Tag: lean

Your first MVP is Wrong

photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/deanmeyers/
photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/deanmeyers/

This essay is written as part of the Startup Edition project – check out the other essays here.

It would be awesome if your first iteration of a minimum viable product (MVP) perfectly addressed your target market segment, delivered great value to your customers, and you never had to change it again. However, that’s not what happens. Your first MVP iteration is the beginning of a build-measure-change cycle. When done right, you’ll deliver the product your customer wants to use for the job they want to get done. So how do you figure out how to find that customer, understand what they want, and deliver that product to them faster?

Finding your customer is the first task to making your MVP less wrong. If you’re baking cupcakes, who buys them? If you’re making software, what is the general profile of the person who should need what you’re offering. And what problem are you solving for that customer? A good problem statement for baked goods might be: “I’m delivering a donut for an underserved market that has specific allergy needs for people who like breakfast snacks once a week.”

Now that you’ve made a statement that matches what you think your customer might want, you should ask them what they want. This action can take many forms, from informal surveying of friends to more formal methods like online surveys, usability studies and tests. You need to be able to answer the question: what does your customer want? You might find they want different things than you think that target customer wants. So ask the question “do you ever eat donuts?” And also the question “what sort of donuts would you like to eat?”

You can uncover a more nuanced version of this question by asking what your customer needs. Often this need displays as a pain or discomfort that the customer wants to avoid. For our baked good example, a customer allergic to nuts might have very strong physical symptoms when eating a product with nuts – in fact, the decision could be life-threatening to some. Consider how strong that statement is: what does your customer need? Customers will display needs differently than wants, so make sure you watch what they actually do in a given situation rather than just asking them how they feel. Then, after you observe the need in action, ask them how they would feel when that feature/attribute/product is taken away. (Would they pay to keep it?)

If you can find a customer, ask them what they want, and uncover some of their needs, congratulations! You’re well on your way to developing your plan for an MVP. So why can you deliver this benefit better than anyone else? A suggestion: you won’t be able to deliver every benefit better than anyone else in the world. So focus on a small (a really small) thing that you can do better than anyone. And soon you’ll understand whether you picked the right small thing to focus on and whether your customer cares that you’re solving their problem.

You should also ask yourself – why is right now the time to deliver your solution? Try to answer the question: what’s the trigger for my customer to buy to relieve their pain by using my product? If you can deliver that benefit at the right time for the right customer better than anyone else, you’re getting closer. And if you have managed to avoid “boiling the ocean” by focusing on a small thing that you can measure, test, and learn from you’ll have an even better chance of making your MVP less wrong. At some point you also need to know whether the combination of the customer’s pain and the solution matches the set of things you can do at a reasonable cost.

How can you make your MVP better? Make sure you ask valuable questions of your prospective customers. Acknowledge their needs and their wants and respond by demonstrating that you’ve heard their needs and delivered something you believe addresses those needs. And build with the idea in mind that you will measure specific outcomes, learn from the actual behavior of your customers, and then change the MVP to make new experiments that get you closer to being less wrong, quickly.

This essay is written as part of the Startup Edition project – check out the other essays here.

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The Feedback Machine: How do you discover what people really want?

 

photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/zigazou76/
photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/zigazou76/

This essay is written as part of the Startup Edition project – check out the other essays here.

How do you discover what people really want?

People are not effective at self-reporting, or letting you know what they will do with your product when you’re not there to help them. Often, customers will tell you that they are going to take action or that they “like” something. And then it doesn’t get done. It’s easier to appease and give positive feedback (“it’s great!”) than to tell you it’s awful or give you specific, constructive advice.

How do you discover what people – and in this case, your customers – really want? To understand what customers want, you need to put a feedback machine in motion and continue to test what you learn over time. As the flywheel for feedback begins to turn, you’ll get more data, which will allow you to test and change faster.

Here’s what one feedback machine looks like: Ask, Observe, and Track.

What are the different ways you can ask customers what they want?

You can talk to customers, give them surveys, and hold focus groups. And each of these methods have caveats. Asking customers what they want is the core way you can find out what they really want – because some of them will tell you. Because customers won’t always tell you directly what they want, it’s helpful to ask them in a few different ways and then correlate the results to see if you hear the same things in different places. And make sure you keep the number of questions low so that customers balk at your survey. You also need to ask them the right questions. Asking a leading question like “given a perfect situation that matches my product perfectly, would you use my product” doesn’t help you or your customers. Zero in on the “I need” and “I want” statements to get closer to the true customer needs.

