1 00:00:06,100 --> 00:00:11,110 So that's a good point, too, to move on and talk about testing the solution. 2 00:00:12,490 --> 00:00:16,750 Before we do that, we need to we need to ask ourselves whether or not we're ready for it. 3 00:00:16,870 --> 00:00:21,580 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. 4 00:00:21,610 --> 00:00:29,890 So. Is is now the right time to go and test whether or not our solution serves that needs. 5 00:00:30,610 --> 00:00:37,450 Well, custom development is designed to stop you from investing in building products that nobody wants. 6 00:00:38,500 --> 00:00:43,960 And if you've been testing the problem and you're not getting a strong signal that there is a customer need there, 7 00:00:45,160 --> 00:00:46,440 then that's actually a really good thing. 8 00:00:46,450 --> 00:00:53,050 You've just you're just about to avoid making a really expensive mistake and moving and moving forward if you take action. 9 00:00:54,910 --> 00:01:02,470 So everyone in your team needs to question everything about the experience that you've just been through, going and speaking to these customers. 10 00:01:02,890 --> 00:01:09,250 Are they excited enough about your about about the problem or are they excited about a potential solution to the problem? 11 00:01:09,880 --> 00:01:18,550 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. 12 00:01:19,840 --> 00:01:26,020 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. 13 00:01:26,500 --> 00:01:35,600 If not. If you're confident that the customers that you've spoken to and have this problem and that 14 00:01:35,600 --> 00:01:43,100 customers exist in large enough numbers for you to build a business around their needs, 15 00:01:43,550 --> 00:01:47,800 then you can move forward and if not change parts of the business model. 16 00:01:47,810 --> 00:01:51,889 Go back and do that customer that the problem has. 17 00:01:51,890 --> 00:02:00,910 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 18 00:02:00,910 --> 00:02:05,860 targeting next week to see if they will use our solution to that problem will buy it. 19 00:02:07,210 --> 00:02:11,110 This still isn't about selling the testing. 20 00:02:11,110 --> 00:02:12,940 The testing. The solution is not about selling. 21 00:02:13,150 --> 00:02:22,160 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. 22 00:02:24,120 --> 00:02:28,830 So obviously we want to know if the solution solves the customer's problem. 23 00:02:29,610 --> 00:02:38,079 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 24 00:02:38,080 --> 00:02:42,250 that question in the course of confirming that the solution meets their needs. 25 00:02:42,280 --> 00:02:43,630 What else can we learn along the way? 26 00:02:44,350 --> 00:02:50,260 Again, we spoke about designing your test earlier and you can decide how you can how to conduct them in this phase. 27 00:02:50,440 --> 00:02:57,700 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. 28 00:02:58,780 --> 00:03:02,110 That's the solution presentation and the High Fidelity MVP. 29 00:03:03,460 --> 00:03:10,540 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. 30 00:03:11,230 --> 00:03:18,940 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. 31 00:03:18,940 --> 00:03:24,400 If you're using a slide, keep it short, five bullet points, and if possible, you should. 32 00:03:24,490 --> 00:03:29,270 You might have a demo at this point. So some mock up, you might have a prototype. 33 00:03:29,270 --> 00:03:34,150 If it's a physical product, you need to find a way of describing quite quickly what the what the solution is. 34 00:03:34,870 --> 00:03:36,580 And remember, it's not a sales pitch. 35 00:03:37,900 --> 00:03:43,450 You need to explain the solution in clear enough terms for them to understand it and how it's going to serve their problem. 36 00:03:44,140 --> 00:03:49,959 And they need to sit back and listen again. This is about listening and hear them out on their initial impressions. 37 00:03:49,960 --> 00:03:56,050 Dig deeper. As I spoke before with your open questions, ask them stuff about how they see it in the market. 