The Venture Design Playbook

About this Playbook

This playbook implements a tools-first approach to its subject matter. I’m often asked ‘How do I get everyone bought into doing [design thinking, Lean Startup, customer discovery, etc.]?’.

Here’s a way- try these tools out in your next meeting or scheduled session. Most them you can use in 10-20 minutes, seeing material output at the end of the exercise.

I’ve adapted this playbook format from the ‘Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation‘, which my friends collaborators Tamara Carleton and Bill Cockayne use in their instruction at Stanford and engagements with industry.

About Venture Design

Venture Design solves two problems common to entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and other innovators:

A) I know that writing a traditional business plan on the one hand probably won’t help me think through a lot of what’s critical with my new venture, and on the other hand will take a lot of time and probably go mostly unread. Barf.

B) I keep hearing how (the practices below) will help me with my new venture but it’s a lot of stuff and I have little time. How do I engage?

What you’ll get with Venture Design is an actionable view of how to focus and propel your venture using today’s most effective practices. The material is organized into tutorials, examples, and templates. Most users review the tutorials and examples, then use the templates to apply the techniques to their venture. There are also workshops you can step through or do with a team.

If you’re starting from the beginning, I recommend the sequence below:

If you’re already in the middle of something, here’s the process in reverse:

This play book will highlight key tools you can use across this process to drive better, more systematic outcomes for your innovation process.

‘VARIED’ Personas

Personas are the foundation for your understanding, assumptions, and decisions around buyers, users, and other actors. Useful personas are: vivid, actionable, real, identifiable, exact, and detailed.

Why it’s helpful

• To systematically describe and share the knowledge your team has about what makes your project tick
• To frame decisions and related assumptions about what you’re creating and how it will operate in the real world

When to use it

We create things for someone with some expectation about how they’ll use it towards an outcome we desire. Personas offer a flexible but robust nexus for that understanding.

They’re especially useful for interdisciplinary discussions where the challenge is to capture observations from different vantage points and focus those into actionable inputs for product creation, promotion, or operation.

What you get

Traditionally used by designers but increasingly popular with the growing interest in ‘design thinking’, personas create a durable foundation for customer-centric innovation and decision making. Successful organizations use them to weave the various stray ends in the customer journey into a world class experience.

Let’s look at an example

Enable Quiz is building a lightweight app for employers to measure a job candidates’ skill sets in key technical topics.The team realized that there were two key players inside the company: ‘Helen the HR Manager’ who is in charge of sourcing resumes and screening candidates, and ‘Frank the Functional Manager’ who is the manager hiring for the position.The team realized that since they didn’t understand ‘Helen’ very well and that a big part of the product’s value would be allowing her to do more, relieving ‘Frank’, they needed to learn more.

Instructions

Step	Time (min.)	Materials & Technique
Write Down as many personas as you can for your venture/product (at least 5)	4	Materials: Index cards & sharpie (or pen; whatever) Notes:Use one index card per persona.And they’ll be sorting them as well. Use the naming convention on the slide, ‘Andrew the Accountant’, for example. This helps (some) keep the personas real and human.Each team member should do this individually.
Are they buyers, users, or both? Note on each index card with a ‘B’, and/or ‘U’.	1	Materials: Use those same index cards, annotating each with a ‘B’ and/or ‘U’.
Can you think of 5 real people for each?	2	Materials: use the back of the existing index cards
Sort the personas. Which have the most compelling need, desire? Why?	1
Detail the top persona in a few paragraphs	7	Notes:Write something that you could give to a colleague where they’d really understand what makes this person tick. After reading the persona, the reader should be able to take an educated guess at questions like ‘What kind of shoes do they wear? What’s their favorite band? What’s the last movie they saw?’

Drawing Insights and Implications

After many meandering discussions, the introduction of personas helped the Enable Quiz team focus and organize their discussions and action plans. On product design and development, they trained themselves to make sure they could answer the following questions:
– Who are we creating this for?
– How do we think they’ll use it?
– Have we validated that understanding with first-hand observations? Or is this an assumption we need to test?

When an engineer or designer was building something, the team made sure that the inputs they had always explicitly identified with applicable personas.
When the team was creating promotion (marketing, etc.), they likewise used the personas to structure their plans, assumptions, and to make sure they were executing on a testable foundation they could continuously improve.

Checklist

The following checklist will help you make sure you’ve created a useful starting point that you can build on.

