Syllabus Lesson 105 of 141 · Past the tenth idea
Past the tenth idea

Constraint cards

Why it matters Banning ideas leaves a blank. Constraints fill it: each one makes the familiar answers stop fitting, so you have to find new ones.

A constraint card is a "what if" you apply to one feature. Take "a task list" and draw the card "the user comes back after a year away". A list of 400 stale tasks is useless; the feature you need is a summary of what changed and what still matters. That is a different product idea, found by changing the world, not by trying to be clever.

Make it a tool

You will write a small function that turns a feature and a set of cards into prompts. Use them on yourself first. Later, the same prompts work on an assistant, and its answers will be less default than if you had asked "give me feature ideas".

card_prompts("a task list", ["offline", "team"])
# ["How would a task list work if it must work with no network at all?",
#  "How would a task list work if one user becomes a team of ten?"]

Recap Pick a feature, draw cards, answer each one. The cards do the work of moving you away from the default.

Your turn

Write card_prompts(feature, keys): for each key in keys, in order, the string "How would FEATURE work if CARD?" using the card text from CARDS exactly as in the example. Then set options to a dict from at least 4 different card keys to your own answer for the feature "a task list" under that card: one sentence of at least 6 words each, all different.

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