Learn about a case study in which problem interviewing was used after making assumptions with a wearable fall detector product. The lesson learned was massive engineering cost savings by validating the product before development was starated
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Layman's Guide to Lean Methodology
1. Layman’s guide
to doing Lean
Chirag Patel
Co-founder | Chicago Health 2.0 | @CHIHealthTech
Dir of Software Dev | ContextMedia | @ContextMediaInc
chirag@chicagohealthtech.org
@patelc75
2. How many of you
are doing lean?
How many of you
want to do lean but
too busy?
Who is early stage
and how early
stage are you?
3. “Get out of the
building”
- every Lean evangelist known
to man (easier said than done)
4. Why did I need lean?
I built this interface that was rarely used
5. Mobile version
At home version
Next product: Lean1st product: Not
Lean
I’m going to try lean
6. Before I learned about
lean, I knew I wanted
to focus on user
stories instead of
features
8. Our “non-lean” schedule
from our 1st product
Build demo with features
based on assumptions
Month 8Start Month 4
Feedback
Build slightly better
demo
Make
assump-
tions
Often
wasted
time &
money
Expensive
Non-
Lean
Needed
to fix
this
9. Stage 1: Problem/Solution Fit
Key Questions: Do I have a problem worth
solving? Does anyone care about my solution?
Are they willing to pay?
my “lean experiment” focuses here
Stages of product lifecycle
10. …. and focused on the “Problem” box
in the business model canvas
12. Proactive
senior
Early evangelists as a
experiment to figure
largest addressable m
Declining
Senior
I started by drawing my customer/user segment
hypotheses and looking for early evangelist
Post
Discharge
Senior
Declining
independently
living senior
with busy
caregiver
daughter
13. “It is better to be wrong than
vague. If you are wrong, you
iterate; if you are vague, you
have wasted your time and
cannot draw any conclusions.”
Cooper, Brant; Vlaskovits, Patrick; Blank, Steven (2010-10-15).
The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development: A cheat
sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany (p. 74). Cooper-
Vlaskovits. Kindle Edition.
14. I started with what I thought were my top
problems aka my hypotheses
….but decoupled the problem and solution
18. This solution/product I already
have in mind should be
renamed to my “first
hypothesis”.
After hypothesis, problem interview and then solution interview
Source: “Running Lean”
19. “How do I identify a
problem worth
solving?
What do I ask?”
20. I broadly asked
“What are your top
problems with
caregiving your mom?”
While focusing on the
ones I could solve
21. But also
“How are you
solving them
today?”
and
“And what does it cost
you to solve them?”
22. Now
“How do I find
interviewees?”
5 friends (don’t interview)
X
5 friends of friends
= 25 folks
26. Admittedly, I also interviewed the “solution”
during the problem interview
27. How I did the solution interview:
Watch them use your solution!
1. Paint a picture
2. Don’t say anything about the solution
3. Prep them to “talk out loud”
4. Practice talking out loud on another
product/site
28. Track
Everywhere
Mom goes
A single hypothesis came from a resonating
problem (told during interviews without asking)
Don’t know
when Mom
went to the
doctor
→
HYPOTHESIS STICKY
30. MVT1: Omnigraffle
mockup
MVT2: Unbounce Landing
page
MVT3: Clickable
InvisionApp Mockups
MVP1: RhoMobile cross-
platform app (started
concurrently with MVP2)
I thought of them as MVTs (Minimum
Viable Tests) instead of MVPs.
31. I did a
mockup of a
landing page
as my MVT1
(using
Omnigraffle)
32. Example learnings from iterating:
• Voice recorder feature idea
I put the Omnigraffle mockup MVP1 in
front of people!
33. Declining elderly seniors
Here’s my
deployable
landing page in
Unbounce
page, good
enough!
Unbounce has
weight feature so
you can easily do
A/B experiments
39. For me, lean is
validating learnings on
both the problem and
solution before
spending time and
money unnecessarily
So how did lean help me?
40. It’s not about saving time
(or shitty MVPs)
Build demo with features
based on assumptions
Problem Interviews
Lo-fi
Mock
-ups
Month 8Start Month 4
MVP demo app
or clickable
mockup
Solu-
tion
Inter-
views
Interviews +
Metric
tracking
Feedback
Hi-fi
Mock
-ups
Build slightly better
demo
Solu-
tion
Inter-
views
Make
assump-
tions
Often
wasted
time &
money
Scalable
Product
Expensive
Much cheaper
Non-
Lean
Lean
Even longer in
healthcare
47. “If I had asked people what
they wanted, they would have
said faster horses.”
- gratuitous Henry Ford quote
48. I quickly filled a Lean Canvas for the
(specific) Dr. Appt “story”
Editor's Notes
The reason I’m doing this is because we’ve advised/mentored/chatted with 20+ startups over the last 2 years and this is by far the #1 roadblock
Happy to meet you 1:1
Ash Maurya “Practice trumps theory”
Why start this general?
1 Gives you the stakeholder’s (caregiver) worldview which is important when aquiring the customer. If the interview has 1 massive must have problem ahead of the one I can solve
“Why I needed lean?’
“What did you did?”
“How did I find time?”
Why am I here? Made many mistakes and made assumption driven
Problem that everyone has
Easier said than done
Doing everytihgn > hard to find time
Why start this general?