	Item	Criteria
✓	You’ve identified the important personas for your project	Did you cover users of the product as well as buyers?What about other (important) actors like partners our counterparties?
✓	You’ve prioritized and contextualized the personas.	Do you have a prioritized list of personas?Did you designate each personas role(s) (buyer, user, counterparty, etc.)?
✓	Your personas are vivid	After reading the persona, do you feel like you’ve met this person?What kind of shoes does they wear?What’s their favorite band?What was the last movie they saw? Why?
✓	Your personas are actionable	Could you take these personas and answer all your key questions about what to create? How to sell it? How to make sure it functions properly in the real world and delivers on its proposition?
✓	Your personas are real	Can you think of at least five people out in the real world that fit this persona? Do you understand what makes them tick? If not, what will you do to go out and investigate and discover that?
✓	Your personas are identifiable	Can you reach these personas? Can you differentiate between them through your existing channels and customer relationships?
✓	Your personas are exact	Have you adequately segmented the personas? Personas can be segmented all the way down to where they’re just one single person. That said, ‘women 28-45’ is not an exact persona and not actionable for most purposes.
✓	Your personas are detailed	Do you have sentences and paragraphs? Your job here is to be a good storyteller, and bullet points don’t tell stories.

Questions for Team Discussion

Comparing outputs from the exercise, what is a working version of the prioritized list of personas?

What are their roles?

What field research and discovery does the team need to do to make the personas VARIED?

In what shared medium will you keep the personas so everyone can refer to them?

Whose job is it to define and manage the next steps in discovering and documenting the personas?

Who is contributing?

Tips & Lessons from Others

1. Just do it
This is not an all or nothing proposition- just having a list of personas that you can reference will help you.

2. Document, discover; repeat
Write down and collage (photos, etc.) as much as you can about the personas. Then go in the field and learn more. Then come back and document your findings. Good personas are created over time from natural experience in the real world.

3. Constantly strengthen the foundation
Make sure everyone is using and editing the persona definitions. The most successful organizations are constantly strengthening this foundation.

Personas: Think-See-Feel-Do

Describing what your personas think, see, feel, and do in your area of endeavor helps improve their usefulness.

Why it’s helpful

• Helps expand relevant detail on personas
• Helps focus discovery activities out in the real world
• Makes personas more actionable for both production creation and product promotion.

When to use it

Once you have a set of personas you’re comfortable building on, think-see-feel-do is a good way to expand them and make them even more actionable in your particular area of endeavor.

What you get

There are a few common frameworks for structuring personas, but think-see-feel-do is one of the most longstanding and durable.

The ‘think’ component captures your persona’s conscious explicit point of view and will help you focus your proposition for them.

The ‘see’ components will push you to understand their learning environment and how what you’re saying to them fits in with the rest of what they’re hearing.

‘Feel’ is one of the most challenging for beginners, but ultimately one of the most valuable- it will help you connect with your customers’ underlying desires, helping your rise above the noise floor.

The ‘do’ component helps push you past the point of speculation to observational learning on actual customer habits.

Let’s look at an example

We reviewed the Enable Quiz product in the ‘VARIED Personas’ section. Here we go a little deeper on ‘Helen the HR Manager’ using Think-See-Feel-Do.

Thinks	Helen thinks the hiring process should be so much better- more systematic, fewer bad hires. Professional development is something they’ve identified that they want to do better, but the functional managers aren’t engaged enough to get the whole thing started.
Sees	Helen is at the tail end of every bad hire and sees the damage it does to the employee and company, alike. Helen sees that online learning has rocketed forward in the last few years. If someone wants to learn a specific skill, there’s a number of high quality options online, many of them free. They just need a way to help employees organize select into these courses.
Feels	Helen feels like crap whenever they have to let someone go. She hates it. The employee hates it. The manager hates it. It’s incredibly destructive and de-motivating for everyone involved.Helen would love to be more involved, more included in functional skills evaluation and improvement. She’s love to have a success story to talk about. Most HR departments don’t do a whole lot in this area.
Does	Helen’s relatively responsive to new ideas, particularly if someone knowledgeable is willing to come in and talk about it. If she likes it, she’ll bring it to the functional managers, who are usually the ultimate decision makers since without their support she can’t get the system online and working.Post-sale, Helen will help keep the program organized, moving, and otherwise on the functional managers radar.All this is predicated on Helen being equipped with the right messages, facts, and best practices to make the purchase and use of Enable Quiz effective.

