How to create better products by beginning with the end in mind

Have you read Stephen Covey’s book 7 Habits of effective people? It’s one of the books that still influences me today. The second habit of the book is: “Begin with the end in mind”. It says: “Begin with the End in Mind means to begin each day, task, or project with a clear vision of your desired direction and destination, and then continue by flexing your proactive muscles to make things happen.” What if we took Stephen Covey’s second habit and applied it to creating products on TPT. What if we flipped our usual product creation workflow on its head. What would that look like?

Vision

The product creation journey does not start with a blank canvas of Powerpoint or Word, but rather with a vision. We envision how our final product is being used in the classroom. The kids are laughing out loud as they play the game. The teacher is relieved to have found this game and bought it with no hesitation… The stronger the vision is, the stronger the pull towards finishing the product. If you can see the children’s faces lighting up when using your finished product, you are well on your way.

Write a few reviews

Let’s write a few reviews. What would the people who buy this product write about? A good review focuses on the user and not on the product. That means that rather than writing a review such as “this product is great and awesome”. A great review would read: “I saved so much time using this product. I am awesome!”

Optional Step: Create the cover

You can leave creating the cover right to the end. However, there are a few benefits of designing the cover before the product is even created. The cover page has to communicate the vision of the final product, with as few words and images as possible. This is always a great recipe to creating great cover pages.

Product Description

Open up word and powerpoint at this point and create the product? Nope, not yet. This is where things get interesting. So far we have dealt with a bit of a fluffy vision, some reviews and the cover page. In this step, we are forced to become a lot more concrete. Who is this for? What pain does it solve for them? What items / content is included as part of the product? We might be tempted to include a long list of features. Scope creep is the enemy when creating products. Cut and cut some more. Write this in your favourite word editor, or TPT Labs product description editor and save it for later.

Finally the creating the product

Congratulations! At this point, you can finally open up your application of choice to start creating your product.

Begin with the end in mind

Sometimes we have a clear vision of what we want our product to look like at the end, and other times we do not. When we begin with the end in mind, we are forced to have a clear vision. This helps us to have a much clearer idea of what we need to get done when we finally start creating our product. Try it out for your next product and let me know how it went.