A Playbook for Achieving Product Market Fit - Dan Olsen

[Music] anyway I'm Deann Olsen it's a real pleasure to be here at productized conference for the first time I just want to give a big thank you to Andre and the product I seen they've been putting on a great conference so hopefully guys can join me in a quick round of applause thank you guys [Applause] conference has been great Lisbon it's been great I'm excited to be here because I actually grew up like less than 400 kilometers away in Spain so it's awesome to be back and I'm excited here to talk with you today and share some advice from my book on the lien Park playbook Tim made a lot of great points you're going to hear again in my talk but actually want to start out with one of the close closely guarded secrets in the product management community I just go straight to the to the important stuff and that is the product managers motto and does anyone know spider-man has a motto does anyone know spider-man's motto yell it out if you know it with great power comes great responsibility that's right so the product managers motto it's similar but it's just a little bit different and it is basically with great responsibility comes no power so we're all laughing but we're crying a little bit on the inside because it's a little sad but anyway product managers as we saw from the Alaskan talk they're responsible for a lot of things right and one of the things that we're mainly responsible for is achieving product market fit in product market fit was actually coined by Marc Andreessen back in 2007 it became very popular with the Lean Startup movement and anytime you have a buzz word like product market fit or MVP we just had a whole talk on MVP MVP is probably the most hotly debated term out there are people having violent arguments about this is an MVP no that's not an MVP right part market fit people talk about a little differently they talk about it almost simplistically it's like Oh Facebook succeeded because they had product market fit startup X they failed sadly because they did not have product market fit so it's basically like synonymous with true or false success and it's not super helpful if you're responsible for achieving it right and if you google product market fit you won't find a lot of good guides on how to do it and I found in my career after working as a product leader at Intuit and then as a park leader at startups and then helping companies and then being a CEO and Founder and talking to groups like this or park managers from many times basically I started to see a pattern of like what had to be true like the conditions in order to achieve product market fit and basically that's why basically I wrote the book the Lena Park playbook that my name mentioned it's basically a guide on how to achieve product market fit and my background is engineering so if I want to achieve something I want to like create a rigorous framework and so I have a framework in a process in that book and I'm actually excited that's why I wrote this book to kind of give you a tactical how-to guide I'm excited to give away a few copies if you guys want to enter the raffle just send a tweet my twitter handles at dan olson you can throw on the product i-17 a hashtag and how i'll announce the winners later on twitter but basically the key framework in the book is the product market fit pyramid and it's it's a pyramid and it has five layers that's hierarchical they're built on each others let me explain it to you real quick so the bottom two layers are the market right it all starts with the target customer whose life are we trying to make better who are we trying to create value for whose pain points are we trying to address hi and literally everything builds on top of that so if you change the customer you're going after then the whole pyramid falls down you have to start over again the next layer up is for that customer what are their underserved needs right what are the needs that that customer has and within those needs which ones are underserved and we'll talk about that more in a minute but we don't want to basically address ones that are already well served if we can avoid that but these two together are together are the market and if you look at a marketing textbook or an economics textbook it'll say the definition of a market is a group of people that share a set of common needs so that's the market now the top three layers are where the product piece comes in and that's really where you have more control it's like that's where you basically form your hypotheses and execute right you don't control the market you can pick which market you want to go after but you can't actually control the market so I like to represent your product as these three key hypotheses you have to get right and the first is your value proposition which hopefully builds on the underserved needs like okay out of all the needs that we could deliver an address for a customer which ones are we going to say our product is a really good job at and more specifically how do we plan to be the best in the market how do we plan have our product be better and different than the other products that are out there that's basically where product strategy lives the next layer up is feature set okay great once we're clear on our vibe proposition what's the functionality that we need to build to deliver that those benefits and customer needs basically right and that's where the concept of MVP comes in so that we don't over build before we realize we're going in the wrong direction we want to validate exactly like Tim said before we invest too many resources and then finally after we're clear on our functionality then comes user experience design and that's what actually you're brings the functionality to life for your customers and that's what they use and interact with and when you have when you see the pyramid this way basically you've got the market you've got the decisions and hypotheses you're making about your product and park market fit is just how well