38 00:03:56,050 --> 00:03:59,380 Are they using other products that are like if they seen anything like it and 39 00:04:00,190 --> 00:04:04,239 how how if they were going to take it and implement it within their business, 40 00:04:04,240 --> 00:04:07,720 or if they were going to start using it in their daily life, how would they go about doing that? 41 00:04:08,320 --> 00:04:10,660 Is there any friction? So that would that would that would stop them. 42 00:04:11,890 --> 00:04:15,700 You're not trying to convince them to buy the product or even that it's a good idea. 43 00:04:15,880 --> 00:04:20,410 You're just trying to learn from them about how they might use it and whether or not they value it. 44 00:04:21,190 --> 00:04:26,229 And then finally check the price points if you can get them to tell you how much they think they should pay for it. 45 00:04:26,230 --> 00:04:26,770 That's great. 46 00:04:26,980 --> 00:04:33,190 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. 47 00:04:33,200 --> 00:04:38,950 Okay. And you're looking for emphatic responses. 48 00:04:39,490 --> 00:04:46,220 This is a quote from Steve Blank. It says lukewarm responses can indicate a profound problem. 49 00:04:47,270 --> 00:04:54,040 Anything less than massive customer enthusiasm about your solution is a big red flag. 50 00:04:54,050 --> 00:04:59,240 It needs to be addressed. There's just no point carrying on building something that isn't going to get people excited. 51 00:05:00,640 --> 00:05:05,360 And at this point, wishful thinking is your enemy. You need to be really honest with yourselves. 52 00:05:07,240 --> 00:05:12,969 So I'm going to move on to the high fidelity MVP, which is another way of testing whether or not the solution works. 53 00:05:12,970 --> 00:05:17,770 And typically the high fidelity MVP will work when you're creating a digital product. 54 00:05:18,400 --> 00:05:25,120 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. 55 00:05:25,120 --> 00:05:30,969 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, 56 00:05:30,970 --> 00:05:35,260 get in, drive around and great idea. It was such a great idea. 57 00:05:35,260 --> 00:05:37,870 It was sold as it comes at CAR and Oxford actually used in quite a bit. 58 00:05:38,410 --> 00:05:45,400 It was started in London by a guy called Betancur and he began with just six cars in Clapham. 59 00:05:46,270 --> 00:05:49,630 He didn't build a back office operation to run his business. 60 00:05:50,830 --> 00:05:58,120 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. 61 00:05:58,810 --> 00:06:03,430 He he cleaned the cars himself. He was the customer support himself. 62 00:06:03,850 --> 00:06:06,819 He ran around making sure that they were all functioning and that they were in 63 00:06:06,820 --> 00:06:11,320 the right places and that all the problems that came up and by any measure, 64 00:06:11,320 --> 00:06:20,080 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. 65 00:06:20,440 --> 00:06:24,549 And he did this way before a lot of this theory was around. 66 00:06:24,550 --> 00:06:28,270 So he was just doing it naturally and he was effectively hand crunching his 67 00:06:28,270 --> 00:06:33,040 business operations to find out whether or not his customers would use his cars. 68 00:06:34,930 --> 00:06:38,709 And so what is a high fidelity MVP? 69 00:06:38,710 --> 00:06:44,530 Well, it's the smallest set of features that would allow us to solve the customer's problem, the problem that we've identified. 70 00:06:46,000 --> 00:06:52,120 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. 71 00:06:53,320 --> 00:06:57,280 And in order to test it, you need to get it into the hands of some early adopters. 72 00:06:58,690 --> 00:07:05,860 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, 73 00:07:06,250 --> 00:07:11,260 that they'll be real excited. Just like when Brett put his cars in the streets of Clapham, 74 00:07:11,650 --> 00:07:14,709 he knew that there were a bunch of people around that he would just desperate to get their hands on. 75 00:07:14,710 --> 00:07:17,950 And they, they were so excited by the idea of of a car club. 76 00:07:18,340 --> 00:07:21,520 They would they were desperate to give it a shot. 77 00:07:21,790 --> 00:07:26,769 So they didn't mind the notepads. They knew that it was a starter, that it was a little bit rough around the edges. 78 00:07:26,770 --> 00:07:29,650 They just wanted to be involved with it. You need to find some people like that. 79 00:07:29,950 --> 00:07:33,940 And that's and it's their needs that you need to serve with your high fidelity MVP. 80 00:07:35,080 --> 00:07:39,820 If you're speaking to lots of customers, you will have heard a lot of ideas for features by this point, 81 00:07:40,330 --> 00:07:44,350 and your job as a product owner is to decide what features not to build. 