If you're like me, you have a stack of ideas in the back of your mind. Ideas for new apps, how to improve something in your business, or how to make a product better. Ideas are awesome, but they're worthless without execution.

If all your ideas have the same value (e.g. zero), how do you decide which ones to work on and which ones to let fade into distant memory? That's where a good process comes in, a process that helps you validate ideas to see if they're worth pouring more thought, effort, or money into.

Design is the process of moving something from your mind’s eye into reality.

People get stuck because they don’t have a simple framework for building what they see in their mind. Building things is hard and messy. Lots of people think it’s a linear process, with one step after another. After all, that’s how we go through life, one step at a time. It's actually not a linear process. It's an iterative one.

"You have to alternate between a creative mindset of ideation, wireframing, and prototyping to an analytical mindset of testing, observing, and measuring results. That’s the only true path to success."

There's a lot more to defining and following a process that works for you, and I'm always happy to talk with you about how we do it at Nine Labs, but that's for another time.

The important thing is that once you choose a process to follow, that you stick with it and use the same process every time. Following the same process ensures you're using the same methods and measurements to validate your ideas. Without a consistent process you just introduce risk, and nobody wants that.

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