What High Level Product Specification is
High Level Product Specification is a term used by Bill Aulet in his book Disciplined Entrepreneurship, and it refers to the stage after the development of the Full Life Cycle User Case, also known as the customer journey.
The High Level Product Specification is a visual representation of the product to be developed. It is nothing more than a set of images and descriptions that represent the operation of the product, its features and, above all, how it adds value to the Beachhead Market reducing their main pains (Pain Ponts). This can be consolidated through images, drawings, powerpoints or even short videos.
This step is very important so that everyone on the team is clear about the product's functioning and value proposition and, mainly, an assessment is carried out together with the personas.
As we mentioned before, this assessment is done through a visual form preferably and with relatively few details. The goal is not to spend time on site, code or hardware development to avoid the risk of not being well received by the personas, which is the most likely situation.
Furthermore, according to Bill Aulet, it is quite common for people to get emotionally attached to what they develop. Developing a product with a beautiful design for this first version can make it difficult to receive feedback from users and, consequently, improve the product faster.
In order to be able to present and understand how some products work, a little more practical presentations may be needed, in addition to visualizations. Even more nowadays where solutions that use augmented reality and that work with our sensations (touch) have grown rapidly. It's okay to do some presentation or demo, as long as it's kept simple and doesn't cost the staff valuable time.
Example of a High Level Product Specification
In order to better assess the output of this stage of business development, we have included below a simple example of how it could be part of the high level product specification of a SaaS platform for monitoring projects, such as Asana or Trello:
Realize that it is definitely a picture of how the product is imagined and descriptions of the benefits. With this first consolidated version, it's time to talk to users and assess whether the format meets their needs and, especially, what other opportunities for improvement can be implemented before the team gets down to business and starts producing the first version of the product.