Instructions

Step	Time (min.)	Materials & Technique
Pick your top persona from the last step	/	Notes:Or if working in a team, you may wish to divvy up the list.
Detail what they ‘think’ in your area of endeavor	2	If you met someone who represented the persona and asked them ‘What’s hard about [your area]?’, what would they say? Other similar questions:What’s your most and least favorite thing about [area]?How do you define success in [area]?What do you wish was better about [area]?
Detail what they ‘see’ in your area of endeavor	2	How do they learn about items in your area? What do their friends or colleagues say? What do they observe when they’re out in public? Online? On TV? In print?
Detail what they ‘feel’ in your area of endeavor	2	What are the high points in your area of endeavor? How do they make your persona feel? Most people are not very comfortable talking about their feelings, so while this is 3rd in the list, you’ll probably be most successful in live interviews probing it last when you have a strong understanding of the other items.At that point, attempt to peel back they onion and ask more about why they did what they did/saw what they saw and how it made them feel.
Detail what they ‘do’ in your area of endeavor	2	Here, it’s particularly useful to think through a specific period in time. If you’re out validating your persona, you might ask a subject about ‘last night’, ‘last Friday’, ‘last time you closed the quarter’. While you may not be interested in a whole day, try to make sure to start at the beginning and walk through the process. This will help you suss out details that are important to you but might seem inconsequential to your subject.

Drawing Insights and Implications

For the Enable Quiz team, this work continued to increase the usefulness of their personas.

On the ‘think’ item, they learned that most companies had the view that they wish they were doing better on recruiting and hiring, but consistently found themselves without enough time or actionable ideas.

On the ‘see’ item, everyone in the company (employees in particular) saw the panoramic mess that a bad hire generated and desperately wanted to avoid that for everyone concerned.

On ‘feel’, they learned that Helen wanted to do more to help relieve Frank on time spent for new hires but hadn’t found an effective way- this she found frustrating and disempowering.

On the ‘do’ item, they carefully scrutinized the process for describing open positions, posting them, reviewing initial resumes, doing initial screening, doing reference checks, late stage interviews with Frank, and the final decision making process on a new hire. From this, they learned a lot about the operational context their product needed to accommodate and complement.

Checklist

The following checklist will help you make sure you’ve created a useful starting point that you can build on.

	Item	Criteria
✓	You know what your key personas think about your area	Do you have a clear idea of your persona’s point of view? When you go out and interview, observe the personas are you consistently hearing similar things?
✓	You know what your key personas see in your area	Do you know where your personas acquire their most important perceptions?
✓	You know how your key personas feel about their involvement in your area	Do you know how to connect with their core emotional drivers?
✓	You know what your key personas do in your area	Do you understand how you fit into the persona’s day or workflow?

Questions for Team Discussion

How much of this do we really know vs. we’ve had to assume and speculate?

What are our next steps to go out and do discovery?

How will we make contact with relevant subjects and get high quality outputs?

Tips & Lessons from Others

The tips from our last section are applicable here- draft, discover, and draft some more. Err on the side of doing something incomplete vs. doing nothing.

Personas: Day in the Life Exercise

Creating great personas isn’t a skill that many of us learn in school. This exercise helps introduce the practice of observational learning and inference-driven personas creation.

Why it’s helpful

• Helps introduce what great customer discovery looks like
• Easy to run
• Get teams talking about personas talking together about personas and discovery
• Blazes the trail for where you may want to go with your customer discovery

When to use it

We like to start with drafting an ideation, then move to this exercise. That said, if you’re struggling to get comfortable with personas and customer discovery, this will help with that introduction.

What you get

As an exercise, this doesn’t have any permanent outputs, though it will increase the fluency and correspondence among your team with the concept of personas and customer discovery.

Instructions

Step	Time (min.)	Materials & Technique
Walk through first persona	2	Materials:See slides here: Day in the Life Exercise Notes:Or if working in a team, you may wish to divvy up the list.
Participants write down their answers to the day in the life questions	3	Materials: index cards or just about anything are OK but it is important to explicitly write them down
Provide and discuss answers (3)	6	Notes:Pick three (or fewer) participants for each. Be sure to press them on why they picked the answer they did- that’s the important part. As students answers differ or disagree, be sure to remind them that it’s about the process and not an exact answer.
Repeat for as many day in the life subjects as you like (currently 6 available)	11/per

Drawing Insights and Implications

This is a great way for everyone to walk the walk some. Furthermore, it will hopefully stoke the desire to go out and find learn about your key personas in real life, constructing your own day in the life portraits.

