So that's a good point, too, to move on and talk about testing the solution.
Before we do that, we need to we need to ask ourselves whether or not we're ready for it.
So we've just been out and we've been testing whether or not the customers have got the problem that we think they do.
So. Is is now the right time to go and test whether or not our solution serves that needs.
Well, custom development is designed to stop you from investing in building products that nobody wants.
And if you've been testing the problem and you're not getting a strong signal that there is a customer need there,
then that's actually a really good thing.
You've just you're just about to avoid making a really expensive mistake and moving and moving forward if you take action.
So everyone in your team needs to question everything about the experience that you've just been through, going and speaking to these customers.
Are they excited enough about your about about the problem or are they excited about a potential solution to the problem?
Have you talked to enough of the right people? Well, perhaps the solution is you presented it and your low fidelity MVP isn't quite right.
Be really strictly sales about whether or not you're seeing a strong signal here because now is the time to do something about it.
If not. If you're confident that the customers that you've spoken to and have this problem and that
customers exist in large enough numbers for you to build a business around their needs,
then you can move forward and if not change parts of the business model.
Go back and do that customer that the problem has.
Again, until you find a problem you can really address. And so we're confident enough that people care about the problem that we're that we're
targeting next week to see if they will use our solution to that problem will buy it.
This still isn't about selling the testing.
The testing. The solution is not about selling.
This is really about learning more about whether your customers want your solution, what their initial reactions to it, how they might use it, and.
So obviously we want to know if the solution solves the customer's problem.
And that's one of the things that we're testing. But just as valuable as the is the insight that will gain in the process of answering
that question in the course of confirming that the solution meets their needs.
What else can we learn along the way?
Again, we spoke about designing your test earlier and you can decide how you can how to conduct them in this phase.
And there are lots of different ways of how to do it. I'll talk about two approaches to the testing, which you can consider.
That's the solution presentation and the High Fidelity MVP.
So for the solution presentation, you're returning to the customers that you spoke to in the first test and you perhaps adding a few more to it.
You need to remind them of the problem that you now know that they have and just confirm it still exists and then explain your solution.
If you're using a slide, keep it short, five bullet points, and if possible, you should.
You might have a demo at this point. So some mock up, you might have a prototype.
If it's a physical product, you need to find a way of describing quite quickly what the what the solution is.
And remember, it's not a sales pitch.
You need to explain the solution in clear enough terms for them to understand it and how it's going to serve their problem.
And they need to sit back and listen again. This is about listening and hear them out on their initial impressions.
Dig deeper. As I spoke before with your open questions, ask them stuff about how they see it in the market.
Are they using other products that are like if they seen anything like it and
how how if they were going to take it and implement it within their business,
or if they were going to start using it in their daily life, how would they go about doing that?
Is there any friction? So that would that would that would stop them.
You're not trying to convince them to buy the product or even that it's a good idea.
You're just trying to learn from them about how they might use it and whether or not they value it.
And then finally check the price points if you can get them to tell you how much they think they should pay for it.
That's great.
Otherwise, tell them how much you think you're going to charge for it and find out whether or not they're terrified by that or I'll think it.
Okay. And you're looking for emphatic responses.
This is a quote from Steve Blank. It says lukewarm responses can indicate a profound problem.
Anything less than massive customer enthusiasm about your solution is a big red flag.
It needs to be addressed. There's just no point carrying on building something that isn't going to get people excited.
And at this point, wishful thinking is your enemy. You need to be really honest with yourselves.
So I'm going to move on to the high fidelity MVP, which is another way of testing whether or not the solution works.
And typically the high fidelity MVP will work when you're creating a digital product.
But it also works in the real world, and that's the example I'm going to give you. So Street Car is a car club.
It places cars on the streets and people can wave the car in front of them and rent them by the hour and just walk up to the car,
get in, drive around and great idea. It was such a great idea.
It was sold as it comes at CAR and Oxford actually used in quite a bit.
It was started in London by a guy called Betancur and he began with just six cars in Clapham.
He didn't build a back office operation to run his business.