Surveys are another good way to get feedback. You can ask for preference using a multiple-choice or free-text survey. You can ask people what they think in a group setting using a focus group – this often spurs new ideas and can also induce “groupthink” – and learn more about many people at once. You can also ask people “what others would like” to try to remove individual self-reporting bias.

Asking gets you one result and Observing gives you a rich picture

Asking customers what they want isn’t enough. Observing what customers do is another key way to learn what they really want. Customers may show you non-verbal cues in a focus group that give you new ideas. And you can also learn a lot from in-person or remote usability studies. The key is to observe what people do without being prompted or providing instructions.

Focus groups provide you with a natural place to observe non-verbal reactions, though you may get some false signals when the customer is not in their natural environment. That’s why in-person and remote usability studies are really valuable.

Tracking behavior over time is the gold standard

Even if customers tell you what they think they want at the moment, the best way of knowing what they want and value in your product is to track their behavior over time.

The best products create or augment habits – things that are done repetitively. They also create or react to triggers – natural behavior cues from their environment and emotions – to spur the customer to do something. And if they are easy enough to do the customer can learn how to do them with little effort until it becomes almost subconscious (thanks @bjfogg for your Behavior Model to describe these aspects of behavior.)

So tracking habits should be one part of your feedback machine to find out what people really want. You should also be tracking any changes in the Word of Mouth that surrounds your product. If your customers aren’t talking about you or your product, that’s probably a sign that you haven’t zeroed in on things that people want – and have not yet exceeded the threshold of what they expect. In an ideal world, everyone would be talking about your product in the right channel at the right time. Some products aren’t ideal for public sharing – but many are after you demo your product for the target customer and they “get it”.

In the real world, you need to find the people who like (or love) your product and then understand how to find more people like them. If you’d like to learn more about this, start by reading Kevin Kelly’s classic 1000 True Fans. You also need to learn how to extrapolate from the things those early adopters love to the things that later adopters will love, too.

The Feedback Machine of Ask, Observe, and Track will get you closer to the goal of learning what your customers want. But it won’t speak for itself – you’ll need to use the information you learn to have conversations with your customers and find out what they truly value.

This essay is written as part of the Startup Edition project – check out the other essays here.

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Two of the Dumbest Business Mistakes I’ve Ever Made

photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/plindberg/2872583288/
photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/plindberg/2872583288/

//Read about more mistakes in the newest Startup Edition

“Do not fear mistakes. There are none.”
-Miles Davis.

We all make mistakes.

I’ve made a few mistakes in my time. I’m not talking about the garden-variety mistakes you might make in the course of the day. I’m talking about product development whoppers, or the kind you look back on several years later and wonder, “What was I thinking!?”

You make the best decision you can based on the information you know at the time and your framework for making decisions. There are a few decisions I wish I could take back, because if I could change them now, they would be great companies (or at least, I could feel like I made the right decision 10 years later). They were ideas for products that I still want now, that still solve a concrete problem, and that people are still willing to pay money to solve. (These ideas also work because they enable the businesses that use them to make more money and get more yield out of their current investment.)

What was my biggest mistake?

My Biggest Mistake was not trusting myself to make the right decision with the information I knew at the time. I didn’t have all of the answers – how to execute, how to find the money, how to deal with the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur – and I let that feeling of being out of my comfort zone make my decision for me. The lesson for next time? Be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Trust my gut more, and be in the moment when struck by a big idea that wants to be real.

Now, you decide whether I should have gone forward.

Here are the ideas that I had and decided not to do. Read them with the knowledge that you have in 2013, and decide whether you would pursue them today: I would.

Big Idea: Make the Grocery Store Easier.

Idea #1: Imagine if the next time you went into your local grocery store, there was a way for your phone to tell you the location of every product in the store, to remember your past preferences for shopping, and even to direct you in an optimal aisle-by-aisle route to minimize the time in store? And what if you received loyalty rewards and marketing offers that pertained to you? And what if you could check out of the store simply by scanning each item with your phone as you placed into the cart. That idea sounds promising and real in 2013, and quite similar to the idea my friends are pursuing at qThru.