Checklist

The following checklist will help you make sure you’ve created a useful starting point that you can build on.

	Item	Criteria
✓	Was everyone able to answer why they picked the answer they did, inferring it from what they observed in the photos.	Quality answers about why they thought what they did (the specific responses aren’t important)
✓	Did you create a discussion friendly, discovery oriented environment?	The point is to get everyone talking about what they thought and why, realizing that there isn’t a perfect answer.

Questions for Team Discussion

Could we answer these questions about our own personas?

If not, how are we going to get there?

Tips & Lessons from Others

1. The Participants are the Product

You should measure the success of this exercise based on your ability to get the participants to tell you why and encourage thoughtful discussions about the personas. As a bonus, you’ll get everyone excited about going out and doing customer discovery to create better personas.

Personas: Value Proposition Trios

Personas operationalize your understanding of the customer; problem scenarios guide your specific priorities.

Why it’s helpful

• Fixes the possibility of waste where a solution is chasing a problem
• Creates a vivid, highly testable view of what you’re doing and why.

When to use it

Once you’re operationalized your personas with think-see-feel-do, you’re ready to elaborate on problem scenarios.

What you get

Agile user stories were a good answer to linking design thinking and product development. The issue is that they often end up without strong customer validation criteria. Working through problem scenarios and alternatives, then leaning value propositions against those let’s you drive to and validate the potential sources of value sooner, critical for rapid innovation.

Let’s look at an example

We reviewed the Enable Quiz product in the ‘VARIED Personas’ section. Here we describe problem scenarios for ‘Helen the HR Manager’.

Problem Scenarios	Current Alternatives	Your Value Proposition
She’d like to know more about the key skill sets their company requires so she can be more focused and creative about finding good candidates. But it’s hard to sort out. She’s not that familiar with the terms and concepts, and they overlap and change.	Right now she just gets lists from the Functional Manager and basically passes them through (to job postings, etc.).	A good substitute might be having a nice simple menu of topics the functional managers can choose from and re-route back to the HR manager to set up screening for new candidates.
She’s love to do a better, quicker, more definitive job screening new candidates.	Right now, she just tried to get better in their particular domain with practice. But it’s slow and there are new technologies all the time.	With the list of skills above, she could easily generate a quiz for the candidates and do a better job on screening.
She’d really like to put a company-wide professional development program in place. A few of her peers at bigger companies are doing it and the employees love it. Vendors have come in to see her with various programs but she doesn’t have the functional expertise to say which ones are a good fit for which part of the company.	Right now she just works with the functional managers if she can convince them to do something on a case-by-case basis.	Presenting the quiz application as an entry point for the HR manager to make it easy for the functional manager to assess a starting point for a skills management program might be a good way to deliver on this problem scenario.

Instructions

Step	Time (min.)	Materials & Technique
Exercise: Brainstorm:: problem scenarios:: alternatives:: your value propositions	7	Materials: use index cards; one per trio (more if needed for space) Notes:- What problems (desires) do you believe the various personas have that are relevant to your venture?- What’s their alternative (or alternatives)? What are they doing right now instead of using your product?- What’s your value proposition for them? They do NOT need to link these to personas yet. Make sure to mention this- comes up a lot.
Exercise: Prioritize the propositions	2	Rank order the index cards

Drawing Insights and Implications

When you’re in an innovation-driven project, your core focus and activities are somewhat different vs. a ‘typical’ project being built for scale and incremental improvement. Crossing your t’s and dotting your i’s doesn’t matter unless it helps you validate or invalidate your fundamental proposition. The reason this is so important and different is that you’re on  a learning mission to see whether or not you have a breakthrough innovation (or not).

Working out the value proposition trios at a level of detail that may feel at first excessively detailed is a great way to make sure you’re focusing on what’s relevant.

Checklist

The following checklist will help you make sure you’ve created a useful starting point that you can build on.

	Item	Criteria
✓	You’ve identified at least one discrete problem (habit/need)	Can you describe it in a sentence? Do others get it?Can you identify current alternatives?
✓	The problem (habit/need) is important	Do subjects mention it unprompted in discovery interviews?Do they respond to solicitation (see also value and customer creation hypotheses)?
✓	You understand current alternatives	Have you seen them in action?Do you have ‘artifacts’ (spreadsheets, photos, posts, notes, whiteboard scribbles, screen shots)?

Questions for Team Discussion

What problems do we really believe are important? Why?

How do we make sure we understand these problems, including the alternatives?

