Duct tape is enjoying a well-deserved resurgence, much of it from rising interest in design thinking and rapid prototyping. Yet I’ve noticed many of the folks I work with as a manager and a mentor don’t go as far as they could in looking at the (usually metaphorical) duct tape solutions their prospective users create.

A B2C Example

I’m on the advisory board of Making Friends, which is working on an iPad/tablet app for children with autism (actually all conditions in the autism spectrum disorder, ASD). One of their earliest inspirations was the fact that parents of children with ASD learn to practice a technique where the parent draws out a story for social interactions, like going to the dentist. The story then serves as a primer for future social interactions that the parent and child can review together. So it’s a reasonable idea to try using software to make that easier and better. And this is where I see lots of folks doing customer discovery stop when they’d likely benefit from going further- ‘A ha! Here’s a clumsy, difficult process that could be better implemented in an app. I’ll get to it’

But making great products is hard and the single best predictor of success (I’ve found) is the degree of empathy the customer discovery team has for the user. So it’s important to take a close look at how the user has used that (metaphorical) duct tape and what it tells you about what they want to do and how they do it. The little facets matter a lot- great products are the accumulation of lots of well-executed details. The team at Making Friends does just that, looking at as many actual hand-created stories as they can get their hands on.

 A B2B Example

I’m the founder and CTO of an enterprise software company, Leonid Systems. We make software for cloud communications operators. They have lots of different assets in their network inventory- all the physical and virtual stuff that makes up their network. We have a product, Loki BPM, that helps manage this.

I was talking a few weeks ago with one of our account executives about a facet of Loki BPM’s inventory management related to one of his accounts. We talked about the problem scenario and he mentioned the customer was still managing this one part of their inventory in a spreadsheet- a good proof point that there was a specific, actionable need. We then agreed that said spreadsheet would be a good source of implementation ideas for our new product feature. He got the spreadsheet, worked with the customer to understand it, and, indeed, it turned out to be a great source of details and specifics on the relevant problem scenarios and user stories.

And so. . .

The focus of Lean Startup is speaking your assumptions and figuring out the quickest, cheapest way to validate or invalidate them. That said, asking the right questions about the user and creating high quality assumptions is equally important. For that, there’s no substitute for learning about details.

Asking users about their metaphorical duct tape may seem strange- obsessive or stalker-ish. Here are a tips to help you on your way:

1. Don’t Be Weird. It’s not Weird
The truth is on your side- you’re just trying to get the information you need to build a good product. Internalize that and try not to project weirdness.

2. Explain
Few people have professional training where they’d understand why you want to see these details (hence all the blogs, book, and general hubbub around design thinking). Explain to them in the simplest possible terms why you want to see the items in question.

3. Make it Easy
Make it easy for the person. This might mean flipping through a few things with them and telling them what you want. It may also mean seeing everything you need while you’re on site or on a screen share since they don’t like the idea of having it leave the building or house. Put yourself in their shoes, think about what’ easy and what’s hard.

I’ve run a few startups and meet with many more through speaking events and community work related to my book. This post is about avoiding and (where needed) fixing the failure modes I see most.

Zombies are still popular, so I went with a zombie heuristic to summarize these failure modes. If you self-identify with any of these:

1. Don’t feel bad- we all carry these tendencies to a degree.
2. You can resuscitate these zombies using the simple incantations below.

FOUR STARTUP ZOMBIES

The Hobby Hacker Zombie

He loves to build things and he loves the things he builds. That’s great as a creative outlet but he also wants to make it a business. Unfortunately, the business is stuck because he always has a few other things he wants to do before presenting to the customer or asking for money. This incantation will help the Hobby Hacker Zombie productize his invention:

The hypothesis I want to prove,
Is the whether I can make the dial on customers move.

The Nice Guy Zombie

He’s excited about working with customers- that’s what the venture is all about. He’s psyched that they have a few customers willing to work with them and he’s hesitant to rock the boat by asking for money. The problem is that his startup is now a plaything for pre-customers that don’t have the authority or budget to spend money. This incantation will help him probe those pockets:

To pay is the way customers say your business won’t go astray.

