Teague Hopkins

Mindful Product Management

Experiment

Questions from Innovation Experts

Recognizing that finding the right question can be more challenging than finding the right answer, Warren Berger of Fast Company asked five innovation experts “What questions should every company ask itself?”

Our favorite responses

Tim Ogilvie: “Where is our petri dish?”

“Where, within the company, can you explore heretical questions that could threaten the business as it is–without contaminating what you’re doing now?” In answering that question, it’s up to company leadership to “provide permission and protocols for experimentation”

Eric Ries: “How can we make a better experiment?”

Shifting emphasis from Ogilvie’s where to the how of experimentation, Ries’s question is counterintuitive for most managers, who tend to think in terms of “making products,” not “making experiments.” But as Ries points out, anytime you’re doing something new, “it’s an experiment whether you admit it or not. Because it is not a fact that it’s going to work.” … This means that instead of asking “What will we do?” or “What will we build?” the emphasis should be on “What will we learn?”

Couldn’t agree more with these two. The key to innovation is experimentation, and making it easy for employees to conduct better experiments faster is an excellent way to start.

Visit Fast Company for the full article.

Certainty in Lean Startups

Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) are experiments, but not the kind you learned in school. You won’t get statistically significant results that could be published in a peer-reviewed journal – but you will get the kind of information that can help you make a choice about your next move.

Photo by Todd Klassy

In business, the scientific method doesn’t give you proof or absolute certainty. It doesn’t make the decision for you. It does reduce uncertainty to let you place smarter bets. A small amount of data can get you from 50/50 to 25/75, and that’s a big difference.

If you think of starting a company as playing blackjack, then lean startup is counting cards. You still have to make the bet, and you’re still going to lose sometimes. But by playing smarter – by making a series of small bets, and betting bigger when you’re more certain of the outcome – you can tilt the odds of winning in your favor.

A Better Website in One Afternoon

Photo by vincen-t on Flickr

There’s a simple experiment you can run in a single afternoon that will give you all the information you need to improve the website for your restaurant or bar. Most bar and restaurant websites are terrible. This is almost a mantra in the web design community. Running a great restaurant doesn’t require having the skills to create a great website, but a good website also doesn’t require hiring an expensive firm to design and build your site. Visual designs are time-consuming and often need some technical knowledge to carry out but you can create a perfectly acceptable visual design based on a customizable template. A great website might take expertise, but it only takes a little to take a bad website and make it good enough.

The biggest gain (and best way to set yourself apart) is not how your site looks, but how it makes the user feel. User experience (UX) matters and it’s not hard to be just a little better than your competition.

The Simple UX Experiment

  1. Recruit 5 potential customers from your local Craigslist board (offer cash or a discount or voucher for a meal at your restaurant).
    2. [box type=”tick”] Example
    Come spend 10 minutes helping us test our Thai restaurant’s website. We’ll give you a voucher for $20 off a meal to use whenever you like. Respond by email with your availability and we’ll let you know where to show up.[/box] [box type=”alert”]Don’t reveal the name of your restaurant. You don’t want people to become familiar with your website until you can watch the process.[/box]
  2. Stagger arrival times by 15 minutes to give yourself time to reset between test subjects. When your first volunteer arrives, sit them down in front of a computer and tell them the name of your restaurant. See if they can find your website on the first try. [box type=”tick”]Explain to your volunteer that you’d like them to speak their process out loud, stream of consciousness style, so that you can understand where they hit problem spots.[/box]
  3. Ask them to try to find your restaurant’s address on the website. See how much time and how many clicks it takes. Pay attention to how long they spend deciding which links to click, and see if they make mistakes or get frustrated.
  4. Ask them to find a menu on your site. See if they can find and open the menu. See if they get confused or lost if they are downloading a PDF.
  5. Ask them to make a reservation. See if they use an online reservation service (if you have one) or if they find a phone number to call.
  6. BONUS: Ask them to try each of these tasks on a smart phone or other mobile device.

Going through this process with 5 volunteers will take you less than 2 hours and only $100 (or less if you’ve offered vouchers). The insights gained from actually watching your customers struggle with your website will uncover the most common barriers that are keeping visitors to your website from becoming visitors to your restaurant. As an added benefit, even customers who succeeded at using the old website will be happier with the improved user experience. A few simple changes can make a big difference.

A Few Words of Advice for Lean Mentors

This past weekend, I once again had the pleasure of mentoring at Lean Startup Machine DC (#lsmdc). It’s always a great experience to be around so many people who are passionately involved in understanding and solving problems and changing the world. Over the course of the weekend, I spent more than 24 hours mentoring teams, and afterwards, I talked with many of the participants about the mentoring process, what was helpful, and what they wished had gone differently. Here are the primary things I learned.

Velocity

Early on in the weekend it almost doesn’t matter what you do as much as it does the act of doing it. It is important for teams to get through their first Build-Measure-Learn loop quickly to get them over their fear of making the wrong decision and help them realize that they can pivot quickly. Encourage teams to get in front of customers early, even if their first experiment isn’t fully thought-out.

Start with the Problem, Not the Solution

Watch out for teams that dive right into designing their product. They often seem to be making lots of process and will tell you so if you drop by, but they are usually spinning their wheels, and need a kick to get out of the building.

Don’t Plan. Act.

When you’re building anything from scratch, it’s easy to get ahead of yourself. Remind teams not to worry about where the business is going to be in two years. Tell them to figure out the first step and then do it.

Be a Scalpel, Not a Firehose

To borrow from Dan Pink, “Your goal isn’t to demonstrate how much you know or to catalog your many insights, but to leave the audience with one idea to ponder — or better, one step to take.” These teams are surrounded by a myriad of information and it’s a challenge to take it all in. As a mentor, part of your job is to help them pinpoint the right information for the challenge that is immediately in front of them. One participant at #lsmdc explained, “The one thing I felt that all the mentors could do better is provide coaching on action steps. As in, ‘This is what you should do, and here’s how to do it'”.

Deliberation

Lean Startup Machine is a fast-paced weekend. Thinking over some decisions can be valuable, but many decisions don’t need hours of discussion and analysis. Make reversible decisions quickly. Timebox. Don’t wait. In one case, a team had set their minimum success criteria and the early data already showed they weren’t going to hit it. Their feedback: “Your suggestion to pivot immediately rather than continue waiting for survey results saved a great deal of time and frustration.”

Focus on Currency

As anyone who runs a business knows, cash is king. Other forms of currency are equivalent to some discounted value of cash. Letters of intent, email addresses, and people willing to give you the time of day are valuable to varying degrees, in many cases proportional to the amount of friction in the collection process (if all they had to do was click a button, that’s cheap; if they had to jump through some hoops and still bought in, you’re doing better). Remind teams that currency is crucial for validation. One participant said “the most impactful thing you did was to keep asking “Is anyone paying you yet?” — That helped keep me on track.”

 

Have your participated or mentored at an LSM event? What have you found worked well, or needed improvement? Add your thoughts in the comments below.