Steve Neiderhauser

How to avoid experiment traps

David Bland explains how to avoid eight experiment traps.

One trap I hope companies avoid is outsourcing testing. This is never a good idea and there’s no real way to justify the practice. This practice leads to handoffs and slows the learning process.

Instead, develop internal skills and teach people how to run rapid business experiments.

Key to Assumptions Testing

Teresa Torres writes that teams can test most assumptions with a combination of prototypes, one-question surveys, or data mining. The appeal of her assumptions testing approach is that it’s agnostic.

You can use any experiment type to simulate a customer event. Embrace the simple assumption-simulate-evaluate model and you'll become a talented assumptions tester.

Prototype Definition

IDEOU offers the definition of a prototype:

A prototype is anything that gets the idea in your head into an artifact people can experience and offer feedback on.

As much as possible, make your ideas tangible, visible, and experimental.

IDEO does a nice job of describing the benefits of a prototype, and I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to use prototypes.

How to Present Your Product

In the book Presenting Virtually, I discovered this effective approach for telling an audience what your product is about. 

Here’s the approach:

1. Provide an example or analogy to describe your product.
2. Share a diagram of the product’s architecture. 
3. Give a live demo of the product.
4. Have a customer provide a testimonial.

How to Prototype Your Story

The ability to break your story into pieces and prototype the experience is a rather rare and valuable talent.

Storytelling helps prototype your story with these incredible tools:

• Logline
• Step Outline
• Treatment 

The Design Squiggle

You’ve probably seen the design squiggle in numerous books or articles about Design or Design Thinking. What is the squiggle about? Well, it shows the design process. The process starts with chaos and a great deal of uncertainty and moves toward certainty.

The illustration and the origin of the squiggle can be found here.

Testing Assumptions

Testing assumptions is a great way to accelerate learning about your customer and derisk projects. For example, a company may believe that most of their customers would want to take a certain class they offer. And yet, when the company runs an experiment they discover that only a couple people show any interest in the class offering.

Learning first how to map assumptions will help teams organize their assumptions so they test assumptions that truly matter.

How do you learn about mapping assumptions. David Bland created this webinar on assumptions mapping.

Lots of great content in this webinar, including facilitation and design thinking techniques.

Inputs for assumptions mapping include:

• Business model canvas
• Product Roadmap
• Product backlog
• Opportunity Solution Tree
• User story map...

Key concept from the webinar: Defer building as long as possible.

The concepts in David’s webinar are extremely helpful and can stop you from wasting months of development time. 

The skill to write brief summaries of key ideas and concepts is rare and coveted.

Review of Empowered Workshop

Tim Woods provides an excellent review of Marty Cagan’s Empowered Workshop.

What’s the most valuable part of the review?

Tim provides a list of pre-reading material for the workshop, so if you can’t attend you still have the opportunity to learn deeply.

The Sketch, Craft, Refine Cycle

In this article, Josh Kerievsky leads us through the artistic process for a poster.

• Rapid, inexpensive sketch creation.
• Elimination and selection of a sketch.
• Elaboration of the sketch.
• Crafting the poster.
• Refining the poster.

Sketch, craft, and refine. These are the steps artists take to create great works.

How Product Managers can Speed Up Development

Some years ago I worked at a product company where the VP of Product had an epiphany late one night and added the role of project manager to his product managers long list of duties.

As you might guess, this approach didn’t turn out well.

The product managers were new to their product role and struggling to master it so how could they possibly learn the project manager role with no training or prior skills in project management.

In addition, the teams were using Scrum, a framework with only three roles and where project management is split among the three roles. Note: there’s research that shows the fewer roles in a company the more profitable the company so please refrain from adding more roles.

By adding the project manager role, the VP created chaos. Work was late even though the team was working longer hours and several of the developers left the company.

Fact is, it’s more about designing an environment for success.

Rich Mironov writes a post that shows how product managers can make design decisions that boosts the team’s ability to deliver.

Here’s three of his tips:

• Forcing slack into the plan so the team has room to adjust to changes.
• Manage interrupts. Most interrupts can wait until the next sprint planning session.
• Don’t prioritize the entire backlog. Leave room for emergent learning.

Opportunity Solution Tree

This article by Teresa Torres, explains the Opportunity Solution Tree; how it helps teams see the big picture and understand the next steps in Product Discovery.

The Opportunity Solution Tree is a mental model that acts like Velcro for your mind. The seemingly small, trivial details stick to your mind because of the Velcro-like mental model.

Product Discovery

Years ago, I worked for a startup company and we started doing agile with the development teams. Well, productivity increased by 412% and yet revenues stayed flat.

That’s when I discovered Lean Startup and validated learning to make sure we were building the right products. The term “product discovery” was coined by Marty Cagan.

In this post Marty Cagan explains Product Discovery and that it is technique agnostic.

Possible discovery techniques are MVP, design thinking, and customer development.

37 Digital Tools for Running Business Experiments

The ability to run experiments is powerful because they dramatically accelerate feedback and customer discovery.

Strategyzer provides a list of 37 tools to help you test your business ideas.

There are tools to conduct customer interviews and tools to create prototypes.

Project to Product

This IT Revolution post provides tips for starting your project to product transformation.

The best tip is to start small. You want to show success early to keep the support of management.  See this paragraph from the post:

"As with other Agile initiatives, it pays to start small and build momentum. Changing the culture of a large organization is not something that can be forced, even if there is top-down support. But many times, these types of initiatives that don’t have full support in the beginning can be expanded, as is described in the 2017 DevOps Enterprise Forum paper Expanding Pockets of Greatness."

They also suggest finding a small project where a single two-pizza team can create an MVP.

Four Tips for Agile Product Management

Abbie Kouzmanoff shares four tips for Agile Product Management.

Teams don’t have to work the same way. Abbie provides four tips for adapting the agile framework.

• Customize Sprints
• Trust your Team
• Consider the Customer
• Encourage Experimentation

It’s great that she encourages the team to experiment and to be curious about the current work flows and other processes.

How to Design Experiments

Teresa Torres provides a wealth of Hypothesis Testing information on her website.

This one tip will save you tons of time. Design and run experiments before you write one line of code. Teams may also want to slightly change the feedback loop from Build -> Measure -> Learn to Learn -> Build -> Measure.