One of the cardinal sins of product management can be seen as jumping straight to the solution. Hands up, I was guilty of this (and some) when trying to pioneer my own idea –  Beecome

Be the best you can be within your Geo-Location or your hive sounds great right e.g become healthy in London by trying out running clubs or reading articles


The intent was there and my by lord was the passion, I even ended up winning some seed funding in a dragons den style manner topping the Loughborough  University’s think big awards. Here’s a pic of me in my much formative years alongside Josef from Josef and Josef kitchenware

However, after failed launches (no customers) and even worst no testing of the market I ended up giving up hope and started to progress a career in Product starting in Manchester and moving to London where it is only now I feel comfortable enough to truly reflect.

Recently, I was extremely grateful to have been introduced via my partner to a legend (in my eyes) someone who has really done the done. Started a company sold it to  a Huge company, set up another company within said huge company which was then bought internally by a huge division within the huge company (you get the picture – I explained my history and nature of the idea and he had said that he had been in the same situation himself, he also won’t let go of over 15 potential business, products or features as he pays recurring fees on domain names… just in case. I was instantly relieved.

He had also learnt this lesson…

“Fall in love with a solution rather than a problem limits your ability to test product market fit “

– oh boy did that resonate with me

Rather than imprint this into a framework his advice was along the lines of:

Does the problem even exist
Speak to people to ensure it exists
redirect the solution of the problem into a more focussed idea
create low fidelity mocks
Speak to people about the mocks and learn if that would save the problem for the,
FOCUS the idea
Maybe just maybe prototype off the back of these learnings
Gather feedback (speak to potential customers)

Rinse and Repeat 

To my friends and family out there who may / may not read this don’t worry I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole again, one thing I will do is learn from the situation and follow guidance taking this learning into both my professional and personal endeavours.