Steve Neiderhauser

The Magic Of Assumption Testing

In her Assumption Testing class, Teresa Torres unlocks the magic of assumption testing. Why do I call it magic?

Any time you can accelerate customer learning by 10X or more, that’s magic.

You see, most teams test ideas instead of testing assumptions. Here’s an idea: A new mobile app will increase revenue by 21 percent. For the next three months, the team wrote software and deployed the app to find out that no one even touched the app. Yes, the team learned a lesson: “The biggest waste is building something no one wants."

Instead of an idea, the team could have reframed the problem and identified several assumptions to test. Testing an assumption takes a fraction of the time to build an idea. 

There’s no need for me to write more because Teresa has written, Assumption Testing: Everything You Need to Know to Get Started.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

Value Stream Design

Value Stream Mapping is a tool that every Agile coach should know how to use. It’s not just the mapping, but what design concepts can you employee to deliver value to customers?

With process design, you could eliminate, simplify, or change sequence of a step in the process.

The book, Value Stream Mapping by Karen Martin, provides several design questions that help create the future state of a value stream. Consider these questions:

General Questions

What are the business issues (quality, speed…) we wish to address?

What does the customer want?

How can we reduce delays between processes?

How can we increase the quality of incoming work at each process?

Delays

Can we reduce batch size or eliminate batching completely?

How can we create more capacity or reduce work load at the bottleneck?

Technology

Is unnecessary technology involved?

Is available technology fully utilized?

Are systems connected to so data flows smoothly?

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These are some of the questions and design approaches in the book. I encourage you to study design because the best way out of a problem is to design your way out.

You can also listen to Karen Martin discuss value streams in this free webinar.