The habit that wastes quarters, and the five-step sequence that gets you building things people actually want.

Most wasted product work isn’t bad execution; it’s excellent execution of an idea nobody stopped to check.

We asked Inkplot brand and marketing director Hilde Franzsen, who works at the intersection of brand, UX and systems, how founders should decide what’s actually worth building.

Solutioneering is jumping to a solution before you’ve properly understood the problem, and it feels like progress right up until launch. The tell is that you’re debating how to build something before anyone has articulated what it’s meant to change. Notice it early and you save the whole quarter that follows.

Here’s how to make sure you’re building the right thing.

Before anything gets built, put the bet in writing: who this is for, what changes for them, and how you’ll know if it worked. A value hypothesis turns a vague conviction into something the team can agree on and later check. If you can’t write it in a sentence, you don’t understand it well enough to build it.

Here’s how to write a value hypothesis.

Every product has one action where a new user first feels why it exists, and everything else is either getting them there or getting in the way. Naming that moment gives you a filter for the whole roadmap. Features that move people toward it matter; features that don’t are decoration.

Here’s how to find your product’s core value action.

Ideas arrive as opinions, and opinions get settled by whoever is most senior in the room. Rewriting each idea as a hypothesis, with a change you expect and a way to measure it, moves the decision from status to evidence. It also kills the weak ideas cheaply, before they consume a sprint.

Here’s how to test a feature idea before you build it.

For anything expensive, especially AI features, do the work by hand for a handful of users before writing a line of code. If people don’t engage when a human delivers the outcome, a machine delivering it won’t fix that. It’s an afternoon of effort that can save you weeks of engineering.

Here’s how to know if you need an AI feature.

Work the five and your roadmap stops being a list of things that sounded good in a meeting: fewer features nobody uses, decisions settled by evidence instead of seniority, and the expensive builds tested before they cost you a quarter.

These five steps are drawn from From Solutioneering to UX: How to Prioritise Designing the Right Things, Hilde’s full masterclass inside the Founder Collab, which is the complete approach to deciding what deserves your build time:

You’ll also get access to 40+ other masterclasses from SA founders and operators on sales, fundraising, paid media, automations and more inside The Founder Collab.

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