When I thought of a very similar idea in 1999, even though the hardware and software was off the shelf and readily available, I didn’t go and build it. I made the decision that “I wasn’t the type to do that,” and “I’m not an idea guy” and let self-doubt make my decision for me. I can’t have that decision back, and I know that what I was really feeling in the moment was, “oh crap. I have no idea how to even begin thinking about that much less how to build and monetize it.” And, it happened again.

Big Idea #2: Make Waiting at a Restaurant Better.

Idea #2: Imagine you arrive at a popular restaurant. Because they are very busy, they ask you for your phone number so that they can text message you when your table is available. At the same time, they ask you to join their loyalty program so that you can participate in drink specials, learn about special events, and play games or trivia while you are waiting in line. It exists today – it’s called TurnStar – and I’ve used it. It’s pretty slick.

Why didn’t I build my version? It was called TextMyTable, and I was ready to go with the vision, the business plan, and the execution play. It was September 2008. Then all of a sudden the economy did a flip-flop and all of our assumptions about what was a normal business turned on their head. Or did they? I was stuck because I didn’t know how to raise the money to start the business or to grow the business in such a way that it generated operating capital.

What’s the Commonality?

In both of these ideas (and in others it’s not important to share here), I had an idea for a product or a service that was innovative. The ideas capitalized on a consumer need, solved an actual problem and had a reasonable chance at being successful. We could argue about the size of the market and the relative degree of success, and the fact remains that they were good ideas. And I made a mistake in not pursuing them.

What did I learn and what would I do next time?

The first thing I learned is that you can’t find out whether you’ll succeed with an idea until you try it. (Duh.) The ideas I think that would have been successful might have been abject failures, wild successes, or more likely somewhere in between. And I don’t know because I didn’t try them.

The second thing I learned from these mistakes is that collaboration is everything. I needed to do more to ask people to tear apart the idea instead of trying to build the whole business from start to finish inside my head. Groups like Startup Edition are a great place to get feedback, learn from other perspectives, and to reframe your questions.

And finally, I learned from my mistakes that it’s impossible to know what you don’t know until you do it. (Sounds like a Zen koan, doesn’t it.) What can you do about that? Admit that you’re going to make mistakes. Try to make different ones the next time you approach a problem, and learn from the results. Trust your gut.

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Makers need to make in the real world.

Makers need to make in the real world

Get out of the (electronic) building

Last evening, as the Pacific Northwest sunshine (yes, we do have that here in the Spring and Summer and Fall) was blazing, I was weeding my garden. There were no electronic devices in force. Although I did share this picture when I was done working, most of the time I used was just to move dirt. To get rid of weeds. And to appreciate the garden’s progress.

One of the things we often lose in the tech world – especially in our zest to communicate with each other – is the ability to slow down and see the life around us. I work in a garden with my neighbors because I love the whole process of taking plants from seed to plate. I’m not the best gardener, and I love the end product. I also really enjoy the ability to think less and do more. Working in the garden gives me energy to go back and interact more with people (in person or otherwise.)

This year, we expanded our garden. This is a little like a lean startup, where you take a chance that your idea for your vegetables matches up with what you can produce and what your individual market can bear. Granted, it’s not as bound by market forces, but it does literally force you to get out of the building (sorry for the bad pun, Steve Blank.) We don’t know which of our garden experiments will work yet. One set of potatoes is being cultivated one way, and another in a way that’s completely different.

What can we take away from the garden experience? First, that making things with your hands helps you to make things with your mind. If nothing else, killing weeds with a hoe is therapeutic and useful. (Just imagine that project, client, or line of code that you need to remove.)

Secondly, it’s important to remember that building a garden is a process, requiring resources, diligence, hard work, and persistence. The garden doesn’t get finished in a day, and does follow a work plan that proceeds in a reasonable order. There are some things you can only do in the spring, and there are other decisions cause irrevocable change (don’t buy enough seed, and don’t get enough plants.)

Finally, a garden is a lesson in resilience. You’re not sure what’s going to happen to the ground, the plants, or the vegetables over the course of the year. You simply can tend the garden, head off the problems as they occur, and enjoy the fruits of your labor. It’s kind of like a startup.

(originally posted on Medium)

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The “Thank You” Effect: Improving Service 1 Step at a Time

photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/timypenburg/
photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/timypenburg/

I’ve written here before about the effect that one person’s thank you had on me (thank you, Brad Feld!) I believe that “The Thank You Effect” is an example of a small action that prompts meaningful next steps to measurably improve service in any company. In my experience, there are a number of these small actions that when evangelized through a support team or through the larger company can really make a difference on the customer experience.

