In 2015, I decided to learn to code because I wanted to fix a problem I saw in the real estate investment industry in New York City. When I started, I didn’t even know how the internet worked.

But after 33+ online courses, a bunch of late night delivery food, and months of computer time in my tiny Astoria, Queens apartment, I had finally built the MVP (minimum viable product), all on my own.

So I put the thing online, and to my surprise, no one else signed up.

What happened to “Build it and they will come”?!

This is not an article on marketing, although, yes, good marketing would have helped create an initial buzz.

Even if there had been some attention created around my amazing web app that would finally fix this problem, the business wouldn’t have worked.

My app wasn’t sticky.

Okay, to give myself a tiny bit of credit, I had done basic things, like ask around my network of agents and investors to confirm that I wasn’t the only one with the challenge.

But I had not done the in depth customer research that it takes to create a product that sticks — a product that actually changes in the work habits of a demographic.

So that business idea failed quickly, and I put it on the shelf to worked the next thing. Then the next, and the next. Each project got better and more grounded in the market’s needs rather than in my original product idea.

This brings us to today. After several years, one failed startup, 20+ more online courses in design and user experience, the founding of one web design company, and the co-founding yet another app startup (this one is still going strong — knock on wood), I’ve finally put together what I think is a healthy sequence of design thinking and customer research.

This sequence puts your creative ideas at the service of the market, and includes relevant testing at every step along the way.

THE 10 STEPS:

Starting with the business challenge (not the product idea)…

Research Phase:

1. What does the user generally believe they want to do?

• Initial understanding of the market around the business challenge.

Example: In the context of Henry Ford’s “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” quote, this is the “faster horses” part.

2. What do they actually want to accomplish?

• Personas — who are you catering to specifically, and what are their lives like inside and outside of this challenge?
• What do your specific personas want to accomplish, and why? What does that action do for their life? How much does that really matter to them? How often will they need to do this? Note: This may vary from the original idea of what the business challenge was.
• Example: They want to know if the weather is good enough that they can bike in a city that they’re traveling to tomorrow, or if they should plan to take public transit and wear the fancy clothes.

Following the idea of the Ford quote, this is where we determine that users want to get to the destination faster so that they can have more time available at either end of the journey.

3. How does your key persona currently get this done?

• Apps they currently use, and in what sequence.
• Key people they go to for advice or help. The relationships involved in those interactions — are those relationships sticky or unreliable?
• How much time and money does it cost this persona to use their current method?
• How committed are they to this process? Are they resistant to change? Is this process already automated or integrated into some other key process in their life that would also be affected by a process shift?
• How do they feel about their current process? Is it part of their identity?

Assuming that at this point you’ve honed in on a persona that’s emotionally ready for change, has the personal resources to make a shift in their process, and would understand the benefits of your specific product if built well, you’re ready to move to the design phase.

Design Phase:

4. What is the 3 simplest processes that could accomplish this goal?

It is critical here to not yet involve existing restraints or resources, or even the constraints of technology today. Just dream and visualize.

What is the simplest interaction, given a perfect universe in which all resources are available, that could address the true challenge at play?

Draw this out in a simple hand-drawn flow diagram.

Come up with at least three separate answers to be sure that you’re not getting stuck on the initial idea.

Note: Early user research can take place here. You may find that your ideal process flows are incomplete, or that they don’t take into account some tangential business or cultural challenges that you hadn’t yet uncovered. Good. Better to know now!

If you do learn that there’s more work to do on the ideal design, repeat the above steps as necessary until you’ve reached a level of confidence in at least one ideal process flow, before you proceed with the work involved to make actual designs.

5. What will you actually be integrating this ideal process into?

• What product is this flow going to live within?
• What are the existing priorities of your company’s brand, and what kind of direction will the brand dictate for this process flow?
• What are the relevant constraints of modern technology today?
• What are your resources and limitations — time, money, development talent?
• What is the backlog of work that will take priority over getting this done at your company?
• What APIs or software systems are already somehow involved in the container you’ll be working with, that may conflict or restrict what you can do?
• What is the timeline of this release? Why? What other product launches and timelines will it correlate with?

Now that your ideas are both visionary and grounded in a clear customer need that is business-viable, it’s time to make the solution visual.

6. How close can you get to the ideal process flow, given real constraints?

Integrate designs for the ideal flow(s) into the existing container and existing constraints.

Draw out the storyboards and user stories that will help make sure you’ve thought about how your personas will actually use the product, help confirm that you’ve designed for the edge cases that could occur, and that the customer journey is complete

Come up with lots and lots of ideas.

Draw them out low-fidelity.

7. What else could minimize friction for a user, practically?

Now that you have several practical options for how to design the user flow, let’s make it even friendlier.

• What are your personas currently using to achieve their goals?
• What of those processes might they want to continue to use after adopting your product, or what might help them make the transition to your product easier?
• What are the industry standards that your competitors are doing well, that users have come to expect from a process like yours?

And how could these practical user requests tie into your product?

For example, if a user is likely to try to import data into a popular CRM, can you build an easy sync into your platform for that specific CRM?

This would also be a good time to do user acceptance testing, to make sure that your process and integrations are what users want, rather than just nice ideas that will cost your company money to overbuild.

Test and redesign until your design is sticky and you believe you have a habit-forming product.

8. Monetization ideas

Now that you have a design that is relevant, easy to use, sticky, significant product that users like and choose to identify with, let’s figure out how to make the company some money.

Do a monetization strategy brainstorm.

For a consumer product, the important thing is to always allow users to achieve their primary goal for free, charging only for supplementary services that your regular users will be able to create additional value with.

After you’ve created a list of non-essential features that are additional to your primary value proposition, it’s time for more acceptance testing...

Test your market for relevance of that paid feature, price sensitivity, and usability with/without that feature.

Implementation Phase:

9. Planning of Development Logistics

Time to make it a real!

Align the development of these new product features with any current development backlog, working with your product manager to get them inserted into the product development roadmap as appropriate.

10. Ongoing and iterative agile project management, product management, testing, and product design

As your product evolves and scales, keep it current by doing all the steps above frequently and in sequence, following the Agile method as much as it makes sense for your product and your team.

And remember to CELEBRATE!

You’ve built something beautiful that is relevant and meaningful.