are the decisions you're making up top how all do they resonate with the market that you're going after and once I created this pyramid I realized you know this is just a way to work through your key hypotheses I can create a prescriptive process that you can follow step by step and that's the lean product process and all you do is you start at the bottom of the pyramid with getting clear on your hypotheses about who your target customer is you work your way up to what do we think the underserved needs are then we work up to what what do we want our value proposition to be how we're going to be better are different what's that MVP feature set that we need to build what's your experience design and I'm a big proponent actually of valid testing or validating with before you build or code you know with clickable and tappable prototypes you can actually do a lot of great testing and proving or disproving your hypotheses so there's a six step which is once we have a ux prototype or if we have a live product then we close the loop and we go and we actually close the loop and talk to the target customers that we started out with in the first place to see where we're at with product market fit so those are the six steps of the lean product process I don't have time to go in-depth in all of them but I'm gonna cover the key steps here with you today and close out with the end-to-end case study of it being applied for a real-world product as I said the first step is determine your target customer and I should say that this process can be applied for a new product obviously if it's a new v1 product you can apply this process you can also apply it at the feature level so if you're building a new feature for an existing product it's really clear that you can apply that also if you're building like a v2 product you can apply it and you can even apply it if you have a product where you haven't used any of these techniques already you'll find ways to assess where you're at and creating customer value and improve your product market fit and I just want to acknowledge especially if you're building a new and product you have a blank piece of paper it's like okay who's your tire customer this is the Tri no there's a lot of anxiety and uncertainty I just want to acknowledge that it's okay to start out with some rough tentative hypothesis about who you think your target customer is and then iterate it later because the first two steps are so intertwined and related that as you get out there and talk to customers you're going to revise who you think your target customer is but let me show you and explain why it's so important because what happens a lot of times in product management whether we're talking about a target customer or we're talking about product requirement that we want to deliver is there's often a tendency to stay at the high level the superficial level and it sounds like a good answer right I was judging a competition once and I asked the group was your chart customer and they said Millennials and at first I was like wow that sounds pretty good it sounds specific but then I thought like how many Millennials out there there's millions of Millennials out there right and their product had to do with a certain product category they could have easily revised it even further so but let me show you why it's important that once we talk about a need let's talk about say the need for transportation within a hundred miles or 100 kilometers of your home right you may need to get to work every day to get to school to get to the store or whatever it is this is a need that a lot of people have and if we just say that superficial level we're not going to be able to create a lot of value but when we look through that need through the lens of a specific customer then we'll see that the detailed needs even though they share that high level need the detail needs and preferences are quite different so let's take two different customers that have this need on one hand a soccer mom and soccer is very popular in the States people play football as you guys call it here on the weekends and parents drive their kids around and then let's take a second type of person who likes to get around a speedy man someone who likes to go fast right and imagine we did 20 Discovery interviews with soccer moms and we said hey tell us what's important when it comes to transportation and they would might bring up things like well I'm carrying my children and all their equipment and their friends so it's got to be big enough to hold all that stuff the car has to be big enough to hold that I'm driving my children around there they're really important so I want the car to be safe and I'm actually doing a lot of driving to all these different places on the weekend so I'm thinking about how much money am i spending on gas and I'd like the car to have good fuel economy or those might be some of the examples of the detailed needs that we hear if we interview 20 speed demons we probably wouldn't hear any of those things we'd hear things like well what's important to me is that the car go really fast and that the car looks cool and then it makes me look cool when I'm driving down the street and doesn't view the things that they might care about and you end up with very different products as a result right they both serve the big need of transportation but they are optimized for the product market fit for that target segment right and I like to talk about cars but think about all the different shapes and sizes of cars that you see on the road out there they've done a good job of understanding those target segments and optimizing the product for that the second step once you get clear on your to our customer is identifying their underserved needs and this is a key concept when you're talking about customer needs that I found really helpful is problem space versus solution space whose aren't a problem space before so I'm really excited you start to hear people talking about it more I've been talking about for a long time