As a Founder or Product Owner how do you go about making decisions? This isn’t so much a philosophical question as much as it is a question of the processes, culture and values of your organization.
Although the statistics are rather imprecise, the probability of success for a new business can be intimidating.
We believe the overwhelming root cause can be traced back to two fundamental and closely related reasons:
- Faulty assumptions about the customer
- Poor decision-making processes used by the leadership team
So far, this blog series has spoken at length about the customer discovery process and the importance of partnering with your customers to understand why, what and how they buy. Learning about your customer is a key theme we’ll continue to explore in future posts, but I’d like to take a brief hiatus and turn our attention to how you make decisions.
Evidology is a compound word we created to highlight our belief in the importance of an evidence-based methodology as a foundation for your business.
Do you have an important decision you need to make? Perhaps it involves your Go-To-Market strategy, lead market segment, product strategy, whether (and where) to pivot, financing options, or human resource management. How you collect evidence and make an informed decision with imprecise information is a daily challenge for you and for others in your organization.
Lean Startup Fundamentals
Without a doubt, the Lean Startup movement has had a profound impact on innovation for entrepreneurs across industries. It has steered Founders and product owners to develop solutions that closely align with customer requirements, controlling cost and risk along the way.
Central to the Lean Startup methodology is an iterative process starting with a hypothesis, testing it, refining it, and actioning it.
For some, however, the blinding pursuit of speed and agility has warped the Lean process into a startup culture with quick decision-making and a fix-it-later attitude. Sadly, for 99% of startups, later never comes.
The most important aspect of the Lean Startup approach is too easily lost. Going back to the fundamentals: it’s about running an experiment, collecting results, then taking action based on an analysis of those results. This process makes for better decision-making and increases the probability of a successful outcome.
The Evidology concept validation framework we’ve discussed in this blog series is a case in point. It starts with collecting evidence to support and refine the hypothesis summarized in your value proposition. This evidence, captured in the Customer Canvas, not only gives you the framework to make effective decisions, but it helps you build a customer rapport to further test and refine your solution and make better decisions faster.
Difficult decisions deserve a framework. I hope you will enjoy this fascinating topic and that it, along with our concept validation process, will make a meaningful difference to your business.
For more information, please contact the Evidology Group.
