Digital Evolution

Category: Lean Startup

  • The Waterfall Startup

    How wise entrepreneurs embrace the predictable outcome of their vision to build innovations.

    A new groundbreaking methodology to create predictable outcome in chaotic situations.

    waterfall-startup

    Pre-order now (via twitter)

    Predicted publication date Dec. 2019

    Build it and they will come.

    This adage has now been proven for centuries: the pyramids, air planes, the Eiffel tower, Disney Land, Dubai, Las Vegas. Built it and they will come. Customer crave for new things pushed with good marketing. Good marketing will sell any well built product.

    Screen Shot 2014-09-25 at 22.54.08

    The best way to go from A to B

    A clear and linear process, that go get your from point A to point B. With an unbeatable certainty.
    Not an iterative process that makes you turn around in circles and leaves you where you started.
    With the waterfall startup, you are actually making clear, visible and trackable progress. Toward your goal (point B).

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    Requirement-Design-Development-Verification-Maintenance Line

    Define the requirement, then design your product, then develop it, verify the quality of your product, launch and enter maintenance mode. If you do it right, marketing and sales will take over the startup will succeed.

    “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”
    ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

    Deliver fully finished products

    Customers hate prototypes. The Waterfall Startup allows you to control the quality of your product according to your standards and only release your product to your first customer when 100% of the requirements have been delivered. A half baked customer experience (CX) will damage your brand for ever.

    Pre-order now (via twitter)

    Predicted publication date Dec. 2019

    “CEOs hate variance. It’s the enemy. Variance in customer service is bad. Variance in quality is bad. CEOs love processes that are standardized, routinized, predictable. Stamping out variance makes a complex job a bit less complex.”
    ― Marcus Buckingham

    waterfall-startup

    Pre-order now (via twitter)

    Predicted publication date Dec. 2019

    Get big fast.

    It’s all about first mover advantage, take the market first or be a follower for ever. Think of Coke and Pepsi… Pizza Hut and Domino’s. With the waterfall startup, plan precisely your growth with a 5 to 10 business plan.

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    Gather all stakeholder requirements upfront

    Predictability makes everything safer for everyone. Fix early on what you are going to build before doing anything else. Involve all internal stakeholder and wait for final formal approval. Once the gate is validated move to the next phase to design the right solution and the test case. Make sure you cover all the edge case. Double and triple check your solution and design. Request again all internal stakeholder formal approval before moving to the next phase.

    Pre-order now (via twitter)

    Predicted publication date Dec. 2019

    slippery-waterfall

  • Problem Interview Guide for Lean Startup Experience

    A hard part of customer development doing problem interview. It’s hard because interviewing strangers is not natural and its also actually hard to do the interview right.

    The good news is that practice do make perfect, get it wrong a couple of times and you quickly understand what to correct and what to keep. If you want some simple exercices to improve your problem interview skills tweet this:
    What exercice can I do to get better at problem interviews? @fdebane @adamberk

    In the meantime, here the problem interview guide we use:
    Download the problem interview guide

    It’s to print and take as a memo for interviews.
    Here is a guide to print and take as a memo for interviews.
    You should not read the guide while doing the interview, but can refer to it inbetween interviews.

    If you have to remember just 3 rules for problem interviews here they are:

    1. Do not talk about your business idea or product
    2. Ask about past events and behaviours
    3. No leading question, learn from the customer

    Download the full problem interview guide

    To capture the output of the interview, you can use the problem interview template.

  • Problem interview template

    Problem interview template

    Nov-14 2014: Added entry to classify customer into early adopter or not using @Justin_Wilcox definition: someone who is actively trying to solve the problem

    Talking to your customers is the starting point to understand their needs. It’s easy to do, but difficult to do well.

