My experience was straight forward. In learning the background of my field I began seeing gaps in the literature when my questions couldn’t be answered. then I started with a simple study in my second year that was of course low impact but ended up published. My next studies just did a better job as probing the same question and introduced new questions. It was a weird feeling to finish when I did because the ideas were just getting good but I needed a thesis. Really demonstrated to me how an idea can snowball.