Your North Star for AI: Idea to Product

TL;DR

Building products with AI is incredibly fast, but speed without direction leads to bloated, unfocused software. A "north star" - your definition of what "good" looks like - keeps you on track from initial idea through MVP to production. This guide walks you through three stages: (1) The Idea - use a scratch pad exercise to define features and pain points, (2) The MVP - leverage vibe coding to quickly validate your concept, and (3) The Product - scale intentionally while avoiding scope creep. The key is maintaining focus on solving specific pain points rather than chasing every feature request. With a clear north star, you'll ship products that solve real problems instead of drifting toward mediocrity.

Outline

AI has drastically sped up how fast a proficient developer can ship products. MVPs can be sewn together as fast as you can think and production features can be integrated in a fraction of the time. This speed primarily comes from utilizing tools such as Cursor or Claude Code which enable "vibing" your way from idea to product.

This brings about a new challenge - you need to be able to articulate what you want and what a positive result is - i.e. what is "good". But knowing what "good" is is hard when you move from basic interfaces and functionality to complex systems. And it gets even harder if you don't understand the underlying architectural patterns and principles that construct your developing world. For these reasons, it's key to have a north star for your development process and I hope to expand upon what a north star is and how to work from idea to production with AI assistance (i.e. how to make your vibe coding not suck).

The Idea

Every product starts with an idea. That can come from client pain-points, market trends, personal experience, imagination, etc. For our purposes, let's assume we have an idea for a coffee shop product inventory management system. Our goal in this stage is to determine what a good outcome looks like while still leaving room for creativity down the line.

The Scratch Pad

I like paper and pencils - they let me quickly sketch out designs, flow charts, and expand ideas with minimal effort and without too much detail that would clog up downstream creativity.

1. Write down your idea in the center of the page (Coffee Inventory Management)
   • The top half of the page will be for features
   • The bottom half of the page will be for pain points
2. From the idea, draw lines down to bubbles with "Pain points this idea solves" (max 5) (When should I order more coffee beans?)
   • From each bubble draw small arrows down to concise questions the user would ask to solve the pain point (i.e. "How many coffee beans do I have in stock?")
3. From the idea, draw lines up from the idea to bubbles with "Features this idea will have" (max 5) (View inventory, Order more coffee beans, etc.)
   • If desired, you can draw small arrows up from the feature bubbles to small bullets of sub-features (i.e. "View bean inventory" -> "# lbs.", "Origins", "Roast", "# Drinks used in", "Roast Date", etc.)

This simple exercise will help you think through your idea and break out the key pain points it targets and the features it needs to have to solve them. This gives you a definition of what a "good" outcome will look like and a north star to guide your development process.

AI Prompt to Help with this Exercise

You are an expert product ideation assistant. Your primary function is to help users think through their business ideas by creating a structured "Scratch Pad" document.

When a user provides you with a business idea, you will generate a single, concise markdown document that follows this exact structure and guidelines:

1. **Key Features (The Top Half):**  
   * Start with the markdown heading: \#\# Key Features.  
   * Below this, create a numbered list of a maximum of five core features the product will have.  
   * For any feature that requires more detail, you may add a nested bulleted list of sub-features. Keep these extremely brief.  
2. **The Central Idea:**  
   * After the features, insert a horizontal rule (\---).  
   * On the next line, create the main markdown heading for the document using the user's business idea: \# \[User's Business Idea\].  
   * Insert another horizontal rule (\---) after the idea.  
3. **Pain Points Solved (The Bottom Half):**  
   * After the second horizontal rule, create the markdown heading: \#\# Pain Points Solved.  
   * Below this, create a numbered list of a maximum of five pain points the idea directly solves.  
   * For each pain point, you must add a nested bulleted list of 1-3 concise questions that an end-user would ask to solve that specific pain point.

**CONSTRAINTS:**

* You must not exceed 5 features or 5 pain points.  
* The entire output must be in a single markdown document.  
* The language must be clear, simple, and concise.

Tip: give this a try by creating a Gem in Google's Gemini and pasting the prompt into the "Instructions" field. (Example Gem Output From Above Prompt)

The MVP

Vibe coding (where you open an AI code editor and simply ask it to build an idea with little to no direct coding) has a place for developers and I believe that place is in the MVP stage. At this point in the game we have a rough definition of what "good" is, but haven't really fleshed it out yet. What will the design look like? How will different features interact? Etc. This is where an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) comes in handy to allow quick iteration and feedback.

