Strategyzer webinar learnings: Designing experiments that matter
Strategyzer put on a free webinar to discuss how to design business experiments that matter, with David Bland & Alex Osterwalder providing the discussion. I stumbled on these guys after being recommended the book 'Business Model Generation' (http://cuddletech.com/?p=910), and subsequently reading the follow-up book 'Value Proposition Design' (my present CTO is encouraging VPD practices) - plus using many of their resources.
(Will add a link to the recording here when it arrives...)
(Will add a link to the recording here when it arrives...)
Big lessons
- When companies start seeing failure as success, culture is moving.
- e.g. I am so glad we learned there was nothing in this idea; we saved millions of investment dollars
- The ramifications of incentivizing output instead of outcome
- Current software development methods reward output (deliver by a certain date, deliver a feature or product) instead of rewarding the outcome
- This leads to focusing on building instead of learning
- Learn / Build / Measure loop
- Start with learn! Almost everyone starts w. build
- Tightly couple learning with building
Thoughts
- Output vs. outcome: How does this fit into or change the Agile w. DevOps view?
- How do you balance getting things done with experimentation?
- Is 'getting things done' a preconceived notion that traps us?
- What needs to change to allow (enforce?) 'experiments with evidence'?
- Fear of failure is an easy theme here - how, practically, can this be addressed and mitigated?
Other notes
- Are you focusing on building? or learning?
- Are you throwing away things you've built?
- If not, the things you are building are too expensive!
- Lean is about deferring commitment
- Be crafty/scrappy/creative in your experiments
- Gets very hard to throw away things that have a big investment in infra/code
- In environments where regulatory or legal barriers are present - don't assume commissions/legal depts automatically want to shut you down
- Talk to them!
- Find out what you can and can't do
Design thinking notes
- Three parts that must not be separated - they inform each other:
- Desirable - do they?
- Viable - should we?
- Feasible - can we?
- Multi-disciplinary teams help keep them together
- e.g. Engineering, sales, business, etc
- Desirability
- Start with customer interviews in teams of two
- Landing page test
- Use the words of the customers
- Pricing tests also should not be ignored - treat the same way
Further reading
- Express Executive Education - http://cuddletech.com/?p=910
- Despite the name, a lot of valuable lessons for anyone trying to make things better
- (added to my future book list...) https://www.amazon.ca/Monetizing-Innovation-Companies-Design-Product/dp/1119240867/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1493142562&sr=8-1&keywords=monetizing+innovation
- https://www.amazon.ca/Business-Model-Generation-Visionaries-Challengers/dp/0470876417/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1493142532&sr=8-1&keywords=business+model+generation
- https://www.amazon.ca/Value-Proposition-Design-Products-Customers/dp/1118968050/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1493142537&sr=8-1&keywords=value+proposition+design
Comments
Post a Comment