Think Your Product Idea is Great? Prove It.
What do science, gumshoe detectives, and new products share?
All begin with a hypothesis and then test if it is true.
In the case of a product, a hypothesis starts as a hunch, an idea, or a brief. Yet at this point, it is still theoretical.
And to botch an old military phrase: new products often don’t survive their first contact with the customer.
So, we must test new ideas — as early as possible.
This concept is not novel. Yet, in his book The Lean Startup, Eric Ries started a popular movement with this concept.
That is, to build products that truly resonate, Ries urges startups and creators of new products to embrace rapid experimentation and customer feedback.
The process can be boiled to the following:
Craft a hypothesis, or the vision of your product, customer, and the problem it solves.
With a mindset of curiosity, commit to learning if the customer agrees with you.
Test your ideas quickly with your ideal customer.
Build simple, focused prototypes. Only what is required.
Test it with your customer. Apply feedback, and do it again.
Okay, but does it work?
Yes. Here is an extreme example.
Our Nike equipment team was tapped to lead our sport category by bringing innovation to an unusual product. A product unchanged for more than a century.
The catch? We had months to complete it, not years.
The product: A leather baseball glove.
The problem: A ball glove’s optimal shape and pliability are short-lived, relative to its lifecycle.
Because it is made from stiff leather, months or years are required to break in for optimal use. Then it is perfect, but the leather degrades eventually until it is unusable. (Think of a round bell curve. The apex of the curve is optimal performance).
Our hypothesis: Could a synthetic ball glove deliver performance faster and last longer than leather?
Footwear faced the same challenges when thick leather was the norm. Now all performance shoes are made with synthetic materials. They are ready to use out of the box and retain these properties longer than leather before degrading. (Picture a bell curve with very short sides and a long flat top).
Test it: We engaged with our users quickly to test our theory.
Within weeks we had a functional ball glove prototype. We simply substituted the usual thick leather for a soccer ball’s poly urethane outer casing. It was far from pretty, but it functioned differently. And reactions from elite high school athletes proved we were on the right track.
But, it was far from PROVEN.
We continued building prototypes, testing additional assumptions. We adapted to the feedback by testing and retesting. Like following a spiral inward, we got closer to the mark.
However, there were many hiccups. Many of our assumptions did not survive testing with real users, requiring us to pivot several times.
Yet in twelve short months, elite athletes had adopted it on the field.
There’s power in the scientific method.
With it comes the freedom to assume and the imperative to test and refine.
And, yes, the need to sometimes pivot.