Business & Product
Customer and Problem Discovery
Problem and context
Home solar systems may include panels, inverters, batteries, and equipment from several manufacturers. Owners often receive separate manuals, warranty guides, and installation records. Important maintenance instructions can be difficult to find and turn into a practical schedule.
Your Solar Guy starts with a simple product question: can these documents be turned into clear actions, supported dates, and useful reminders without hiding uncertainty? The aim is to help homeowners understand what to do, when to do it, and where each recommendation came from.
Intended users
Primary user: homeowner or residential solar owner
The primary user owns or manages household solar, battery, or inverter equipment and can supply at least one related manual. They may be comfortable using a web form or may prefer to forward documents by email.
Prospective solar owner
A prospective owner may want to understand likely maintenance responsibilities before or shortly after installation. This audience is plausible, but it needs further research before it becomes a core segment.
Operator
The operator manages service configuration, privacy controls, provider limits, and support. Their needs shape reliability and administration, but they are outside the main customer journey.
Jobs to be done
Functional jobs
- Find important maintenance, inspection, service, and replacement actions.
- Understand which actions have dates or recurring schedules.
- Add eligible actions to a calendar.
- Ask questions across retained manuals.
Trust jobs
- See the file and page supporting a result.
- Understand when information is uncertain or incomplete.
- Keep documents and results private.
Convenience jobs
- Submit manuals through the web or email.
- Return to saved results without creating an account.
- Receive a concise response without reading every manual page.
Product response
The planned experience supports two entry paths. A homeowner can upload manuals in a private web workspace or email the same material to the service. Both paths lead to the same structured results, calendar rules, and document Q&A.
| Customer difficulty | Planned response |
|---|---|
| Important instructions are scattered across manuals | Consolidate relevant actions and notes |
| Timing language is difficult to interpret | Extract timing rules and calculate supported dates |
| Owners may forget future actions | Offer calendar-ready events |
| AI summaries may be difficult to trust | Show file and page evidence |
| Documents are inconvenient to organize | Provide a private workspace with web and email intake |
The value proposition is practical: spend less time searching manuals, understand maintenance responsibilities, and make supported dates easier to act on. User research still needs to establish whether that value is strong enough to change behavior.
Early evidence
Informal conversations with approximately 15 to 20 family members raised concerns about maintenance timing, replacement uncertainty, and scattered documents. This input helped form the first product hypothesis. It does not establish demand, willingness to pay, or product effectiveness.
Assumptions, risks, and open questions
The MVP depends on several assumptions:
| Assumption | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Owners can locate relevant manuals | The workflow begins with user-supplied documents |
| The problem occurs often enough to justify a product | Determines product value |
| Owners will share manuals with a private AI-assisted service | Affects adoption and privacy design |
| Citations improve trust | Supports verification |
| Calendar reminders are useful after extraction | Supports the main follow-up action |
| Installation dates are often available | Affects dated results |
| Private links are acceptable for MVP access | Affects identity and recovery |
| Email reduces submission effort | Affects channel strategy |
| Document Q&A creates repeat value | Affects continued use |
| A 15-day workspace lifetime is sufficient | Affects retention and privacy |
The main risks are incorrect or incomplete results, privacy concerns, provider limits, and the possibility that maintenance is too infrequent to create repeat use. Users may also interpret the service as professional safety or warranty advice.
Research should answer a few basic questions. Which equipment types create the strongest need? Which actions do owners commonly miss? How much source detail builds trust? Which entry path feels easier? Is the retention period long enough?
Validation plan
Research should test the assumptions above instead of treating them as settled.
Problem interviews
Interview solar owners about how they store manuals, find maintenance instructions, remember dates, and decide whether guidance is trustworthy.
Document audit
Review public manuals to identify timing language, page quality, tables, conflicting instructions, and manufacturer-specific patterns.
Task-based prototype study
Ask participants to submit a manual, find an important action, verify its source, and create a calendar reminder.
Trust, channel, and retention studies
Test whether users understand exact, estimated, unresolved, and review-needed results. Compare web upload with email intake, then observe whether people return to saved results or document Q&A during the 15-day workspace period.
Useful measures include submission rate, successful result rate, time to useful results, calendar or Q&A action rate, reported usefulness, repeat activity, and accuracy on a reviewed document set.
Product principles
- Use installation as an optional scheduling baseline.
- Preserve uncertainty and source evidence.
- Keep results read-only during the MVP.
- Restrict Q&A to retained workspace documents.
- Require application validation for dates, access, approvals, and delivery.
Related planning documents
The PRD defines requirements. User Journeys describes expected workflows. Technical Architecture and Engineering Constraints describe the planned system. Testing and Acceptance defines the checks required before release.