Venture Design (1 of 2): Product Design and Validation

Successful ventures are built on:

• A strong foundation understanding of the customer
• Adaptive progress to product and promotion that works

In this session you’ll learn actionable practices from the discipline of design thinking, Lean Startup and customer discovery. The use of customer discovery and rapid iteration is at the heart of today’s most successful ventures.

Slides

Module 1: Achieving Customer Relevance

Module 2: Iterating to Success

See page for Venture Design Session II for the balance of the slides.

Homework

A. Draft a working set of personas

Pick the most important buyers and/or users. More is not necessarily better- you can always add more (re-segment) later. Finish think-see-feel-do. Find a photo. Push yourself to finish at least one persona all the way through (description, photo, think-see-feel-do). Beyond that, write as much as you feel you know and then move on to customer discovery out in your customers’ environment. There’s a template available here: Venture Design Template (Personas).

B. Draft a working set of problem scenario-alternative-value proposition trios. 

Flesh out as many as you can. You’ll find a template for this interleaved with the personas (see above link).

C. Finish a working product hypothesis and positioning statement.

For an examples on the product hypothesis, see slide 109 from ‘Module 1: Achieving Customer Relevance’ in the slides. For a template on the positioning statement see Venture Design Template (Positioning Statement).

D. Finish a working interview guide to validate your persona and problem hypotheses and complete a few customer interviews.

See here for a template on these: Venture Design Template (Customer Discovery).

E. Draft a working set of assumptions

Start from your Product Hypothesis (see #C). For a template, see Venture Design Template (Assumptions).

F. Design your experiment(s) and execute as much as you can

This may be an MVP of sorts but ultimately it’s whatever you think most efficiently validates your most pivotal assumptions.