When you’re aiming to create something groundbreaking—something that doesn’t exist yet—it’s hard to know where to begin. We’ve seen it time and again. The uncertainty is palpable, and our clients often ask:
These are all valid questions, and without the right approach, innovators risk squandering time and resources, chasing the wrong ideas—or worse, building products no one needs. So, how do you create a product that’s rooted in the future but serves today’s users?
Let’s start by addressing the first misconception: building for the future means abandoning the present.
(We’ll cover exceptions later)
No matter how futuristic your vision, your product must solve a problem that exists today. The vision might stretch years into the future, but your product needs to resonate with something users already care about.
Consider Netflix: today, it’s synonymous with video streaming, but it didn’t start there. The company first addressed a current problem—people’s desire to watch films at home by borrowing VHS tapes. Only from that need did it evolve into a streaming giant.
Uber is another example. While it might feel like Uber redefined transport as a whole, it was built on an existing need—unused cars and people looking for cheaper, faster rides. These problems existed long before Uber introduced its app, and Uber’s solution fit seamlessly into users’ habits.
Your product might be revolutionary, but it needs to hook into a current user problem to gain traction. By mapping the current state of users’ needs and behaviours, you not only anchor your innovation in reality but also identify opportunities where your future vision can be layered in gradually.
The success of your product is inversely correlated with how much you ask users to change their habits and processes. The more a new solution fits into existing workflows, the easier it will be to adopt. Products that make incremental improvements to existing processes are easier to adopt than those that require a complete overhaul.
When we helped a client redesign their decarbonisation platform, they initially wanted to reinvent the industry in one go. After all, full end-to-end decarbonisation wasn’t really being done successfully yet in any organisation. Hence, they mostly relied on the expertise of subject matter experts to try and create an entirely new process from scratch.
We convinced them that by mapping the current state, stakeholders involved, and existing user needs, we’d uncover overlooked pain points. What we didn’t foresee was that we also identified an entirely new user group to focus on—the platform’s users’ suppliers, who were frustrated and disengaged with how procurement processes were done. This discovery shifted the entire product strategy.
When it came to mapping out a solution, this could be done by adjusting current processes in the right places rather than starting from a blank slate. Mapping the current state doesn’t mean you’re confined to solving today’s problems forever. Instead, it helps you understand how to build something that fits into existing workflows, habits, and technologies, giving your innovation a strong foothold in reality.
The more your product disrupts user habits, the greater the need to prototype, test, and iterate early in the process. If your solution is truly different, ensure you have early and frequent validation to guide your direction.
Let’s assume that there really is no reference point for you in the market you are solving for. Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and sometimes, the best ideas come from looking beyond your own industry. Cross-industry learning (or 'cross-pollination") can offer fresh insights that might otherwise be overlooked.
For example, when I worked with British Airways on improving the passenger experience, we drew inspiration from digital transformation projects in retail and healthcare. By mapping user flows and identifying pain points in the same way we would for a different kind of B2C app, we were able to suggest nine new services to improve the passenger journey.
By borrowing techniques and approaches from different sectors, you can inject new thinking into your product and identify solutions that are often missed when only focusing on your market or direct competitors.
There are some rare occasions where building for a future problem makes sense—if you have unique insight into when and how that problem will manifest. However, this is inherently risky and only advisable when you and your team have already spent years working in a given problem space.
When I was still working at QuantumBlack/McKinsey, I designed a tool called PerformanceAI. My team anticipated the need for machine learning model monitoring in production environments so we built an easy-to-deploy tool to do just this. However, development was quickly stifled when we realised that practically none of our clients were running models in production yet. We had to temporarily pivot to enabling experimental model runs first before returning to our original concept a year later.
In this case, market maturity caught up. Still, the timing had to be carefully managed by first building for an interstitial step. If you’re solving a problem that doesn’t exist yet, research is still key, as is the gradual phasing-in of your ultimate ambition.
If you ever feel that user research and testing don’t apply to your innovation, you might be using the wrong methods. Countless research and prototyping methods go beyond traditional user testing. Speculative design, for example, is a tool we use to examine possible futures and design for the one we believe is most desirable.
In our approach for a client in the automotive industry, we were asked to imagine mobility 30 years into the future, but we still needed to make the outcomes tangible enough to inform near-term product development. By leveraging speculative design, we’d help the client envision several possible futures. We’d then pick the most desirable one and translate it back into practical steps to be taken today.
Methods like these help you test assumptions and explore future possibilities without neglecting the importance of tangible outcomes and near-term product development road maps.
Your experience and intuition are valuable, but they need to be balanced with validation. Start by mapping out the insights you already have—those you know as facts and those that remain hypotheses. Test the latter quickly and update your understanding based on real user feedback.
When scoping work for our reference client Aneira Health, we set out to invent a new health service from scratch. It was impossible to predict what we would have to design from day one or when an MVP could be ready.
To overcome this, we started by mapping the ambition and the team's knowledge as if it were a finished service, highlighted the make-or-break hypotheses in the value proposition, and focused our research and design efforts on those critical junctures.
This was done in just a few days, but helped us put both the long term vision as well as the near term MVP priorities in focus - without disrupting any already ongoing efforts.
We believe that innovation doesn’t happen all at once but through of iterations, each one grounded in your experience, evidence, and validation with users. Even technical R&D work can and should be integrated into the product development life cycle to ensure value creation (we'll cover this in a future article). This approach allows you to realise your future vision while ensuring that every step along the way delivers value to today’s users.
The road to innovation is full of challenges, but with the right approach, you can avoid the common pitfalls and create products that leapfrog the market. If you’re ready to start your journey, reach out to us. We’re here to help you navigate these challenges and turn your vision into reality.
This story was written by a human with editorial help from Grammarly.