1 Gives you the stakeholder’s (caregiver) worldview which is important when aquiring the customer. If the interview has 1 massive must have problem ahead of the one I can solve
Story:
1. Who’s the first one to interact
ENTREPRENUERS THINK THEY KNOW WHAT TO SOLVE
Yea it's best consumed a little at a time. 20 min a day type thing so you can apply the concepts to your own development (at least mentally)
This is the work we could have done before raising$1M – so much you can do without raising a lot of money!!!!!
While we were in due diligence with the angels and VCs for our first $1M, we could have validated the feature needs and create stories without raising a lot of money
Stage 2: Product/Market Fit
Key Question: Have I built something people want and willing to pay enough for? Do I have repeatable and scalable sales model?
Stage 3: Scale
Key Question: How do I accelerate growth? Can I execute my flushed out business model?
10% > 90%
Why start this general?
1 Gives you the stakeholder’s (caregiver) worldview which is important when aquiring the customer. If the interview has 1 massive must have problem ahead of the one I can solve
Early evangelists will thank you for the crappy solution that’s twice as good as existing solution; willing to take your MVP and you can learn from; you will move into early adopter
How do I identoify
(look up specific questions that I was going to ask)
Example of problem interview questions that are specific
Make physically smaller; yellow is not smallest
Wholly in the circle
I have the problem and solution tightly coupled and wil show how I am stripping them apart
Why start this general?
1 Gives you the stakeholder’s (caregiver) worldview which is important when aquiring the customer. If the interview has 1 massive must have problem ahead of the one I can solve
How do I identoify
(look up specific questions that I was going to ask)
Example of problem interview questions that are specific
Problem and solution separation
Why start this general?
1 Gives you the stakeholder’s (caregiver) worldview which is important when aquiring the customer. If the interview has 1 massive must have problem ahead of the one I can solve
How do I identoify
(look up specific questions that I was going to ask)
Example of problem interview questions that are specific
Adding context – “walk through the day”
Why start this general?
1 Gives you the stakeholder’s (caregiver) worldview which is important when aquiring the customer. If the interview has 1 massive must have problem ahead of the one I can solve
How do I identoify
Example of problem interview questions that are specific
Why start this general?
1 Gives you the stakeholder’s (caregiver) worldview which is important when aquiring the customer. If the interview has 1 massive must have problem ahead of the one I can solve
There are workarounds!
Don’t ask “Would you pay for this?”
Example of problem interview questions that are specific
I found Ann through my network
A list of five names of people you know who share some of the characteristics (job, demographics, hobbies, industry, etc.) of your ideal early adopter customer. Log onto Facebook, LinkedIn, look at your Twitter followers, etc., and write down five names. Write an email to all five asking for introductions to five people they know, who might also share these characteristics. This is your first contact list. If you don’t know anyone with the same characteristics, simply ask your network for the names of five people who might! Pitfalls to avoid Don’t simply survey your friends and colleagues. While those people are likely to be friendly, their input is likely to be skewed. Use them to find people, not answers. Don’t rely on only one method of prospect acquisition, since this will likely limit the type of person (i.e., market segment) you speak with. ExperimentationCooper, Brant; Vlaskovits, Patrick; Blank, Steven (2010-10-15). The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development: A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany (p. 76). Cooper-Vlaskovits. Kindle Edition.
Prefer face-to-face interviews.Maurya, Ash (2012-02-24).
Pick a neutral location.Maurya, Ash (2012-02-24)
Don’t pay prospects
Avoid recording
Document immediately
Do at least 10
Alec Baldwin story
Did I find tainting was an issue? Don’t try to confirm your own hypothesis
COLUMN Type:
Must Have, Nice to Have, Don’t Need
COLUMN How solving today + Cost of Shortfall:
Is that solution free or paid? More difficult if paid and was free before;
Who to get the problem interviews? Friends and friends of friends vs ads on craigslist
“Unknown” problems
Rigid and fomulaic – gives an example “does this resonate with you” in the problem interview
Did 3 more interviews and it kept resonating
Update this
RhoMObile – this is how engineers think
Show how Pivotal Tracker works with screenshot with points\
Erin montague prototyping
Getting to 10%
How do I know I have an MVP?
How to interviews eliminated features?
During one of the 7 iterations, we interviewed a nurse and she mentioned a voice recording option. Cool, but don’t change the MVP!
$5 charge
Focus on problem checkboxes
Define priority access – “Sign up to be notified”
Facebook > priority access
Maybe discount to monthly subscription
Complexities
User (senior) is not the payer (caregiver)
Hardware schedule is 9 months out
Complicated Sales channels
Need a single message for new products (Rishi was right)
20 health tech startups
Yea it's best consumed a little at a time. 20 min a day type thing so you can apply the concepts to your own development (at least mentally)
This is the work we could have done before raising$1M – so much you can do without raising a lot of money!!!!!
While we were in due diligence with the angels and VCs for our first $1M, we could have validated the feature needs and create stories without raising a lot of money
Talk about the Mixergy podcast and how Eric used lean principles to sell the book
Book tours are bad. Pre-order is bad.
yea it's best consumed a little at a time. 20 min a day type thing so you can apply the concepts to your own development (at least mentally)
Rigid and fomulaic – gives an example “does this resonate with you” in the problem interview
My friend Subbu started a lean launch ‘pod’ in which 4 (health tech ) companies met every 2 weeks
Keep each other accountable!! Action items by the next 2 weeks. Accountability is more important because you have 10 other things going on. Weird dynamic but this is about openeness – this is a hidden characteristic of lean
20 health tech startups
Why am I here? Made many mistakes and made assumption driven