What can quilting teach about building a product? Step 1: Planning
By: Mindy Regnell
Tags: Lessons Learned, Product Management, Quilting, Product, Planning

What do opportunity cost, personas, and use-cases have to do with quilting?

This is what happens when you buy fabric with no solid plans and/or go fabric shopping on Black Friday.

Hopefully the intro to this series made an interesting enough case that quilting can teach you a few things about building a product. Each article will dive deeper into different phases of building a quilt to provide more specific examples.

A quick overview of building a quilt

If you’ve never built a quilt before, here is a quick overview of the steps.

Step 1: Planning — Deciding what you want to make and who is it for

Step 2: Piecing your quilt top- This is a fancy way of saying making the top of your quilt usually this what most people think of as quilting. Gather your materials and get started.

Step 3: Quilting — Taking your quilt top, backing & batting (the fluffy stuff that makes a quilt soft) and sew them together.

Step 4: Binding — Creating the edging & finishing your quilt.

So how do you get started?

When building a product or making a quilt you are immediately faced with a choice — do you focus on what you are building or who you are building it for? Figuring this out can be tricky and often these two decisions are intertwined.

Quilting personas & use-cases

When planning a product build, often planning can start with what to build rather than who you are building for. In the case of quilting, since I’m not selling my quilts (and have zero desire to) I’m more focused on the user persona and I’ve found that if I start with who rather than what, I end up with an extremely different quilt. I think there’s some important product lessons that can be gleaned from that.

When you are creating a quilt, it’s advantageous to think about who will be using the quilt and how. A quilt made for an infant could end up being displayed in the nursery or it could be used for tummy time. These are contrasting use-cases even though they are both for a baby. A quilt made for display doesn’t need the same qualities; it will rarely need to be washed and extra soft fabric choices aren’t necessary.

Similarly, if your product roadmap only includes what you’re building, but not who you’re building it for (or why they even need it), there’s a better chance you’ll wind up with a really cool piece of technology that can’t or won’t be used in its current form.

When I start the planning process of a baby quilt with a specific family in mind, I try to find out if there is a nursery theme or even just the color scheme that I can work with — as well as how they might plan to use the quilt.

Similarly, when planning to build a new product, knowing just who you want to build for isn’t enough information on it’s own. Without additional context, similar to how I should know more about how a baby quilt would be used, it will be hard to build a product that truly fits the needs of either your buyer or user persona. Taking the time to better understand the personas of both your user & buyer can help you create a product that addresses the problems of a potential user and is valuable for a potential buyer.

For a baby blanket, I have two different users- the baby and the parents. Let’s be honest, the baby isn’t really giving much feedback at the planning stage, so that leaves me with my friends, the future parents, as my user persona. From here I could subdivide into a few different types of parents if I needed to get more specific — first time parents vs current parents for example. This quickly becomes tailored to the individuals to help figure out what to build.

Here are just a few examples: