As a start-up, you are in many ways in an exciting situation. The world is open, just waiting to be conquered. But reality quickly sets in, because how do you do just that? What do you have to offer the market? The same thing in a cooler way? Something completely new? How do you get started?

Many startups go on hackathon weekends, pretotyping orfive-day design sprintswhen they need to come up with a new product or feature to solve a specific problem. But which way should you go to Rome? It doesn’t have to be fancy and you can easily cut and paste from different methods. That’s what we did.

One weekend in the fall, the entire Aety team took a trip to North Zealand. However, it was no ordinary weekend, it was a “product weekend”. The purpose was to come up with something that we could develop together and get off the ground.

We hope you can use this post as inspiration for how to get from idea to concrete prototype proposal.

Before we left for the weekend, we had two rounds of brainstorming where all ideas were brought to the table. It was everything from big data systems, apps or plugins to the platforms we have strong competencies with, Atlassian and Alfresco.
After brainstorming, the ideas were examined to flesh them out a little more. A select committee was tasked with choosing 20 to come to the weekend, so the more knowledge, the better the chance. We hit the ground running when we arrived, and the weekend went according to the plan below.

Step-by-step

1. Explained by idea man – The idea originator was given one minute to explain the idea and why it should “win”. Then everyone had a general understanding of the ideas.
2. Post-it move back and forth – After that, all ideas were written down on post-it notes. Each person in turn was allowed to rank an idea from 1 to 3, and once that was done, you could only move an idea one place forward or back. We did this twice, which brought us down to 8.
3. Matches – To get down to 5, we chose to use matches in a very practical way. Here, strategy was paramount, to get the idea you definitely wanted to take further. The 5 who got the most matches moved on, and in case of a tie, those ideas got another round with the matches.
4. The 6 hats – Designed to go all the way around ideas, to uncover all aspects and move forward with the idea. For each of the ideas, we each wore a “hat” and we changed hats when we had to talk about a new idea. It helped to challenge the idea, and especially ourselves to think critically about our own great idea, or be optimistic about the idea that you like the least.
5. Eurovision Point – After the lively debate, it came down to voting. In pure Eurovision style. We had 12, 10, 8, 6 and 4 points to be distributed. And after a long day of debate, eating, walking, presentations, creative thinking, we finally came up with the idea that we are working on.

The next day we continued working on the idea, with the developers diving into the code while the rest of us developed the strategy for the business potential and an MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

We can only go on a weekend like this because we have many different skills here at aety. From development, business analysis to implementation, and everything in between.

Click around our site to see what we can help you with in development, operations and consultancy.