Tag Archives: customer development

Getting Lean-er with Value Hypothesis – Product Case Study Part 4

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In the previous post, we learnt how to systematically validate our hypotheses about persona and problem scenarios. Now, we need to make sure we have a proper value proposition to address our persona problems, needs or desires. And the questions is: Are we providing a better alternative to what the user currently has? Will they be motivated enough to abandon other alternatives and join us?

The evangelist Guy Kawasaki once told a story about Sony and its experience with the yellow walkman. You can check it out here.
The moral of the story is that you shouldn’t present your potential customer with a solution and ask them about their opinion. They will almost always give you an affirmative reply! They will always say “yes” for a feature or product but they might not mean it. Instead, you need to observe your user behavior and response, and measure them against your value proposition, assumptions and metrics. Continue reading →

Getting Lean with Persona and Problem Scenario Hypotheses – Product Case Study Part 3

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In a previous post of this series, we brainstormed to create hypotheses about User Personas, Problem Scenarios and Value Proposition. We also created User Stories to drive narrative collaboration about our product.

Here, I’m going to show you how to get out of the building to understand what problems, desires or needs do your users care about. And I’m going to use user personas, which are ways of describing those users, and problem scenarios, which are ways of describing what is actually important to them.

This activity must be time-boxed so we constraint the time we have to push ourselves to focus and experiment and not go astray on extraneous details. Usually these experimentation exercises are called Design Sprints and they are limited to 5 days each. Does this remind you of agile practices?! Before committing to any expensive investment, you take your idea to the market and start experimenting with your hypotheses and creating refined user stories, if not pivoting the whole idea if users show no interest! Continue reading →