Do you know he product design urban legend about the yellow Sony Walkman? The story highlights the dangers of asking a group of people how they like something (the sports yellow version of the Walkman, in this case). The focus group said that they liked it and were willing to buy it. However, once Sony produced it, nobody wanted to purchase it.
So how might we try to avoid similar pitfalls when looking to understand our clients and their needs?
We may employ experiments and validated learning from Lean Startup and pretotyping!
Last week at our HL Tech office, we ran a session where groups could practice using these approaches. We asked each group to think about a potential product and what need it may be trying to fulfill, then to come up with a hypothesis and design an experiment using pretotyping to try and quickly validate it:
e.g.:
✔️ pet owners will book a pet sitter online 🐶 🐱
✔️ remote workers in similar locations want to meet in person for coffee ☕️
✔️ people invest more when the return is higher 💰
The main takeaway?
👉🏻 It is easy to get caught up in your own ideas, so some groups lost sight of their hypothesis and became too focused on trying to market their product, asking people’s opinions, rather than trying to validate the hypothesis by observing people’s natural behavior.
👉🏻 It is not easy defining a meaningful hypothesis. Groups spent a lot of time on this part, trying to find the value for potential users and the right question or problem we would like to help them solve.
👉🏻 Many of the metrics we designed at first ended up being ‘vanity’ metrics. We needed to scrutinize and iterate a few times before we started to come up with meaningful metrics that would help us validate outcomes (e.g., what does the volume of website visitors actually tell us, compared to the volume of pet sitters booked)
👉🏻 Building a fake product or a mockup can help reveal some gaps in your hypothesis and chosen metrics. But you’ll learn more when you observe people using your hashtag#pretotype. You’ll discover insight and potential issues, maybe even finding that the real value for your customer sits in a completely different place than what you were expecting.
So it proved a valuable time for our colleagues, as many gained some new knowledge, but we also had great fun building hashtag#pretotypes for our products using paper and cardboard. 😀
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