Do we all agree the work we’re currently doing is relevant and necessary to solve these problems?

Tips & Lessons from Others

This exercise really brought things into focus for the Enable Quiz team, closing the loop on their prior work with personas and making the work even more actionable. It raised a lot of constructive questions about what they were developing and the questions they were getting answered when they interviewed prospective customers.

Lean: Product Hypothesis

The product thesis integrates your personas, problem scenarios, alternatives and value propositions in a testable formulation.

Why it’s helpful

• Creates the freedom to innovate by acknowledging and structuring the uncertainty of new ideas and approaches
• Gives the team a focal point to use in systematically progressing through an innovation project

When to use it

Use the creation of the assumption set at the beginning of a new project or try it out as a focal exercise for a project that’s already underway.

What you get

The core product hypothesis is:

A certain PERSONA exists…

…and they have certain PROBLEMS…

…where they’re currently using certain alternatives…

…and we have a VALUE PROPOSITION that’s better enough than the alternatives to cause the PERSONA to act (buy, use, etc.).

Let’s look at an example

Back to Enable Quiz, which offers lightweight technical quizzes for screening job candidates, here’s their central hypothesis:

‘HR and functional managers are in charge of technical hires and……they struggle to effectively screen for technical skill sets, making the hiring process slower and more labor intensive and producing worse outcomes than they should reasonably expect. Currently they implement a patchwork of calling references and asking a few probing questions……By offering an easy, affordable, lightweight technical quizzing solution, Enable Quiz can acquire and retain these customer personas, delivering material value.’

Instructions

Step	Time (min.)	Materials & Technique
Each participant drafts a version of the product hypothesis	5
Compare and consolidate	5

Drawing Insights and Implications

The form of their product hypothesis didn’t exactly surprise the Enable Quiz team, but it helped them draw a line in the sand and start from a shared focal point for defining next steps.

Checklist

The following checklist will help you make sure you’ve created a useful starting point that you can build on.

	Item	Criteria
✓	The product thesis is inclusive	Does the product thesis capture the key attributes of what will make the product succeed in the market?

Questions for Team Discussion

Does this get at the key facets of what will make the product succeed?

If not, what else is there?

Tips & Lessons from Others

1. It’s a starting point
The product hypothesis is about creating a strong starting point. The next exercises are good for detailing next steps.

2. Plan the work; work the plan
In an innovation-driven environment, you’re generally on a learning mission vs. a scaling or operational mission. That means the work should thread back to validating your product thesis. If it doesn’t, scrutinize it carefully.

Lean: Assumption+Experiment Pairs

Assumption+Experiment pairs are at the core of the evidence-driven innovation practices popularized by The Lean Startup, helping innovators prioritize validated learning over premature scaling.

Why it’s helpful

• An innovation to-do list is different than a regular to-do list: it emphasizes outcomes over just output; these pairings will help you create and manage the right kind of list
• Gives the team a yardstick to measure progress

When to use it

When you have an innovation (/startup) team that’s trying to break down next steps and make sure those are actually moving the innovation forward.

What you get

First, you’ll break down your product thesis into four components parts:

Component	Key Questions
PERSONA HYPOTHESIS	Who exactly is our customer and do we understand what makes them tick?
PROBLEM HYPOTHESIS	What problems, needs do they have and how important are those? What alternatives are they using today?
VALUE HYPOTHESIS	Do we have something that’s better enough than the alternatives?
CUSTOMER CREATION HYPOTHESIS	Can we economically reach and sell these customers?

You’ll then detail these into discrete assumption+experiment pairs.

Let’s look at an example

Back to Enable Quiz, which offers lightweight technical quizzes for screening job candidates, here’s are a few examples from their work:
PERSONA HYPOTHESIS

Assumption	Experiment
The Hiring Manager persona and Functional Manager exist in roughly the form we’ve described and they are collectively responsible for technical recruiting and hiring.	Arrange customer interviews and without leading questions find out how they handle the creation of open positions and their fulfillment.

 

PROBLEM HYPOTHESIS

Assumption	Experiment
Screening technical hires for skill sets is difficult and most companies wish they could do it more effectively vs. their current alternatives. This wish is on their ‘A list’ of problems.	– Discovery interviews: does it come up as a problem, unprompted – Test pre-release promotion and sign-up’s for more info.

