Hello, welcome to the BottomUp Skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons, I'm the CEO of Qualitance and we are at the final chapter of lean hypothesis. I've really enjoyed sharing with you, the real nuts and bolts of how to do the lean hypothesis, how to apply lean thinking to your product. So now what I'm going to do is in this final chapter, I just summarize best practices.
So it really does assume you've listened to the previous two shows. Just go and jump into your app, have a listen to those super short 10 minutes each, um, that that will help you get the most out of this. Episode, uh, I'll do my best to give you all the context, because really what we're going to do today is isolate a few things that can really ensure that [00:01:00] you get your problem solution fit, that you get the validation you're looking for.
And likewise, I'm going to help you avoid being in a guessing game. We want to be in the knowing game when we're out there designing and building product services business, nonetheless, it's really important that you are disciplined and rigorous. In fact, I always talk about, uh, being. Sort of like Sherlock Holmes, really investigating the facts.
You can put a ton of facts and data into your lean hypothesis and it can yield you really powerful insights on how to improve your product. So let's just talk about lean hypothesis as a mini process. I've got five steps for you, and I would really strongly advise you following these. First of all, let's just imagine you have.
Uh, an existing product and, um, step one is go and gather the data [00:02:00] on what your users are. Your website, visitors, what are they doing right now? Now, if, um, you look at that data, you might need to ask a few questions just to. Uh, fill in some basic gaps, like a good example of that would be rather than just saying our customers.
It would be really good to say our very loyal customers. So you go down into a segment, you might need to speak to a couple of them just to get to know their needs. So that's step one, get all the data about how they're behaving. If it's a website where they're clicking, how they're getting there, if it's a sh, if it's a physical store, you know, talk to people when they'd come in, talk to them, when they check out really important.
And then step two is you formulate your hypothesis and your hypothesis we'll have these five. Major components that we've talked about in previous episodes, we'll dig into them in a [00:03:00] minute, but you're going to have this hypothesis about what a great new product or service is going to look like. Step three, go and test each of the variables in your hypothesis.
And you're looking to confirm what you've written there or scratch it out, reject it. We said it was the loyal customers. Actually. It's the new customers that have the biggest opportunity for us. Great insight. So you need to get, actually go through the hypothesis until it is fully tested and you will often.
Find that it's really important to document because people want to discuss particularly major pivots in your lean hypothesis, like a customer pivot, like a solution pivot. You really need to have some documentation to support that. Um, so we love, uh, the dovetail app. Uh, so if you go and Google that, it's a fantastic way to document what you're learning from your users.
So step four, you've created those documents. Step [00:04:00] five, the loop starts again, get your conclusions, create new questions, perhaps even a new hypothesis. So this is the process that you want to follow. Now we mentioned our five key things, and I want to make sure that you get these into your hypothesis. You should state.
A clear user persona, or customer state, their problem that they have right now and trying to get a job done. So there's two really important points. I love to see it when people also say here's their current alternatives. Okay. For what's our value prop. What's new that we're bringing to them and we'll observe, observe success through certain metrics.
Really important to stick to those, please don't skip because they're all there for a good reason. And it's just going to skew your results in your lean hypothesis. Okay. So we've dealt with the nuts and bolts of the lean hypothesis. We kind of put those into a [00:05:00] process. Here is some. Some very, uh, good lessons that I've learnt overseeing this implemented.
And, uh, if I was to start today, these, these four lessons, I would hold really, uh, front of mind, um, in order to make sure that we are successful. Okay. So you're going to do a lean hypothesis, make sure that the. Testing is given a very specific fixed timeframe. You know, I like one to two weeks max, because you know, you need to create a start and an end to this process.
You need to take all of the conclusions, share them with your colleagues, your partners, your, your investors, your board, whoever it is. It's really important that you just don't get into this endless, you know, fine tuning and polishing because this really leads us to the second thing. We're really only [00:06:00] proving here, problem solution fit.
So you don't want to get too carried away. So an interesting thing that you'll see come, uh, come up a lot in, in lean startup is doing the least amount of work. So this doesn't mean in this case to cut corners, but. Particularly if you're seeing that something's not working, let it go. If you're seeing something that's working.
Okay, good. But we don't need to test it 300 times. Like test it a couple of times look solid. Okay. Because obviously there's still so much testing that can happen, particularly when we're going into product market fit, we're going to be building MVPs. So do the least amount of work to achieve the proof, the validation of your hypothesis.
Now another thing, uh, that is really important is when you're working in a team structure, like who is doing what and defining the actions that need to happen, because if [00:07:00] you don't. Run these tests and have clear actions on who's doing what you're still going to have largely a bunch of guesses. So if you have an existing product, you might do tweaks in your product in order to test out your hypothesis.
If you've yet to build a product, maybe you need to go and do some research. And there's many different ways you can research. I'm going to give you those in a moment to help you out. Lastly. The expected result. For success. Now we talked about, uh, something, uh, earlier on in, uh, the previous episode where we talked about actually, when you write your hypothesis, you should also, um, actually outline your test outcomes.
What do we think being correct? Looks like, what do we think being wrong looks like. Cause there's not easy, easy. Trust me. It's not always easy to know. Okay. Does that data. Prove or disprove our [00:08:00] hypothesis. So to get you out of that endless cycle, just make sure you've got some framing of success of test outcomes.
All right. We're on the home stretch here for some best practices with the lean hypothesis. If you are enjoying this and you would love to go deeper head over to bottom-up dot IO, where you'll find all sorts of, uh, great courses, they're totally free and you can learn. Design thinking, agile lean and much, much more.
So if you want to test, um, uh, beyond, uh, your product, um, there's lots that you can do. You can do surveys and interviews. You can even rapid prototype. If you have a product right now, obviously what you want to look at is the ability. For journey completion, task completion. Very good way to, to validate our hypothesis, um, make sure that when you are prototyping, you try and create the really direct experience.
And if you're very interested in rapid prototyping, we also actually have a course on [00:09:00] that as well. So you can check that out at bottom-up dot IO. All right. So that's it. That is our three-part series on the lean hypothesis. I hope you've really got something out of this such a great tool. I use it all the time and, um, I couldn't, I couldn't bear the thought of starting a project to build a brand new product without Arlene hypothesis.
So. I hope this gives you a really good frame for the problem solution fit. I hope it gives you the ability to articulate your vision for your new product. And most of all, I really do hope it gives you the power of the confidence to go out in the world to build new products, to build new services, to build new businesses.
All right, this is the bottom-up skills podcast. That's a wrap. [00:10:00]
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