Let's say we've gone out,
we've done our discovery with real human subjects,
and we have this view that we want to test of what
our customer segments and the personas within them actually will buy from us.
The propositions that will cause them to engage with and buy and use our product.
How do we test those?
Well, we talked about this process,
and we're kind of taking these as an input,
and what we're really focused on is how we take
these value propositions and assumptions and test
them while minimizing the amount of time that takes
and the amount of money we have to invest so that we give ourselves more and more tries.
And that's really the whole purpose of this sequencing of things.
As you move forward through this process,
your options are going to narrow because to build good product,
you've got to drive to a level of specificity,
and at the same time your costs are going to escalate.
It's very inexpensive on a relative basis to go and talk to subjects,
its a bit more expensive to run the kind of engagement
and motivation experiments we're about to talk about together.
And all of that is vastly cheaper than building and
maintaining actual software or physical product.
You've got this view of problem scenarios and alternatives,
and this question of are our propositions better enough than
the alternatives at delivering on
this problem scenario that our customers are going to buy and use this?
So how do we test that with a minimum of waste?
Well, we take first of all this kind of proposition hypothesis,
where we're able to lean our propositions against an understanding of the personas,
the alternatives, and then we have a nice structured kind of
point of view that everybody can understand and go out and test and observe.
If we wanted to kind of summarize our sort of value hypothesis,
the hypothesis that we have
a proposition that our customer actually wants to buy something from us,
it might look something like this.
If Enable Quiz does something,
offers companies that hire engineers
lightweight technical quizzes that screen job candidates then,
and this is kind of the next class, then these companies what would they do?
They would trial, use,
adopt, and ultimately pay for such a service.
Now this may seem really, really simple.
It's like well, if we set up a lemonade stand on
fourth in May next Saturday people will come and buy lemonade.
But, you may find and I think you will find,
that this is a really useful starting point for just saying,
here's what we're assuming about the business,
and how are we going to test that with a minimum of time and money?
And you want to act like a scientist and do this
in a disciplined way where you're looking for an objective right or wrong answer.
And as any scientist will tell you,
the best way to get a good experimental result is to go in with a
nice well thought out and well textured hypothesis.
So, how do we take our nice well textured,
well researched hypothesis or good ideas that
we've formulated based on talking with subjects,
and systematically, go through and see if we're right
about this customer segment to value proposition fit.