Why Now: Timing and Product Success
If you’re finding this post now, I actually wrote a book about all this… It’s called Why Now: How Good Timing Makes Great Products. You’ll get a fuller perspective there.
Deciding what product to build depends on many things. The problem you’re trying to solve, your capabilities, what you’re passionate about, people involved, how much time you have, your budget, and even temporary considerations like what’s currently hot and how easy it is to raise money.
You have similar questions if you’re evaluating startups as potential investments. Or if you’re a startup founder or an early team member. Or even if you’re part of a team in a larger organization developing new products in-house.
Many things influence your likelihood of success, but there is one factor we recognize, while often not really diving into how it works. That’s the importance of timing, or the “why now” question.
It takes a while to uncover answers to these questions. Over the last couple years I’ve written a menu of options and a set of recommendations to put them into action. I supplemented that with a range of examples I now dip into for comparison to different situations.