    On each interview I try want to understand:

    1. pain level of the problem to the eye of the customer. Is this a problem worth solving for them?
    2. the frequency of the problem. How often does it happen?
    3. discover alternative solution the customer have used. How are they solving it today?
    4. understand how they have been looking for those solutions. This provide insights on their journey and is valuable to understand you marketing channels
    5. discover other potential problems related. This allow you to identify other opportunities

    I don’t like using a script for interview, it breaks the natural flow of the conversation. But I found having a template to take note helps structure the feedback directly and make sure I am not missing any of the above.

    Download the Problem Interview template

    If you are doing problem interview with your potential customer, please try it and let me know what you think.

  • Put this Hammer Down – Why do Customer Discovery ?

    Put this Hammer Down – Why do Customer Discovery ?

    DSC_0009

    “When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail” -Bernard Baruch

    Here, the hammer is your solution and the nails are your customers. I am sure you have already found lots of nails for your hammer. But please take a closer look at those nails. They are screws.

    Put the hammer down and look at that poor screw. If it’s actually a nail, take the hammer back and take a swing, but if it’s a screw, you will need something else.

    Many entrepreneurs start by building the solution they have imagined (a hammer) and then come up with a list of potential customers that could be interested (screws that look like nails) and hit them with their solution.

    And the screw says ouch. The entrepreneur don’t hear the screw and hit harder, ouch, and then try to hit another screw. But the end of the day, the entrepreneur is exhausted that the nothing has being build.

    The entrepreneur should really look at the screw, understand what type of screw it is, how the head is, the thread, the length, the alloy. And then think about the tool he can use for the job.

    So put the hammer down and take a close look at that screw and decide what the solution should be. Don’t hit the screw on the head.

    That’s called Customer Discovery. Remember, no hammer allowed.

  • Applying the Lean Startup principles to game development

    A few month ago, I started exploring how the Lean Startup principles could be applied to computer game development.

    This journey lead me to Alexandre Normand co-founder of Execution Labs, an accelerator for game developers inspired by Lean Startup approach. Alexandre started Execution Labs to help independent game developers produce the games they want to build.

    In the past years as games shifted from being standalone products to become evolving services, the upfront paid model faded to give birth to the free to play model.

    This shift made continuous improvement of computer games possible.

    So how does Execution Labs apply Lean Startup to game development ?

    Build the MVP/ v0 in 6 months
    As the goal is to create player engagement, it’s important that the design and visuals are pretty and pleasant enough. To go faster, don’t reduce or compromise the quality of the graphics, but rather reduce the amount or variety of graphics produced.
    Fixing the development time to 6 months forces to focus on what really matter for the game to be good. Some game are tested early with paper prototype.

    Continuous and regular customer feedback
    Test the game every other week with 10 to 15 players. Regularly player come to the Execution Lab to play with the prototypes. This provide the game developers precious qualitative feedback, on top of the quantitative tracking already in place.

    Limited launch on test markets
    Launch the v0 on test markets, similar enough to your target markets but with a smaller population – typically Canada, NZ, AUS or Finland.

    Meta-game comes later
    The initial focus is on the core loop. The goal is to test and iterate so the core become fun and engaging. The meta game comes later. The meta game will insure the longer term retention and repeated play.

    Alexandre confirmed that to build a game, programming is the most time consuming activity, followed by graphic design and game design.

    So as far as reducing waste, programming should be the place to look next.

    Here is the Execution Lab process.

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  • What to read after reading the ‘Lean Startup’

    Reading-Lean-Startup

    I get sometimes asked for recommendation on what to read after the Lean Startup. Here are a few resources I found useful:

    • The 4 Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank – or watch Steve Blank class on Udacity which covers some of those topics. Eric Ries followed Steve Blank class at Stanford and Lean Startup was inspired by some of Steve work. It introduces the notion of Customer Development. Put simply, it’s the exact opposite of what Jean de La Fontaine said wheh he said: “Never sell the bear’s skin before one has killed the beast”.
      Customer development is the exact opposite: Here you sell the skin first. This book is about how to customers before you even start building a product.
    • Running Lean by Ash Maurya, is a very practical how to guide that will tell you, step by step how to validate / invalidate your business hypotheses. It intrudes the Lean Canvas explaining how to use with loads of examples – or get started with your own lean canvas and here is a great manual on how to do just that.