let me explain the two and we'll talk about why it's important basically but problem space is a customer need or problem or benefit that you want your product to address that it should address right so if I said hey I want to create a way for people to easily share photos with their friends letting people easily share photos with their friends is in the problem space right so a well written product requirement a well written agile user story would be in the problem space in contrast in solution space is a specific implementation either a product or a design that's intended to address that customer need or requirement so if right after I said yeah I'd like to create a way to make it easy for people to share photos and I said and by the way last week and I quoted an app that does it that app would be in the solution space right or for my friend Mike was a designer he said Dan I created a design for you here's a mock-up for you that mock-up will be in the solution space so that's the difference and what happens is we live in the solution space and most people work in the solution space so the solution space kind of pulls you in as many product teams they just rush right in the solution space is our building or coding without getting clear on the problems and so you want to make sure you spend enough time in the problem space before you proceed to the solution space the example I like to use to highlight this is when NASA was sending astronauts into space they knew that the ballpoint pens that we use here on earth wouldn't work because they need gravity right and it wasn't NASA but one of NASA's contractors Fisher the head of that company said you know what I think we can invent a pen that's gonna work in space without gravity and he went off and he spent a million dollars of R&D and he invented a space pen and have a space pin here I haven't had chance to make sure it works in space but they tell me it does I'll trust them faced with the same challenge the Russians gave their astronauts pencils and you can actually get a Russian spaceman it's a pencil in a box it's like a joke kind of poking fun at this why do I bring up this example I bring up this example because well obviously if these both equally met the need of being able to ride in space and the one that didn't take a million dollars and all that time and effort is a better solution right better ROI the second reason I bring it up is even when you're trying to be focused on the problem space it's so tempting that the solution space just kind of a finds ways to creep in when the head of the Fisher company said you know what I think I can invent a pendant right in space he actually polute was polluting his problem space with a little bit of space so when he said I think I can invent a pen that writes in space what was the pollution space pollution that had anybody pen yeah he said pen he like embedded the solution in the problem statement right it would have been better if you just said a way to write in space just be a little vague away to write in space and then you know from lean startup in the Toyota Production system we have the five why's technique hopefully you're familiar we say well why is that important why why why right and we said well why do astronauts need to write in space we might come up with a better answer like well they need to be able to write information down and refer to it later that's an even better way of articulating the requirement like maybe then we don't even have anything to do with writing and we have some kind of series system where you talk to it and it reads back to you or something like that right so that's the other reason that I bring it up basically is that how does that play out on our feature teams when you write a G or tick and it says build a drop-down build a menu build a wizard drop-down menu wizard those are solutions right and so you want to use the same five why's technique and say why are we building that well we need a way for the customer to pick their destination city okay well let's say that is the problem space in the ticket and then we'll see maybe a drop-down as the best way to do it maybe it's not right let's talk about a more of a software example so I used to work it into it one of our big products is TurboTax it helps people do their taxes it's a software product so it's in the solution space it competes with another software product tax cut that's in the solution space and what you want to do is like I said start in the problem space and then map over if I if I had to ask people hey what does TurboTax do at a high level again at the very very high level people replies do something like it we prepare my taxes or helps me do my taxes and we can map back and forth the other person that really helped me appreciate this problem space concept was Scott cook he's a founder of Intuit and he would give a talk to groups of product managers and he would say who's the biggest competitor to TurboTax and we would all raise our hand and hope he picked us and if he picked us we'd be like it's tax cut he's like no you're wrong it's pen and paper because more Americans were doing their taxes with pen and paper so that's the other thing about the problem space it helps you really understand what is true competition and substitutes for the need that you're addressing and those market layers of the pyramid the needs they don't change anywhere as quickly as the solution space and the end and the products right in the book I talked about the desire to the need to listen to music on the go that started with FM transistor radios and then we went to Walkman and then we went to mp3 players and we went to iPods and we would just use our phones now right so the technology solutions came and went but the fundamental need to listen to music on the go was the same throughout the whole time so what I advise is before you get in solution space let's spend some time in the problem space and this again is too high level it's good to have an umbrella concept of what you're trying