 

VALUE HYPOTHESIS

Assumption	Experiment
A lightweight technical quizzing solution for screening new hires would deliver value substantially above current alternatives. With the right customer creation recipe(s), Enable Quiz could drive substantial sales of such a product.	– Execute a manual ‘concierge’ experiment on the quiz process by making up paper quizzes for test companies’ open positions- Make some early pre-release sales – Test pre-release promotion and sign-up’s for beta programs

CUSTOMER CREATION HYPOTHESIS

Assumption	Experiment
Channel: Direct Sales. Enable Quiz can connect with demand economically through direct sales.	– Test and measure a limited set of sales activity (probably starting with a founder/senior person)

Instructions

Step	Time (min.)	Materials & Technique
Draft persona hypotheses & experiment pairs	5
Compare and consolidate	5
Draft problem hypotheses & experiment pairs	5
Compare and consolidate	5
Draft value hypotheses & experiment pairs	5
Compare and consolidate	5
Draft customer creation hypotheses & experiment pairs	5
Compare and consolidate	5
Prioritize next set of experiments, time box into an iteration and assign responsibilities	20

Drawing Insights and Implications

This exercise gave the Enable Quiz team their marching orders for the next cycle, removing emphasis from more traditional dev. and marketing tasks they previously had on the board.

Checklist

The following checklists will help you make sure you’ve created a useful starting point that you can build on.

PERSONA HYPOTHESIS

	Item	Criteria
✔︎	This persona exists (in non-trivial numbers) and you can identify them.	Can you think of 5-10 examples?Can you set up discovery interviews with them?Can you connect with them in the market at large?
✔︎	You understand this persona well.	What kind of shoes do they wear?Are you hearing, seeing the same things across your discovery interviews?
✔︎	Do you understand what they Think in your area of interest?	What do you they mention as important? Difficult? Rewarding?Do they see the work (or habit) as you do?What would they like to do better? To be better?
✔︎	Do you understand what they See in your area of interest?	Where do they get their information? Peers? Publications?How do they decide what’s OK? What’s aspirational
✔︎	How do they Feel about your area of interest?	What are their triggers for this area? Motivations?What rewards do they seek? How do they view past actions?
✔︎	Do you understand what they Do in your area of interest?	What do you actually observe them doing?How can you directly or indirectly validate that’s what they do?

 

PROBLEM HYPOTHESIS

	Item	Criteria
✔︎	You’ve identified at least one discrete problem (habit/need)	Can you describe it in a sentence? Do others get it?Can you identify current alternatives?
✔︎	The problem (habit/need) is important	Do subjects mention it unprompted in discovery interviews?Do they respond to solicitation (see also value and customer creation hypotheses)?
✔︎	You understand current alternatives	Have you seen them in action?Do you have ‘artifacts’ (spreadsheets, photos, posts, notes, whiteboard scribbles, screen shots)?

 

VALUE HYPOTHESIS

	Item	Criteria
✔︎	You have an experiment with actionable metrics that constitutes a material exchange of value	To what extent does the subject’s action validate your value? A sign-up is ‘some’; a sale is ‘a lot’. Visualize your results and the decision you want to make from them. Does the current experimental design provide for the outputs you’ll need?

 

CUSTOMER CREATION HYPOTHESIS

	Item	Criteria
✔︎	You’ve thought through the whole customer journey, including: attention, interest, desire, action, onboarding, and retention.	Does the journey seem credible? Testable?
✔︎	You have an economical means to acquire and retain happy customers.	You’ve validated the economics of each step.
✔︎

Questions for Team Discussion

Does everyone understand the next steps and how their part will contribute to validating the product thesis?

Are we going to get the kind of definitive, actionable results we need from these experiments?

What do those look like?

Maybe we should draft the presentations or notes we want to have as a result of the experiment now to make sure?

Tips & Lessons from Others

1. Step through it- even the ‘obvious’ parts
Items that might seem obvious may turn out not to be so once you peel back the onion. Also, the sequence builds in a way that’s helpful for being thorough and coherent.

2. On the customer creation hypothesis
The AIDAOR storyboard is a great way to break down this area to learn more.

3. Begin with the end in mind
The idea is that at the end of an experiment you have a result that’s true or false. The reality is that particularly on the first few tried you end up with a third result: inconclusive. Start your experiment with the specific outputs you want to see at the end formulated- a report, an email, a PowerPoint. It doesn’t have to be fancy but literally beginning with the end visualized will help you avoid this third outcome.

Lean: The Minimum Viable Product

The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) helps us focus on the learning mission so central to innovation as opposed to the scaling mission we’re acclimated to pursuing.