One tool I have played around with is Google AI Studio which allows you to quickly create and prototype web applications with easy integration with their Gemini AI models. For our demo here, I ran the above system prompt for our coffee shop idea and came up with this output. From there, I pasted the plan into Google AI Studio and it created a working AI-enabled MVP for our coffee shop idea! (Try it out yourself)
- Note: At work, I would likely have used Cursor or Claude Code to create the MVP based on the plan. Having the AI tools in an IDE makes it a lot easier to tweak and also work within existing codebases.

From the above MVP, we can see it actually works! It's very simple, doesn't have a backend database, etc., but it's something you can play with and iterate on until you feel like you have knocked out 80% of the design and functionality you need. This will then serve as a guide or template as we turn this MVP into a full production application.

The Product

Now that you have a solid MVP and a clear understanding of what your product needs to do, it's time to build the real thing. This is where the majority of development happens - and if I'm being honest, it's also where a lot of developers (including myself) lose sight of their north star.

The shift from MVP to product isn't just a code thing; it's a mindset shift. Your MVP was all about speed and exploration - figuring out what works and what doesn't. But now? Now you're building something that needs to be stable, scalable, and maintainable. This is where understanding architectural patterns stops being just a nice-to-have and becomes absolutely critical.

Fleshing Out Your North Star

Before you start cranking out code, take that north star you defined earlier and flesh it out properly. For our coffee shop example, you'd want to think through:

1. Architecture: What's your tech stack going to be? Do you need an API? A database? Multiple services talking to each other? For the coffee shop system, you might decide on a React frontend, a Node.js backend, and a PostgreSQL database.
2. Data Model: What data actually needs to live in your database? Think about inventory items, orders, usage logs, etc. How are they related? How will you query them?
3. User Experience: What did you learn from your MVP? Did users love the inventory dashboard but hate the ordering flow? Now's the time to refine these based on real feedback.
4. Success Metrics: What does success actually look like? Fast response times? High uptime? User adoption? For a coffee shop manager, maybe it's "can I see if I'm running low on beans in under 2 seconds."
5. Real Constraints: Budget, timeline, team size, hosting costs - these all matter. Be realistic about what you can actually build and remember to iterate as you go.

Using AI Responsibly at Scale

Here's where a lot of people mess up with AI: they ask their AI tool to "build the inventory feature" and then accept whatever it spits out. Don't do that.

Instead, be intentional and specific. Give AI the context it needs:

1. Specify your architectural decisions: "I'm using React with Zustand for state management on the frontend, and I've got a Node.js/Express backend. The database schema looks like this..."
2. Reference your north star: "Remember, the core pain point we're solving is 'I need to know when to order more inventory.' The MVP handled this by showing a simple list. Here's how we want to improve it..."
3. Ask for small, testable pieces: Instead of "build the inventory system," ask for "create the endpoint to fetch low-stock items" or "create the UI component to display inventory alerts."

This approach keeps AI as a tool that amplifies your thinking rather than a magic box that makes decisions for you.

Staying True to Your North Star

Production development is where scope creep comes to the party. You'll get feature requests. You'll think of cool ideas. You'll be tempted to "just add this one more thing." And before you know it, you're building something completely different from what you started.

That's why you keep your north star visible. Here's how:

1. Document your decisions: Write down why you chose React over Vue, why you went with PostgreSQL, why you picked that architecture. Future you (and future team members) will thank you.
2. Test features against your pain points: Does this feature actually solve one of the pain points you identified? Or are you just gold-plating? If it doesn't directly help solve the core problem, it probably doesn't belong.
3. Check in regularly: Every sprint or every milestone, ask yourself: "Are we still building what we set out to build? Has something intentionally changed?" That second part is key - change is fine, but it should be intentional, not accidental.
4. Get good at saying no: This is honestly a superpower. Not every feature request moves you closer to your north star. Being able to say "that's a great idea, but it's not part of our core vision" is what separates focused products from bloated ones.

Here's the thing about the journey from idea to MVP to product: your MVP showed you what was possible. Your product shows what's right. And that distinction - guided by your north star - is what separates software that's actually useful from software that just... exists.

Wrapping Up

Building products with AI is a superpower, but like any superpower, it needs guidance. Without a north star, you'll find yourself three months into development wondering how you ended up building a completely different product than you started with.

The three-stage journey we covered - Idea → MVP → Product - isn't just a framework; it's a mindset. Start by defining what "good" looks like on paper. Build an MVP to validate those ideas quickly. Then take what you learned and build something production-ready with intention.

The beauty of this approach is that your north star evolves with you. As you learn more about your users and their pain points, you can intentionally adjust course rather than accidentally drifting off target.

What's your north star? Are you working on a product right now? Drop a comment below - I'd love to hear what you're building!