to focus on but this is the fun part as a team where you get to use divergent thinking and brainstorm what are all the different ways this is what we did in the workshop yesterday what are all the different ways that we can help people with their taxes and we might brainstorm things like well computers are good at math so it can help me check my taxes and help me avoid mistakes it can help me file my taxes instead of printing them out and going to the post office I can push a button and follow them online it can help me maximize my deductions it can ask me questions about hey what did you spend money on this year and you may be able to deduct things on your tax return it may be able to help me reduce my audit risk by looking at what I'm filing and saying hey this looks kind of risky right and so what you want to do is brainstorm as many of those as you can we're not saying we're gonna do all these in our product but it's good to explore the problem space the other thing is good problems today's statements have this kind of format you notice these all start with an action verb because it's start doing something for the customers creating value for the customer it's also written from the customers perspective my taxes my deductions my audit risk right so that's how we gon want kind of in the problem space right statements that are like that and when you do explore the problem space basically you want to brainstorm you know dozens and dozens and peel the onion and get a very rich definition of what you could do when you do that the problems is messy I should mention by the way if I had time I'd ask everybody here well you know what they what benefits they would want you give me a whole range of answers and it'd be hard to make sense of that so I just want to acknowledge that but what you find is you find that there are clusters of related benefits for example let's take days to these three benefits help me prepare my taxes reduce my audit risk and check my return if I did five wise with the customers and said why is it valuable that it reduces your risk why is it valuable that it checks your return we we get them to go from the more detailed level and get them to move up to higher level reasons for why they like it so you can envision a ladder we call it a benefits ladder and those five wise we might end up with a story like well that it's all about empowerment or confidence and the narrative might go like well before TurboTax I'm just not good at math I didn't know the tax laws I was kind of scared and intimidated to do my taxes but with TurboTax it just walks me through and I get everything done right fundamentally an empowerment or confidence and emotional benefit there could be a completely different benefit ladder for other benefits about saving time that has nothing to do with confidence saving time and preparing like before TurboTax it took me three days to do my taxes now it takes me you know eight hours and save time filing and we could have a third different ladder called save money where basically saves money and so this is what a problem space definition looks like basically you don't need more than one level but you just basically organize all the different benefits that you could potentially do now if you follow my advice and you do this you're going to end up with a lot of different benefits that you could do we obviously can't do them all and and and basically we're gonna have to prioritize the other thing I want to illustrate with TurboTax is that you actually I spent all this time talking about TurboTax without talking about any features and you can actually spend a lot of time in the problem space if you focus on it it turns out that TurboTax has a feature mapped with free to one of these benefits right and so the other side benefit is you want to have that clear mapping if you have a clear mapping and you have a well named feature and just by somebody looking at the name of the feature they can figure out how it's gonna create value for them pretty much right if you follow my advice as I said you're gonna have a lot of things you could do and the next question becomes great Dan now we need to converge and prioritize the framework that I like to use for that that I developed is important for satisfaction so I want to explain that real quick importance is on the y-axis it's for the need that were talking about how important is it to you for a given customer right and if I had like three different needs one might be low importance for you one might be medium one might be high and if I ask someone else they might have a different answer for that and then on the x-axis we have how satisfied are people with how those needs are getting met today with whatever they're using today again low medium high and you can envision this as like a rigorous survey with you know quantitative methods or you can also just vision and envision it as a thinking tool for your team where you just talk about low medium high and you plot things where they are but let me divide this in a quadrant so we can talk about the different parts and the bottom left we have low importance of user need right and low satisfaction with what's out there today in the bottom right we have low importance of user need and high satisfaction so it's out there today at the end of the day neither of these quadrants are really worth going after because it's a low importance need right why would you spend your precious time and resources going after this and people don't do this on purpose by not doing these kind of lean user centric techniques they think they're creating something valuable and important and then they only realize after they launch that they didn't in the upper right quadrant we have high importance of user needs so that's better it's something that's really important to people but we also have high satisfaction with the current alternatives people are relatively happy with what they have today that's a competitive market and I'm not saying you shouldn't go after that but you