01
Purpose
Why does this exist, and what breaks if it does not?
Most products fail here and nobody notices for eighteen months. If the purpose cannot be said in one sentence without the word “platform”, there is no purpose yet.
The 5P alignment
Five questions. If any one of them has no honest answer, nothing gets built — because the cost of finding out later is eighteen months.
The five questions
02
Product
What is the smallest thing that proves the purpose?
Not the MVP as a scope-cutting excuse — the MVP as an argument. If it ships and the hypothesis is still untested, it was not a product, it was activity.
03
People
Who has to change their behaviour for this to work?
Every product is a request that someone act differently. Users, yes — but also the sales team, the fulfilment team, and the person who has to stop doing it the old way.
04
Path
How does the first user become the thousandth?
Growth is not a channel. It is the answer to why the product gets easier to sell the more people use it. If there is no such reason, you are buying users, not growing.
05
Place
What does the market actually permit here, today?
Regulation, culture, infrastructure, trust. A gold platform in Tehran and a gold platform in Zurich are not the same product with different copy.
Where this comes from, and its limits: distilled from the engagements on the Experience page. It is a working model, not an externally validated methodology — it has to prove its worth in every engagement, or it does not get used.
06
In practice
What it looked like at Shalize
The framework is not a diagram. This is what running it actually produced.
Purpose
Make gold buyable without trusting anyone
ResultBuyback written into the product, not the sales pitch.
Product
The operating system, not the app
ResultEnquiry → order → invoice → payment → fulfilment → buyback, each with one owner.
People
Sales had to stop working from memory
ResultCRM adoption was the real launch, not the website.
Path
Trust compounds; ads do not
Result4,000+ verified customers; repeat purchase became the channel.
Place
An Iranian gold market settles physically
ResultLogistics and custody were product problems, not back-office ones.
Next step
Have a problem that will not hold still?
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