Why it’s helpful

• We’re just naturally wired to want to build things and to hate uncertainty- the MVP is a tool that helps us do what’s effective vs. what’s comfortable
• The MVP’s conceptual tightness make it an easy way to communicate why you’re doing what you’re doing
• Often the MVP isn’t working product at all but some kind of presentation fakery- it’s important to consider these options to avoid wasting time and money

When to use it

If you’re innovating, you’re doing something that hasn’t yet been done. By definition, you don’t yet know what (if anything) will work so you want to minimize time and money spent. The MVP is a tool for defining what that means for a first implementation.

What you get

Your MVP definition should tie back to your Value Hypothesis- it should be the simplest possible delivery that will give you material, incremental validation of your proposition.

Let’s look at an example

Back to Enable Quiz, which offers lightweight technical quizzes for screening job candidates, here’s are a few examples from their work:

Enable Quiz will execute a ‘concierge MVP’, meaning that they’ll handcraft the experience they’re thinking of providing with their product. This means hand-creating custom quizzes for companies that have open engineering positions.

Instructions

Step	Time (min.)	Materials & Technique
Brainstorm MVP ideas	5
Compare and decide on leading approaches, adding in metrics	10

Drawing Insights and Implications

They have a few success criteria for these MVP experiments:

1. Number of Candidates to Functional Manager

One premise of the product is that it lets the HR Manager do more of the job of candidate screening. They’d like to see a 40% reduction in the number of candidates the functional manager sees before they make a hire.

2. Rating on Candidates by Functional Manager

The HR manager will ask the functional manager to rate the technical qualifications of candidates they see. Participating companies will run at least two positions, one as a control without the quiz. The team would like to see a 50% increase in the average qualification rating.

3. Interest in Refundable Pre-Payment for Discount

At the end of a trial would at least 40% of participating companies like to make a refundable pre-pay for the service in return for a 50% discount?

Checklist

	Item	Criteria
✓	How will this validate the value hypothesis?	Is it a definitive validation or a moderate validation? Pre-selling is a strong validation where sign-up’s are a moderate validation (unless in extremely large numbers)
✓	Have we maxed out opportunities to learn about the customer w/ out building anything?	Have you spent time with subjects to qualitatively validate your persona and problem hypotheses?
	Do we have to build working product or would a demo/synthetic item do?
✓	Have we ruled out all simpler options?	Are there cheaper, easier ways to validate the value hypothesis?

Questions for Team Discussion

What are all our options?

Is there a sequence we should take?

How many people and what resources do we need to to do this?

Do we really understand what the end result will look like and is it actionable for our target next step?

Storyboarding: Before & After

Storyboarding puts your design thinking outputs into motion, helping you expand your understanding of the customer and drastically improving the presentation of your ideas. The before & after storyboard will help you expand and describe your product thesis.

Why it’s helpful

• To make sure you have vivid, testable descriptions of your product thesis
• To avoid missing important details in your thesis creation, discovery, and execution

When to use it

This is a great follow-on to your product thesis, particularly if you want to exercise or showcase your point of view after some customer discovery or before a presentation.

What you get

Traditionally a tool for artists, producers and designers, storyboards are increasingly popular with ‘design thinkers’ of all stripes. The before & after storyboard energizes and raises the bar on customer discovery and proposition management.

Let’s look at an example

Back to Enable Quiz, here’s their before and after storyboard dealing with the problem of hiring engineers, specifically validating their credentials:

Instructions

Step	Time (min.)	Materials & Technique
Make sure you have an identified set of personas, a problem scenario, an alternative, and a value proposition	/
Before: Using three panels, storyboard the initiation/trigger for the problem and then a summary view of the actions that follow.	5	Materials: STORYBOARDING SQUARESSee previous items on personas, problem scenarios, alternatives, and value propositions
After: Starting with the same trigger/initiation of the problem, storyboard the after scenario	5
Peer presentations	3 min/per	Present your storyboard to a partner; see if they get it by asking them to summarize

Drawing Insights and Implications

This is basically a richer view of your product hypothesis. Putting the thesis through the storyboarding process is a good checkpoint to make sure a) you still believe you’re on the right track and ultimately that b) this is what you’re seeing when you go out into the real world and do customer discovery.

Checklist

The following checklist will help you make sure you’ve created a useful starting point that you can build on

	Item	Criteria
✓	The storyboard is discussable	After presenting the storyboard for 2-3 minutes, can a counterparty explain it back to you?

Questions for Team Discussion

Does the product thesis still look good?

