bold statements. Use this "story deck" to facilitate a conversation, not a presentation. This prompts customers to agree or disagree, revealing their true pain points and validating your hypothesis more effectively.

Don't let the novelty of GenAI distract you from product management fundamentals. Before exploring any solution, start with the core questions: What is the customer's problem, and is solving it a viable business opportunity? The technology is a means to an end, not the end itself.

Directly asking customers for solutions yields generic answers your competitors also hear. The goal is to uncover their underlying problems, which is your job to solve, not theirs to articulate. This approach leads to unique insights and avoids creating 'me-too' products.

Instead of searching for a market to serve, founders should solve a problem they personally experience. This "bottom-up" approach guarantees product-market fit for at least one person—the founder—providing a solid foundation to build upon and avoiding the common failure of abstract, top-down market analysis.

Truly innovative ideas begin with a tangible, personal problem, not a new technology. By focusing on solving a real-world annoyance (like not hearing a doorbell), you anchor your invention in genuine user need. Technology should be a tool to solve the problem, not the starting point.