need to be like 10x better you need be really clear on how you're going to be 10x better than the established player that's up there the first thing I always think about up here is like Google search you know how important is it to find what you're looking for online the information you're trying to look up it's pretty important but it's not like people walk around going gosh I can't get this Google thing to work I can't find what I'm looking for online it works works pretty well for people right and then finally in the upper left quadrant we have the high importance of user needs so that's good and we have low user satisfaction with current alternatives that's where opportunities live basically and they may not be there forever because other companies are trying to find these opportunities and pursue them as well but they do exist when you look at things this way the company that occurs to me up here is uber they've done a lot of things right to get to the scale of business that they've gotten to but I think an unspoken reason why they've been successful is that they were fundamentally addressing an upper left quadrant need if I said to you how important is it to get to your flight on time at the airport how important is it to get to that business meeting how important is it to get to you know whatever a meeting you have it'd be pretty important and actually the taxis in Elizabeth been pretty good but back in San Francisco they weren't that good they wouldn't show up on time you know you can imagine asking questions about hey how satisfied were you with your taxi ride how clean was it how safety do you feel how polite was the driver how easy was it to pay the person you can imagine some low satisfaction scores on those so that's an example of upper left quadrant and what I like about this framework is it's meant to be a visual framework so what I'm trying to say is if there's a product represented by this red dot that addresses a need with that level of importance with that level of satisfaction then that rectangle created by where you plot it is a proxy for how much customer value that feature actually creates and if there's another product by represented by the green dot that addresses a knee with that much importance with that much satisfaction and it creates that much more value and when you see it this way you realize that the opportunity to create value is just the area to the right of where the best product and the market is that meets that need and that's why the upper left quadrant offers the biggest opportunity to the most area to the right and if you have an existing product you can apply these techniques to basically create more value by improving the satisfaction with which you meet that user need now if this seems kind of like theoretical conceptual this this important versus satisfaction let me show you some real-world data this is from a product that I worked on and we had 13 key features and we had a lot of users so we actually surveyed the whole user base and had you know statistically significant data and so now instead of high medium low we have importance going all the way up to 100 and we have satisfaction going all the way to 100 as well and each of these dots is one of those 13 key features plotted with its importance in satisfaction and the number to the right is the satisfaction number just so you can more easily see it as the p.m. for this product the first thing that jumped out at me was this thing up here I'm like great people are telling us this feature is 100% importance and we're getting 98% satisfaction I was excited about that my second thought was I'm not going to spend any of my development resources on this I'm gonna go find something else that's gonna create more value rather than messing with that and you know we had a cloud of features here we had this one here but basically this one was the one that was in the upper left right had relatively high importance and low satisfaction so we used importance inside faction to prioritize dots and I was excited a few years later that I discovered the book what customers want by Tonio wick and he also has a quantitative approach for imports and satisfaction that is similar to the one that I came up with so that gave me a lot of encouragement and confidence and if you're if you like this idea of getting quantitative about it I'd recommend checking out his book too alright so once we get clear on what the underserved customer needs are the next step is to define our value proposition okay which needs are we actually going to claim our product you know delivers on and how we're going to be better and different than the competition and before I moved to Silicon Valley to get my MBA I actually studied lean manufacturing and one of the things that I learned in that program is the Kano model and you're seeing it applied more in product management which i think is great but this I like to use Kano model as a framework to articulate our value problem let me explain it to you real quick on the x-axis we talked about how fully does the product meet the need from it doesn't meet the need at all to it fully meets the need and then on the y-axis it's as a result of how much the product needs to need how much the user satisfaction or dissatisfaction does it create and if this sounds a little complicated don't worry the Kano model is really simple it breaks everything down into one of three categories of benefits or features the first and easiest to get your head around is a performance benefit or feature this is simple more bizz better more creates more customer satisfaction less creates less if we were in the microprocessor space and our chip was 10% faster than the other chips right we would be outperforming them per chip speed would be a performance benefit sticking with cars that say I was looking at two cars and they were pretty similar and then I suddenly realized that one of the cars had a better fuel economy than the other one all our things being equal I picked that car because fuel