He did stuff like buying notepads from W.H. Smith, getting his logo and sticking them over the top and putting them in the car as the logbook.
He he cleaned the cars himself. He was the customer support himself.
He ran around making sure that they were all functioning and that they were in
the right places and that all the problems that came up and by any measure,
he'd built a high fidelity MVP, the simplest version of his service, which was work and well enough for people to actually use it, engage with it.
And he did this way before a lot of this theory was around.
So he was just doing it naturally and he was effectively hand crunching his
business operations to find out whether or not his customers would use his cars.
And so what is a high fidelity MVP?
Well, it's the smallest set of features that would allow us to solve the customer's problem, the problem that we've identified.
That's not all of your customers problems. That's just a few or you want is a few to start engaging with your with your products or service.
And in order to test it, you need to get it into the hands of some early adopters.
So early adopters of people or companies who are so eager to get your product that don't make do with a half finished product,
that they'll be real excited. Just like when Brett put his cars in the streets of Clapham,
he knew that there were a bunch of people around that he would just desperate to get their hands on.
And they, they were so excited by the idea of of a car club.
They would they were desperate to give it a shot.
So they didn't mind the notepads. They knew that it was a starter, that it was a little bit rough around the edges.
They just wanted to be involved with it. You need to find some people like that.
And that's and it's their needs that you need to serve with your high fidelity MVP.
If you're speaking to lots of customers, you will have heard a lot of ideas for features by this point,
and your job as a product owner is to decide what features not to build.
And that's most of them. The answer should be most of them.
And. The MVP is not your finished product so either don't get too hung up on it needs to be perfect.
It's just something that you can get out there that you can start using. Here's what we do in our agency when we're exploring ideas for products.
I'm not sure if you can see it, but down on this board,
all of the possible features for any product down in the corner over here are most of the features.
And we've we've divided the board up into three swim lanes and in and in each one with
each one is a product release and you can see how few of the features we've moved up.
These are the ones that are essential. These these are the the very few features that we need to build to begin with to find
out whether or not this thing is going to start working for some of our early adopters.
And we don't need to think about the rest of it.
And that's that's usually the case if you're really honest with ourselves about most of the stuff that you're going to be doing and.
And so how did you go about validating your your MVP?
Well, you should understand at the beginning what's desirable user behaviour on that
MVP looks like and make sure that you've put in the metrics to to measure it.
You need to be able to measure whether or not people are signing up, whether or not you're losing them on sign up,
whether or not they're coming back again, whether or not they're interacting with a certain part of the product that you're building.
You should also remember to go and speak to your customers, even though you may be producing a product that's all online.
In the early days, there's nothing better than hearing directly from the people who are using it.
To give you an example of that, as a great business in Oxford called Educate, one guy run by a guy called Charlie Derbyshire just starting off.
It's a product that teachers can use to set homework for their classes, and it marks the homework for them.
So it saves the teachers for 10 hours a week in marketing.
So great value proposition. Now, Charlie started off with a big bang launch and sent mail out to all of the schools.
And he did get some schools activating accounts, but most of them didn't continue after the free, free trial.
So by a lot of measures, his initial launch had failed.
But what Charlie did was built relationships with those with those people who had come forward and said,
Yeah, that really does sound like a nice idea. I'd like in my school and with them over the next few months,
he changed his products and developed it and made sure that it was genuinely servicing
their needs because he had built those relationships even though it was a digital product.
And actually maintaining those relationships, which are for Charlie, is now an integral part of his business.
When he onboard the school, he he handholds them and then lastly let you know, take every opportunity you can to learn stuff during this MVP.
So I spoke earlier on about an investment that we've made into a used cars product, so used car sales product.
So it's in we're going through the process of building our MVP at the moment when we launch it,
we're going to be launching it to a small number of dealers. Now, our plan is not necessarily hellbent on making that launch a success.
It's about building personal relationships with those dealers,
getting on the phones and going and visiting them and finding out whether or not our product in their hands is working for them.
And if it's not, why not? It's all about learning. It's a learning experience.