    But the best thing to done, once you have read the lean startup, is to find a project of yours, and apply everything you have read / learned. This is really the best way to ancor the knowledge. Putting it to practice. And when you do, please let me know, I would love to know what else you have learned.

  • The one metric you need to track – Lean Analytics

    I recently finished another online course: Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll & Ben Yoskovitz, authors of the book of the same name. Those guys are so smart. They explain everything very simply and clearly – masters of their domains.

    The ONE
    This course is very rich and complete with vivid examples, but the one thing that I don’t want to forget is: Focus on ONE metric when doing improvements. Which metric ? Well depends on your business model and which stage of development you are in. The stages being: empathy, stickiness, virality, revenue, scale.

    OMTM: the One Metric That Matter.

    lean-analytics-key-slide

    So ask yourself: what’s the ONE metric I need to track at this stage ?

  • Getting your first customers – simplified customer development

    Sometimes startups come to me with this problem: we have created this great service, how can we get our first customers.

    Those startups quite often need to put a hold on product development and focus customer development.

    What they don’t actually know is:
    – are they addressing a real, existing problem or a burning need ?
    – does their service or product actually solve the problem – to the eyes of their target customers (or to their wallets should I say).

    Answering those questions with genuine insight from real people is what customer development is.

    Here is how to do it. It look and sound easy can be very tricky as it’s goes against a lot of expected cultural and social behaviours.

    Find 10 potential customers from the target group and understand if the problem you are solving is a big pain or they dont really care.

    For each customer understand where they stand:

    1. Did they have the problem ?
    2. Did they know they have the problem ?
    3. Did they look for a solution ?
    4. Did they hack a solution ?
    5. Did they pay for a solution ?

    Customer problem categorisation - customer development

    Achtung! Don’t ask them those questions. Have a conversation – not an interview – about the problem you are trying to solve and understand how they are solving it today. At the end, categorize them into the buckets above.

    Once this is clear, the question is, how do I find those 10 potential customers ?
    Be creative, try different methods. Which ever method works best can later become one of you marketing / communication channel. Drop the one that dont work. If you can’t find those first 10 customers, how are going to find 100s of them ?

    If your product solves the problem, the people that you identified as paying for a solution (the last bucket) are your potential customers. You can start selling it to them.

  • What Ash Maurya told us in Paris

    Startup people in Paris had a dilemma this week – choosing between two events on the same night: hear the good words from Ash Maurya author of Running Lean or listen to Heidi Isern and Blaise Bertrand from IDEO.
    I ended up going to listen to Ash Maurya.

    Here is what he said that I liked:

    Most startups fail (still). Startup that succeed change along the way. They never end-up when they wanted to go.

    The biggest risk is not finding customers.

    If you cant get 10 customer off line. You can’t get 1000 online.

    Ash runs a program where in 8 weeks, startups get paying customers and – here is the trick – they can’t write a line of code.

    About validating assumptions: getting 2 positives answers out of 10 is not good enough. Change something and try to get 8 out of 10.

    While doing customer development, most of the time spent on interviews is actually between interviews.

    • Referring to his book Running Lean, he said he can’t tell when the launch date was. It was the result of a continuous process. It’s concept ‘no launch date’ that I like, forcing you to be live with your poor product on day one.

    Finally, he remained the limits of the methodology: it’s about getting feedback fast and being able to know if you are on the wrong path quicker. It does not guarantee success.

    I suspect IDEO might have the rest of secret sauce…

    Thank you for signing the book too :)
    Thanks for signing my book too 🙂

  • A Power Point template for the Lean Canvas

    So, the Lean Canvas is making it’s way into people mind. You can create and edit yours on the Lean Stack website. I had a request for a power point version of it.

    Download here the Lean Canvas Power Point template.

    I have also created a Google Slide version that you can duplicate and edit.

    Lean Canvas PPT version