economy is a performance benefit for cars that's performance second category is must-haves so having a must-have doesn't actually make anybody happy but not having a must-have makes people unhappy again sticking with cars say a walk was buying a new car I walked into a showroom and I saw this car and I loved the way it looked and I read the specs I like loved the features that had but then he looked inside and I realized hey it doesn't have any seat belts I wouldn't buy it because I'd be afraid of getting hurt or dying right so seat belts are a must-have for a car but if car a has five seat belts a car B has 100 seat belts I don't say car B is 20 times better right once you have one seatbelt per customer you're pretty much good to go and then the third category is des lighters so not having a delight or doesn't cause any problems but having a delight er or a WoW feature can really create a lot of customer satisfaction and value not today but when the first cars came out with GPS navigation it was a delight er right before that people were printing out Google Maps or MapQuest and getting lost and then all sudden the people GPS they just put in where they're going and it changes how they get from point A to point B but as we know more and more cars got GPS navigation over time Garmin and Tom Tom came out with their add-ons and now we all just use our phones for GPS navigation so they just tells you that this isn't a static picture that these needs and features migrated over time so that yesterday's des lighters become today's performance features become tomorrow's must-haves and the pace with which I happens depends on the level of competition and innovation in your space but what we want to do is use these three categories that must have performance a glider as a way to articulate our proposition which again is which user benefits are we going to provide and how are we gonna do so in a way that's better than our competitors so the way we put the Kano model to use is we list one per row what are the must-haves benefits for our product space for our product category what are the performance benefits what are the delight our benefits so that step one is you list them all step two is you create a column for each of your key competitors and then you create a column for yourself step three is you rate your competitors and it can you know doesn't have to be anything too complicated it just to be high medium low if you happen to have a quantitative measure you can use that but so here's the here's our competitive situation let's say both of our competitors have the must-haves competitor a is the best at performance benefit one competitor B is the best at performance benefit two they're both so so a performance benefit three competitor a has a delight of their own this is the backdrop upon which we should be figuring out what's our product strategy what's our value proposition right and I think that very few teams actually go through this exercise to ensure they're delivering a differentiated product there are a lot of me2 products that are out there right and this is also an important point where it'd be really tempting and easy to say hihihihihi we're going to beat everybody at everything but we don't have the resources to do that and some of you in the workshop know what I'm talking about but but we can't do that we don't have the resources to do it and secondly it wouldn't be like a focused message for our company or for the positioning out in the market right so this is where you need to say no and one of my favorite definition of priority is saying no and there's a great Steve Jobs quote about that as well so let's say this is what we do based on this we say of course we're gonna have the must-haves we're gonna deliver someone on performance benefit one but we're not going to worry about being the best at it we're gonna say no at a performance benefit - we're gonna say no we're not gonna try to you know spend a lot of resources there and we're gonna try to be the best performance benefit 3 maybe we've identified a market segment that really values that benefit or maybe we have some technology ideas as to why we can deliver higher levels of satisfaction and then we have our own idea for our delight err what matters the most from this exercise is what's called your key differentiators they are basically the performance benefits where you plan to be the best in market and what are your unique DES lighters that's what really matters and as we go into the next step of the lean product process of our MVP we want to get clear on this we make sure our MVP has those elements in it because otherwise if we test intervene it doesn't have those elements in it what are we really testing we're not going to be testing must-haves they're not gonna have a differentiator product with that so that's why we want to get clear on this going into the next step which is MVP feature said and I don't have time to get into a whole lot you know we just had a great talk from Tim on MVP but I do want to share with you one mistake I see teams make that basically I like to explain with another pyramid from Erin Walters he was if anyone used MailChimp the email program it had a delightful user experience I remember when it came out Erin Walters was the head of UX design for that he wrote a book called designing for emotion and this is a modified basically the framework that he created but it's a way to think about our product as far as how functional is it how reliable is it how usable is that how delightful is it right and the idea is you color in how much at that point in time your product realizes of each of those layers and one of things I like about this too is that you know usability was a hot topic of discussion maybe you know 15 years ago these days most people understand that hey people need to be able to use your product and it's important for it to be usable and now the conversation is shifting more towards delight right so if usability answers a question can people use your product