Design Studio
We the product people (designers, PMs and researchers) have been making digital products for decades now. Our craft has always been evolving, sometimes gradually, sometimes in bursts. 2025 seems to be one of those burst years where a major problem (I call it a major frustration) in our craft gets addressed
The #1 frustration with working on new product ideas is that it takes a significant amount of effort to get the first version out to users.
While much has been written and said about ‘MVPs’, those of us who have launched these know that they often require multiple people working over months just to get the first version out. Thankfully, some of these work and end up funding companies and our careers. Of course, most of these products fail to get any adoption among users.
The failure in itself is not really a problem - product ideas are, after all, hypotheses - they are to be proven or dis-proven by the users.
The funding of new ideas already accounts for high failure rates. The source of the frustration is the fact that this is too damn slow and expensive from a human motivation point of view. So much so that a significant number of ideas don’t even get attempted. A hidden ‘cost-of-attempting filter’ that eats up ideas in their infancy.
This was the state of things, and something changed after ChatGPT’s runaway success. There has been a cascade of tools that have together decimated the cost-of-attempting filter. Coming back to the main thesis: with today’s tools, in as little as one week, non-technical product folks who want to test an idea can make a working prototype of a product to test it with a small group of potential users.
This is not a prediction for the future. Early adopters are already doing it, as you’ll see in the cases captured here. The widespread adoption of this practice is only a matter of time. This has implications for everyone in the ecosystem.
For startup founders, this means that instead of spending months of their life building an MVP, their 1-week-product, built at almost zero cost - will now get either validation from the users - giving them confidence to invest more time and money, or an invalidation, helping them wrap up quickly and move on.
A CxO - turned - yoga - instructor wanted to create an app that helps his students on days when the studio is closed. Instead of spending months building the app in the traditional way, a 1-week-app was built to test the concept.
For product owners (with roles like head of product or PMs), this means that the countless ideas in their mind now finally have the hope of being in some users’ hands, albeit as quick and dirty 1-week-products at first. An article in ‘The Ken’ shows how well-funded companies are taking a spin-off approach to test ideas. With 1-week-products, the concept can be made to work in resource constrained companies as well
A head of product at a SaaS platform for community-building wanted to create a sub-product, a dashboard that gives admins a view of the engagement in their communities. A dashboard was generated using ready-made libraries
For interaction designers, especially those who want to try creative concepts, this means that instead of working for months on design directions that users will summarily discard, they can first test with their 1-week-product what works, gather feedback and stats, and then iterate to develop the direction that really works and makes a difference
A timesheet software wanted to innovate on the interaction of entering timesheet info. Instead of relying on Figma prototypes, the designer chose to test creative concepts using working prototypes, such as the one above that represents timesheets as a stack of hats with sliders for entry
For researchers, this addresses one of their top concerns - that even though a certain need is observed in research, whether users will act on it is an unanswerable question. With a 1-week-product, they can test the user’s actual behaviour on an actual product
This startup’s idea of a job application assistant bot was hard to get feedback on as just an idea, since the concept itself was a no-brainer. For gathering feedback, a landing page was created along with a bot that was simulated using prompts layered on top of an existing LLM.
For product marketers, one of the major bottlenecks is when they need to create custom journeys at the intersection of campaigns and products. For web-based journeys, they can now build custom journeys and test them with campaigns
A Bengaluru based an all-women travel agency that heavily uses social media marketing built custom journeys for campaigns to take traffic from first time visitors to leads.
In every business, there is often a long list of problems that require solutions in the form of software that could potentially become a product to be marketed externally. Amazon AWS is the biggest example of this. However, unlike Amazon, in smaller businesses, there is often not enough budget and human resources to take on these projects.
Now, those who have these problems can directly solve them with these 1-week-products. Considering these are internally used tools, they could be used just like actual products without the concerns of cybersecurity and visual polish. Once there is full confidence that the problem is actually solved, the productisation work can begin
Examples we’ve seen so far are just the tip of the iceberg, but the pattern is clear: Non-technical professionals in product teams are no longer fully dependent on engineering teams to experiment and innovate. This phenomenon is going to user in product innovation at a speed never seen before. Let’s dive into the what and how of these products to help you get started on your journey of making them
A service firm founder felt that the existing ERPs are too complex for his business, and decided to build something that just works for his business
Breaking down problems or ideas using these parameters helps us identify problems we can tackle with this method
The more the ideas are to the left, the easier it is to test them with the method. However, this should be considered a criteria for elimination. Some ideas can seem like they are not a good fit for this method, but they can be tweaked to make them viable. See the sidebar for an example
Let's do a quick recap:
These are working products, often made by non-technical professionals using generative AI tools, that can be given in the hands of users for testing. Unlike paper (or Figma) prototypes, users actually use them over a week or so and give feedback
These are ruthlessly distilled MVPs with just 1 or 2 features that fulfill only the most common use case. They also need to have some basic tracking mechanism to keep track of the user behaviours.
We get 10 users to try them and talk to each user in detail about why they used it, why they didn’t, what worked, what didn’t. If the idea is validated or if the user feedback is strongly pointing in a positive direction, we proceed to designing the actual product.
Anyone! The tools available today make it possible for PMs, designers, researchers, and marketers to take a week out of their lives and just build these
A SaaS company working on messaging products wanted to test the concept for a new dashboard to visualise the communications happening on a given day. This is something that’s far too right on the spectrum of ‘integrations with existing product’, since the dashboard is to show data from an existing product.
The team decided to use a simple log of messages exchanged on one particular day. This log was exported as a text file and used as the sole input for the 1-week-product dashboard.
Doing this allowed the concept testing team to build and run the 1-week-product independent of the team handling the live production platform
Here are 3 ways to get started
Get in touch with us to help you on your 1-week-product as consultants
We’re conducting workshops where you can learn the techniques and also meet people to collaborate with. Join one of the workshops in your city.
Join the 1-week-product challenge in our private WhatsApp group, where product folks are building pet products.
Start a WhatsApp chat in case you are interested in any of these.
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