Is it consistent with what you’re seeing in the field during customer discovery?

Tips & Lessons from Others

1. Try, try, try again
It’s easy to get started with storyboarding. Getting fluent in the process may take a few tries.

2. Be vivid, be specific, be real
The whole purpose of the storyboard is to be vivid, producing something that therefore is more testable against real world detail.

Storyboarding: AIDAOR

AIDAOR offers a comprehensive view of the customer journey: attention, interest, desire, action, onboarding, retention.

Why it’s helpful

• Helps you make sure you’re not neglecting key steps in the customer journey, like sign-up and contracting
• Gives you a more vivid, testable view of your customer intake funnel

When to use it

As you begin to develop your hypotheses around customer creation, this is a great way to tie that to the preceding work around design thinking while making your view of the funnel easier to discuss and test.

What you get

Usually executed in six panels, the AIDAOR storyboard will provide you a compact view of the customer journey that you can tweak and expand (to multiple views) as you progress your understanding.

Let’s look at an example

Back to Enable Quiz, here’s their AIDAOR storyboard:

Instructions

Step	Time (min.)	Materials & Technique
Storyboard the AIDAOR journey	10	Materials:  STORYBOARDING SQUARES
Peer presentations	3 min/per	Present your storyboard to a partner; see if they get it by asking them to summarize

Drawing Insights and Implications

The Enable Quiz team realized that there were a whole set of stories around how ‘Helen the HR Manager’ gets the quizzes right by working with ‘Frank the Functional Manager’. They also realized they hadn’t thought through the sign-up and ordering process as well as they should.

Checklist

The following checklist will help you make sure you’ve created a useful starting point that you can build on.

	Item	Criteria
✓	The storyboard is discussable	After presenting the storyboard for 2-3 minutes, can a counterparty explain it back to you?

Questions for Team Discussion

Are there any gaps in the target customer journey vs. your plans?

Is it consistent with what you’re seeing in the field during customer discovery? In actual customer acquisition?

Tips & Lessons from Others

1. Focus on the small things, the boring things
We tend to want to focus on headline features and topline promotional messaging. Overall, that’s probably good but it’s important to make sure you’re not doing a great job on product and promotion and then bleeding customers to a bad sign-up process or invoicing.

Storyboarding: Agile Epics

Storyboarding your epic agile user stories creates better inputs for your implementation team and helps you push and expand the limits of your understanding.

Why it’s helpful

• Helps link the work you’ve done on design thinking and customer discovery to product implementations
• Creates a more testable view of your product implementation plans, focusing and improving field validation

When to use it

Agile is great and its use of stories dovetails well with design thinking. But stories can easily become rote and inwardly focused. Storyboarding key epic agile user stories will help you improve inputs to your engineering team and outputs to your customer.

• You’re spending too much time discussing what to build
• You’re struggling to write good stories
• What you get at the end of an iteration isn’t matching what you thought you’d get
• You’re not sure how to systematically validate that what you’re putting into the market is working for the end user

What you get

The storyboards can easily be linked to the epic story itself and its related sub-stories.

Let’s look at an example

Back to Enable Quiz, here’s storyboard for the following epic: ‘As the HR manager, I want to create a screening quiz so that I can understand whether I want to send recruits to the functional manager.’

Instructions

Step	Time (min.)	Materials & Technique
Write an agile epic	5	Make sure this is large enough be an epic but individual enough to be something that a developer would implement as a feature.
Storyboard the epic	10	Materials:  STORYBOARDING SQUARES
Write the related user stories, linking them to the storyboard	5
Peer presentations	3 min/per	Present your storyboard to a partner; see if they get it by asking them to summarize

Drawing Insights and Implications

The Enable Quiz team realized there were several key implementations around how ‘Helen the HR Manager’ would communicate the quiz results from candidates to ‘Frank the Functional Manager’, along with her comments.

Checklist

The following checklist will help you make sure you’ve created a useful starting point that you can build on.

	Item	Criteria
✓	The storyboard is discussable	After presenting the storyboard for 2-3 minutes, can a counterparty explain it back to you?

Questions for Team Discussion

Does this make sense as a feature?

How will you know if it makes sense to the customer?

Is it understandable, discussable with the implementation team?

Tips & Lessons from Others

1. Stories are for discussion; they’re not a spec
The point of storyboarding an epic is not to prove it’s a good story. It’s to make it even more discussable with colleagues and development. Be sure to stay open to revision so you get the most out of the agile process.