The Traffic Fan Zombie

The site’s got traffic! And users are signing up! Stuff’s working; the problem is that no one’s paying. The site’s got a few things that users will occasionally use for free but they’re not converting to revenue. He needs to abandon the vanity metrics in favor of revenue-generating conversions that support their business model. This incantation will help him separate the wheat from the chaff:

A visitor lands
Doesn’t do a damn thing here
No money for us

The Internal Tools Zombie

Their tool works great internally and she wants to see if it will work for the world at large. Why not? Good question- but she should start from the beginning and look for a product/market fit with an MVP (minimum viable product) version of the tool. This incantation will help her drive the decision to productize or let the tool rest in peace internally:

If there is a rule
To productize a tool
It’s to see if buyers think it’s cool

IN SUMMARY

1. Decide
If you want the project to be a business, make sure you have a solid understanding of the buyer, a set of assumptions, and then shepherd a minimal viable product into the wild with a watchful eye.
2. Timebox
If you’re having trouble moving forward, one way to scoot things forward is to set specific timeframes for design, creation of the MVP, etc. Like anything in this inexact science, this isn’t a universally correct decision- sometimes you do need more time in planning and design. But if you think you’re taking too long you probably are.
3. Get Paid or Get Pivoting
Driving to revenue is the best way to shake off the cobwebs and figure out if things are going to work. I’ll be doing a full post on this next week.

Several startup’s I’ve met are either:

a) testing the market for a B2B product venture or
b) doing consulting and looking for a way to improve their economics and scale.

At Leonid we drove to our current business in three steps:
1. taking whatever consulting we could get to pay the bills
2. driving to a product/market fit for repeatable consulting ‘products’ we wanted to scale
3. MVP’ing and scaling software products where we saw a win for our customers

Driving to a product/market fit on standardized consulting products had a number of positive effects on our economics, summarized here:

Leonid’s been profitable every year since 2007, and focusing the consulting business on standard products gave us the ‘learning’s and earning’s’ to invest in product development. Without any outside financing, we MVP’ed several bits of software and arrived at our current portfolio of four products.

The consulting gave us a major head start on product development in that we had an opportunity to formulate in ‘concierge’ fashion manual steps we’d later automate with our software MVP’s. It was a good deal for the customer and for Leonid.

Leonid’s certainly not the first company to follow such a recipe, but I do think the recipe’s underused. The next section has six tips I’d recommend to anyone pursuing the recipe.

Six Tips on B2B Consulting as ‘Concierge’ Vehicle

More?

If you’re interested in more detail, here are my slides from a related talk I gave at the Lean Startup Circle San Jose:

I enjoyed participating in a podcast and webinar  next week with @CindyFSolomon on disrupting corporate IT and enterprise software. Cindy’s the founder of the ‘Global Product Management Talk‘ and the moderator of the AIPMM webinar series and she does a great job of pairing these items. Our topic will be disruption and the raised bar in enterprise software and corporate IT. We’ll talk about the major forces at work and what you can do to apply today’s most effective concepts and techniques to stay competitive.

Podcast

Listen to internet radio with ProdMgmtTalk on Blog Talk Radio

Webinar

Below is a webcast and slides from the AIPMM Webinar
VIDEO

SLIDES

I first heard the story of the yellow Walkman in the winter of 1999, just as the dot.com period was cresting. It was told to me by my boss at the time, a product design guy and IDEO alumni, as I was walking out the door to the San Francisco subway system to do what would now commonly be called “customer development”. The story of the yellow Walkman is a cautionary tale, though I nevertheless went on to make most of the mistakes this post cautions you to avoid (not to worry, dear reader- I added some surefire tips at the end). The story goes like this:

Sony’s conducting a focus group for a yellow ‘sport’ Walkman. After assembling their ‘man/woman on the street’ contingent, they ask them ‘Hey, how do you like this yellow Walkman?’ The reception’s great. ‘I love that yellow Walkman- it’s so sporty!’ ‘Man, would I rather I have a sweet yellow Walkman instead of a boring old black one.’ While everyone’s clinking glasses, someone had the insight to offer the participants a Walkman on their way out. They can choose either the traditional black edition or the sporty new yellow edition- there are two piles of Walkman’s on two tables on the way out. Everyone takes a black Walkman. [1]

What?! Why would all those focus group participants lie to the moderator like that? There are two reasons and they’re both rooted in the fact that people want to be nice. First, no one wanted to tell they moderator they didn’t like his (or her) yellow Walkman- that’d be mean. Second, group think- it takes a lot of energy and commitment, much more than people have in a focus group, to disagree with the sentiment of a crowd. The moral of the story is that you need natural behavior for quality observational learning. Whoever offered the Walkman’s nailed that.

Recurring Pitfalls in Customer Development

I heard this story almost fifteen years ago and while there’s a definite uptick on awareness about design and design thinking, not a whole lot has changed (yet) in aggregate. As a manager and a startup mentor, I spend a lot of time coaching current and prospective product developers about the practice of design thinking. I do the best I can. I tend to find two opposing misinterpretations about product design.