So I made a list of 50 small things that you can do to improve customer service measurably in your company. I’m not a purist, so some of these things might be “bigger than a bread box” – or need to be broken down into component steps – and aren’t quite ready to be measured on their own. And I do believe that adding only some of these steps will really improve the service culture at your company.

50 Small Things to Improve Customer Service

  1. When in doubt, be nice.
  2. Say “Thank you” in your response.
  3. Suggest a solution to the problem at hand in addition to asking for more information.
  4. Offer to provide additional assistance – email or call back.
  5. Commit random acts of kindness and deliver Customer Wow (Be More Awesome.)
  6. Follow up after an issue has been resolved and let the customer know you haven’t forgotten them.
  7. Come up with a list of the top 10 “cringe items” to fix.
  8. Drop everything and fix them.
  9. Implement standard responses for the 20% of cases you encounter 80% of the time.
  10. Reduce the number of clicks it takes to do something important in your app.
  11. Place more “closed question” choices inside your application and reduce decision fatigue.
  12. Identify the top 10 highest rated and lowest rated knowledge base articles that your customers use, and rewrite them on a content calendar.
  13. Review searches that result in zero results in your knowledge base.
  14. Define what it means to “love the product”: how does your service tangibly change a customer’s life and what problems does it solve?
  15. Define the lifecycle of a customer case – what are the stages, and how does a case move from stage to stage?
  16. Make sure that one person owns the customer’s case throughout the lifetime of that case.
  17. Create a report (shared widely within the company at an interval that makes sense to you, probably weekly) with positive and negative customer comments.
  18. Catch people in your organization doing something right.
  19. Identify cases that drive new knowledge content, revision in existing knowledge content, or removal of knowledge content.
  20. Put an expiration date on knowledge content (good, review, remove.)
  21. Define customer segments and decide whether they deserve extra attention – then make that part of your service process.
  22. Create a clear escalation path and understand how many cases are in a state of escalation.
  23. Define customers that have custom solutions and make sure it’s easy to find why they’re custom.
  24. Create a simple data driven measurement to determine whether a customer is likely to churn.
  25. Maintain relationships with top customers and talk to them on a schedule – they should probably hear from you at least once a month.
  26. Define simple goals that everyone can measure and do to improve service, even if it’s outside of their “job description”, e.g. “answer 5 customer emails/day”
  27. Try whatever you’re doing from the customer’s point of view; then observe the customer doing it with your mouth shut and your ears open.
  28. Be able to deliver a 2 minute demo of the key differentiators and benefits of your product.
  29. Respond as fast as you can, and if you don’t know the answer, say so. If you can’t solve the problem and will let the customer know when it’s going to be solved, do so. And if it’s unlikely that you’ll ever solve the problem, say so.
  30. Send physical thank you notes by “snail mail” to your customers.
  31. Eat your own dog food, drink your own champagne, and use your own product every day.
  32. Provide off-hours support by email, pager, or smoke signal. (Probably not by smoke signal.)
  33. Have lots of ways to be contacted (whichever way the customer prefers) and funnel all of those inbound contacts into one place.
  34. Get more sleep and make it easy for your team to eat breakfast.
  35. Ask your customers what gifts you should buy for a friend – you’ll learn more about what they like.
  36. Stack rank your projects internally and limit the amount of active projects to force decisions.
  37. Have a Big Hairy Audacious Goal as your North Star.
  38. Build Bench Strength of Amazing People with Different Strengths.
  39. Share some interesting content with customers every day.
  40. Ask customers, employees, and partners: “how can we do better”?
  41. Ask daily or weekly: “what’s one thing that we should change?”
  42. Ask daily or weekly: “what’s one thing we should stop doing?”
  43. Ask daily or weekly: “what’s one thing we should start doing?”
  44. Find other people who care about customers and talk to them.
  45. When in doubt, beg forgiveness rather than ask permission and just do the right thing.
  46. Go home and hug your dog, your kids, and/or your significant other more often.
  47. Take more walks during the day.
  48. Spend more time being passionate about the causes and things you love.
  49. When you find a new rule that helps the customer, write it down and share it.
  50. #Go for it.

I’m going to use this as an anchor post for other items I write about the Thank You Effect, and I’d love to hear any ideas you have about measuring and improving the customer experience (in a service business or otherwise.)

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