delight answers the questions do they want to use your product how do they feel when they use your product so that's kind of the point his book in this framework but the idea is we can use this framework to think about how we approach MVP and color in what we plan to execute on for our first MVP and what the mistake I see a lot of teams do is they know they can't possibly bite off the whole pyramid at once and they know they can't bite off all the functionality of lunch but the use MVP is an excuse to do this to build a subset of functionality but say you know what it's okay if it's buggy it's just an MVP it's okay if it's not easy to use it's just an MVP we'll fix it later let's just get it out and test it right it's okay if it's not delightful how do you think when you testing them you feel like this with customers how do you think it does it doesn't do well is just having the functionality isn't adequate people have to be able to use it and needs to work well enough right so it's true that you only want to build a slice of the pyramid for your MVP but it should look more like this where for whatever subset of functionality you are biting off you basically are making sure that it's reliable enough useful enough and delightful enough I'm not saying it's going to be perfect it is an MVP right but you need to you can't completely ignore those other aspects of it so just please keep that in mind when you're doing your MVP so that you're really testing your product and your value proposition the next step would be great we're clear on our in the book I have a lot more guidance on how to determine what your MVP functionality should be and break things down don't have time to get into that but once we get clear on what that feature set is the next step is to create is to do user experience design to create a prototype and figure out how it's going to work and as I said I'm a big believer in testing with clickable tappable prototypes and the tools have made it really easy these days the final step once we have our MVP prototype where we have our live MVP or live product is to test it with customers right and now we've come worked our way all the way through so that you extra prototype or that product that we've built is the manifestation of all the assumptions and decisions we've made along the way and now the point is to go take that and close the loop and test with customers and again I don't have a lot of time to get into it but I have advice on how to how to run those good sessions with customers so I want to close out with a study of this being applied to end-to-end it's for a project that I did called marketing report calm the my client was the CEO of a small start-up and they already had a product in market and he an idea for a new product and he wanted me to validate it and it was a small team me the CEO the VP of Marketing and a UI designer and he had very limited have resources so he wanted me to validate that there was a business opportunity there and he gave me the constraint that we can't do any coding you need to do this without any coding and I said great that sounds good and the idea wasn't marketing for does anyone here get junk mail at home a few people looks like yeah a lot of hands right so they found you guys too they have they get us in the states pretty good so the idea was we all get junk mail and say I get a piece of junk mail and it's and it's for cat litter you know save money on cat litter why did I get that well it's because in some marketing database somewhere in the cloud it thinks that Dan Olson has a cat right and they may be right and they may be wrong right why that's why I got that and there weren't all in analogies analogies to the credit industry the CEO would work in the credit industry and so if you think about the credit industry not today but while a while ago you would apply for a loan or a credit card and you'd send in your information and they would look you up in some secret database in the cloud and come back and say yes you're approved or no you're not based on you know all the data that they had on you it was a similar ideas let's empower people to see the data as to why they're getting the marketing mail that they're getting that was the idea I said okay sounds great identifying the entire customer you guys just saw everybody gets junk mail so it was basically a broad consumer offering step one consumer offering for a broad customer market step two was okay let's get clear on the problem space in the solution space the top idea was learn why I received the junk mail I received that was the top problem space statement that they were really interested in focused on and the top solution space idea is a map to that where a marketing report which was similar to a credit report that consisted of a marketing profile where it would show you all the data that they had on you that was being used to send you the junk mail that you got and a marketing score which was meant to be similar to a credit score some kind of numerical measure where higher it was better basically so that was the core idea and one of the executives in addition to the core idea said well what about money-saving offers like maybe I can say you know what I don't have a cat I have a dog can I just tell you I have a dog and opt-in to get dog food coupons to save me money so I thought people might want to opt in for money-saving offers he had a hypothesis people might want to compare their shopping and spending with other people and then because social networking was hot at the time we just put social networking in there so pure kind of tops down thing the other executive wasn't interested in any of those three things but they were more interested there again we're interested in the core idea of why am I getting the junk mail that I'm getting but then you to help people actually what if we just explored just reducing the junk mail that people get and then we brainstorm that hey if we're saving all this paper we can help people you know we can say that we're saving