#1 I call the ‘Steve Jobs Misinterpretation’- see left side of the seesaw below. The basic idea is that that the designer will be like Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs magically knew what was right and didn’t countenance doubt or discussion. The fallacy here is that while Steve Jobs was highly confident in his methods and wasn’t known for taking the long way around the barn, he had an intense, almost manic, interest in learning about the customer. I’m no expert on Steve Jobs but I think that much is clear from the written record.

#2 I call the ‘Tell Me Fallacy’. The basic idea is that being customer driven means having the customer tell you exactly what they want. Think you’ve got a good idea? See what the customer thinks. The problem is that people aren’t able to predict themselves in that way and even if they were, they’ll err on the side of telling you what you want to hear anyhow- see the Walkman story.

OK, so what then? Well, the right approach is a little more subtle but certainly not the proverbial rocket science. It takes a lot of practice to do well, but the basic ideas are easy to grasp.

Best Practices in Customer Development

Step one is to determine what you’re after. There’s discovery and validation. You can do both, but if you do I’d do them in that order. With discovery, you’re looking to learn what you ‘know you don’t know’ and even things about your target user that you ‘don’t know you don’t know’. With validation, you have one or (ideally) multiple alternative product implementations and you want to observe how users react to them. If you’re not sure if you should be doing discovery or validation, odds are discovery’s the place to focus.

If you’re doing discovery, it’s still useful to have hypothesized a few items you want to prove or disprove, even if they’re highly abstract. Without that, you may struggle to focus the discussion. That said, in discovery you’re not looking to fill out a questionnaire, you’re not looking to get a statistically significant result. I’ve had this awkward discussion with startup mentees many times: ‘We talked to people in our target market and 87% said they’d want something like this.’ The yellow Walkman story helps but this discussion’s always rough- they’re disappointed. They’ve done what they’d thought should be done- go out and talk to customers. The problem is that the ‘87% stat’ is probably yellow Walkman data. When you’re in this phase, it’s important to stick to facts and actuals. Every need and emotion your product might fulfill already exists. You need just need to survey the landscape. Your real terra incognita is where your idea can take root and flourish.

You can ask the subject ‘How many times did you eat potatoes last month?’ and expect a good answer. You can even ask them something more abstract like ‘How do you feel when you visit the dentist?’ or ‘Where do you want to be career-wise in five years and why?’. But if you ask them ‘Would you like an app that does [xyz]?’ Or ‘What would you want in an app that does [xyz]?’ then you’re probably going to get yellow Walkman data, and derail the discussion. Particularly if you’re at this early stage, I highly recommend against group discussions. There’s a lot of quality research that even with internal company discussions, these formats devolve into a question of who talks the loudest and most frequently. Keep the discussion natural but focused on your objectives. You’re not looking for the expected thing- you’re looking for the thing you don’t know yet. Be curious, be friendly.

If you’d like more background, I have a few talks about the integration of design thinking, Lean Startup, customer development, business model canvas, and agile here on the site’s SPEAKING PAGE. If you want a starting point, you can check out these notes and this template (downloadable Google Doc) on the application of these principals: CUSTOMER DISCOVERY TEMPLATE. For sure, I have no monopoly on these ideas and there are a lot of great resources online.

If you’re doing validation, that means you’ve worked from a notion of your personas, problem scenarios and stories to a set of prototypes. Your job is to replicate the natural reaction of your target market to these prototypes to decide if and how you should revise. The yellow Walkman situation was an example of validation. Keep validation simple, keep it natural, and, above all, keep it specific. What would be the modern, Lean Startup take on the yellow Walkman situation? I would say it would look something like this: Sony’s product designer mock’s up several colors of Walkman and puts together some kind of an ordering page with the options. Focus group subjects (or just online visitors) are allowed to pre-order what they want. This gets you the same result without having to actually produce a whole bunch of yellow (or whatever) Walkman’s. Yes, you need to figure out what to do with the subject who selects the purple Walkman you never produce, but you’ve got several options on that.

A full review of usability and A/B testing is beyond what you’ll want to read in this post. Suffice to say there’s an abundance of tools and editorial online.

Talk Back

What’s been your experience? How have you handled discovery? Validation? What resources did you find most helpful? What would you like to have that you don’t have?

1. This is a ‘story’ in the sense that it’s a kind of product design urban legend- folks I know in product design know the story. No one knows if it’s really true. Everyone’s had similar experiences many times over, but not as vivid or tellable. The quotes, the clinking of glasses are my own embellishment to the story.