82 00:07:45,220 --> 00:07:49,180 And that's most of them. The answer should be most of them. 83 00:07:49,630 --> 00:07:55,040 And. The MVP is not your finished product so either don't get too hung up on it needs to be perfect. 84 00:07:55,400 --> 00:08:03,860 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. 85 00:08:04,700 --> 00:08:07,639 I'm not sure if you can see it, but down on this board, 86 00:08:07,640 --> 00:08:13,040 all of the possible features for any product down in the corner over here are most of the features. 87 00:08:13,310 --> 00:08:19,260 And we've we've divided the board up into three swim lanes and in and in each one with 88 00:08:19,580 --> 00:08:23,750 each one is a product release and you can see how few of the features we've moved up. 89 00:08:24,200 --> 00:08:30,259 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 90 00:08:30,260 --> 00:08:33,530 out whether or not this thing is going to start working for some of our early adopters. 91 00:08:33,860 --> 00:08:35,420 And we don't need to think about the rest of it. 92 00:08:35,930 --> 00:08:42,280 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. 93 00:08:44,540 --> 00:08:48,440 And so how did you go about validating your your MVP? 94 00:08:50,120 --> 00:08:54,679 Well, you should understand at the beginning what's desirable user behaviour on that 95 00:08:54,680 --> 00:08:59,860 MVP looks like and make sure that you've put in the metrics to to measure it. 96 00:08:59,870 --> 00:09:04,720 You need to be able to measure whether or not people are signing up, whether or not you're losing them on sign up, 97 00:09:04,730 --> 00:09:09,650 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. 98 00:09:12,050 --> 00:09:21,620 You should also remember to go and speak to your customers, even though you may be producing a product that's all online. 99 00:09:21,860 --> 00:09:26,240 In the early days, there's nothing better than hearing directly from the people who are using it. 100 00:09:29,090 --> 00:09:35,480 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. 101 00:09:36,200 --> 00:09:42,139 It's a product that teachers can use to set homework for their classes, and it marks the homework for them. 102 00:09:42,140 --> 00:09:45,870 So it saves the teachers for 10 hours a week in marketing. 103 00:09:45,890 --> 00:09:52,160 So great value proposition. Now, Charlie started off with a big bang launch and sent mail out to all of the schools. 104 00:09:52,160 --> 00:09:59,390 And he did get some schools activating accounts, but most of them didn't continue after the free, free trial. 105 00:09:59,600 --> 00:10:02,080 So by a lot of measures, his initial launch had failed. 106 00:10:02,090 --> 00:10:06,530 But what Charlie did was built relationships with those with those people who had come forward and said, 107 00:10:06,530 --> 00:10:11,660 Yeah, that really does sound like a nice idea. I'd like in my school and with them over the next few months, 108 00:10:11,930 --> 00:10:15,919 he changed his products and developed it and made sure that it was genuinely servicing 109 00:10:15,920 --> 00:10:19,220 their needs because he had built those relationships even though it was a digital product. 110 00:10:19,760 --> 00:10:25,640 And actually maintaining those relationships, which are for Charlie, is now an integral part of his business. 111 00:10:25,910 --> 00:10:35,870 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. 112 00:10:36,350 --> 00:10:44,540 So I spoke earlier on about an investment that we've made into a used cars product, so used car sales product. 113 00:10:44,540 --> 00:10:49,550 So it's in we're going through the process of building our MVP at the moment when we launch it, 114 00:10:50,390 --> 00:10:57,860 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. 115 00:10:58,220 --> 00:11:01,550 It's about building personal relationships with those dealers, 116 00:11:01,730 --> 00:11:06,740 getting on the phones and going and visiting them and finding out whether or not our product in their hands is working for them. 117 00:11:06,740 --> 00:11:10,220 And if it's not, why not? It's all about learning. It's a learning experience.