trees or being environmentally conscious and so I in rated this to get to this point and I guess said okay is everyone's idea on the board they said yes and I looked at this with an eye towards NDP and I said you know what this is way too big for a single MVP so what I did is I actually created two different MVPs the first was I took this functionality plus this functionality and we call it the marketing shield because it was shielding you from junk mail and then the second MVP was this core green functionality plus the blue functionality and it was called a marketing saver because it's trying to save you money so then now that we had define our feature set we moved to the next stage creating our ux prototype this is an example of the landing page that you would get to write I'd call this medium fidelity we didn't obsess about the design or worry about it too much but it gives us the basics ideas and then when you click in this is the page that you got to and it had like four blocks on here and wait the way this would work is you basically would we would mix and match the different features to the 2mbps and when you clicked on one these learn more buttons you would go to a page where you would interact with that feature so it was a prototype of about eight or nine pages and I moderated people through the clickable prototype and what did I learn here's that same chart now color coded with red yellow green nothing was a slam dunk there were tons of questions and concerns throughout the sessions right so green doesn't mean yeah they liked it green means well we understood their concerns and we think we could address them if we iterated and we think there's enough underlying value there so the first thing is did we get any green yes we did there's no guarantees you're going to get green when you run this right the second thing is any green in the main area there's no green so I was like I'm glad we tested something else and this happens all the time people go out with a certain idea in a certain hypothesis for a certain target market and they go that's not too interesting but let me tell you about something else and then finally the red I'm just as happy about the red do you guys know what a marketing score is I don't either but I know it would have taken a lot of resources to like hire to buy a data feed and all this engineering time and effort to create the algorithm in the score and all this effort to train users on it but because we saw that people don't want it we don't have to do that so part of being lean is avoiding that waste so we basically had a pivot right you talked about a pivot we started here and we I decided we going to pivot to there we gonna pivot to here and we decided to pivot to reduce junk meal and because we hadn't coded anything we had no problem just throwing away our prototypes and starting from scratch and what we did is we started from scratch and we went through the six pages I have notes I had from the customer sessions and we made through the new prototype addressed every single question our concern and we pivoted to junk mail freeze so marketing port rot Dom completely gone and we learned all kinds of stuff we learned that not all junk mail is the same we learned that there are certain types of junk mail that people really really don't like and it's the financial related when cash advance checks pre-approved credit card offers because people were afraid people gonna steal money for their account or somehow take their identity I also learned other things and this is what happens when you go out and talk to people I would ask people hey tell me what happens when you get your jacket alright let me tell you Dan I get my junk mail and I go to the shredder and I go shred shred shred shred shred shred they shred their junk mail for five minutes I'm sure some of you do that that's 30 minutes a week that's 1,500 minutes a year so there was a whole save time benefit that we didn't even have on our problem space map so we added that the second time around and little things like people said are you gonna save trees how many trees are you gonna save so we said oh we're gonna save 43 trees just so we answered their questions and it was like a night and day difference there was over some questions and concerns the second time around and both times we asked people hey would you pay 10 bucks a month for this and it's always iffy to ask people if they would pay but we saw a market night and day difference the second time around people said well I did a 30-day trial but if your product did what it said I would gladly pay you 10 bucks a month and then after the truck after the trials were done I give them thank you for I give him the payment for their time thank you very much almost every single person asked so is this product live now can I go use this I said no sorry we're still building it's not quite live yet like hey can I give you my email can you email me when it comes out like nobody did that the first time around so we were excited by the progress that we made in that one realm to sum up to close out here again the lean product process started out by getting clear on your to our customer figure out what you think the underserved customer needs are with importance in satisfaction use the Kano model to define your value proposition how you're going to be better or different than the competition get clear on your MVP feature set so you don't over build before you confirm whether you're going in the right direction or not use UX design and create the prototype so you can go out and test with customers and basically learn rates Oh obrigado this is my contact information I'm looking forward to doing Q&A and we'll be doing a book signing at the afternoon break Thanks

Channel: PRODUCTIZED

Views: 37,928

Keywords: Productized, Lisbon, Productized17, Product Management, Design, Design Thinking, Service Design, Dan Olsen, Lean Product Playbook

Id: p3Bl4XWIBcw

Length: 38min 3sec (2283 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 09 2018