When Two “A”‘s Exchange Places within “Manipulate” – Which Comes First: Acquisition or Attracting Users/Customers to the Product?

I am on the way to finish the second self-edit and revision of my book introducing Business Rules and explaining its importance for any kind of business. You can see the very first and raw draft of it here.

During this second revision I realized that something didn’t work. I discovered that I had put acquisition (of both tangible and non-tangible means) for a given product or service before the planning the user interface and before marketing the product.

This sequence does have its justification when we talk about concrete actions. You need first to acquire the necessary manpower, knowledge, tools, supplies, etc., before you can develop your product or service, create a corresponding user interface, and finally when it is ready, you put it on the market.

But this is not true when it comes to planning. When you plan something, then you first need to have a good idea how your product is going to look and feel like when used. And even before that you would need to identify your customer base, which is the first and foremost part of marketing.

On the other hand you will have to perform a number of acquisition actions before your product or service can go into design phase. You would need certain hardware and software, and your team or yourself would need to acquire the necessary skills.

While the product or service is being designed, and even when created, produced and maintained, the user interface will change its appearance and functionalities, which will call for the appropriate action while marketing and further acquisition.

So I guess all the above may have contributed to my confusion on what to put first when defining a product’s or service’s business rules: business rules on user interface and marketing or what is necessary to acquire for this product or service to exist.

I think the main and also quite exciting challenge can be concluded as follows. When you define your product’s or service’s business rules, you are in a way already implementing your product or service. You might find yourself acquiring not only the necessary knowledge about your customer base but also practically at the same time getting the needed team together, the necessary hardware and software to develop your app. You might not wait with all that until you declare your business rules released and official in their first version. Or you might. It is up to you.

P.S. An interesting observation. There is only one letter, which repeats in the word Manipulate. This is “A”. Curiously, I have confused the position of the types starting only with this letter and not with the other ones.