Product Management

Lean Startup Crash Course

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Apps, Business, Product Management
Those of you who know me know that I am a fitness experimenter and product manager that works at Intuit (also a father of twins and a husband!). Well, I have to give a prominent shout out to Intuit, and Scott Cook specifically, for embracing the Lean Startup methodology and for putting innovation in front of everyone who works on products.

I recently had the opportunity to participate in an Intuit-wide Lean Startup competition where teams were selected to come to San Diego and pitch ideas to Eric Ries, get guidance from Brant Cooper, and get judged by a combined panel of innovators at Intuit. The competition started on Friday and ended Monday which meant working over the weekend.  Competitors were judged by how many times they passed through the customer feedback loop.  This means conducting experiments with customers in a time-compressed schedule multiple times.

I had heard about the lean startup methodology before and was familiar with many of the terms like “pivot” or “persevere”. However, I didn’t really know the Lean Startup method until it was “game on” time. I can tell you that going through this competition was fantastic!  Why?  Because my teammate and I made many mistakes and learned fast.

Here’s a quick run down of how it went (leaving the idea specifics out at the moment):

  1. We pitched our idea to Eric. Eric said do something else.
  2. We tested the problem space with real customers, and it was ho-hum.
  3. We ran a survey on Facebook, bought some ads, and didn’t get anywhere.
  4. We ran a survey on Ask Your Target Market and got fantastic results that told us how 50 customers rated the problem, solution, and if they would buy. 
  5. We had a new view of the problem and a rating of what customers wanted and that they would buy it if it existed. We were so excited we decided to build a prototype.
  6. The prototype got finished “enough” but took forever. Worse, it didn’t directly help us answer the question we needed it to answer. 
  7. We had to switch to a landing page mockup and test the problem, solution, and buy question there.
  8. We used up our ad money and found out how ad bids really worked. We wished we would have saved money earlier on the Facebook survey. 
  9. We got the ads dialed in and kicked off a parallel effort. 
  10. We only had a few hours left and ended up running around with our half-built prototype and our landing page printed out canvassing potential customers to see if the would buy it.
We ended up winning the competition, which was great, but what was much better was the experience of really nailing down the questions we needed to answer so we could decide how to move forward.  On top of that there was another huge learning…when you know the right question, you then have to ask the second most important question.  How fast can you answer the question you need to answer?  We really had a lot of barriers about even going to that question, but being time-pressed, the barrier broke. 
I can’t say enough about how crucial it is to ask that second question. Instead of running off into a corner building something we don’t know if customers want, we now have a very good picture of what customers want.  We did it with 4 days and about 200 bucks. Given what we know now, I think we could trim it to 2 days and 100 bucks next time.

Are you interested in a gardening Iphone app?

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Apps, Product Management
Prior to my indoctrination to the Lean Startup method, I thought if I built something really good, people would flock to it and love using it. In some cases, I’m sure that’s true, but with my gardening iphone app I never got that far. For some reason, I never managed to put it in front of people. While I agree that was completely wasteful, I thought I would attempt to remedy this. 
To the right, I have a couple of screen shots of the Gardening app called “Growfu”. It has two main functions. The first is to help you remember to water your garden. When you enter in plants from your garden, the app checks out the plant and then determines a watering schedule.  From there, it reminds you to water the plants in your garden and keeps track of if the plant has been watered or not. You have additional activities that you can record regarding your plant or plant areas like taking a picture and seeing all your activity with your plants.  You can see your plant history. I imagine this being particularly helpful if you are wondering why a plant had a successful yeild or not.
The second function of this application is to show you gardens around you and what’s going on with them.  The idea is to connect you with fellow gardeners in your area so you can share knowledge. Ultimately, the goal is to help you know what is growing well around you and what is not. For example, if broccoli doesn’t grow in your area for anyone else, do you want to try it?  Or, if tomatoes aren’t working for you this year, are they working for others?  If so, what is the difference?  
In this screen shot on the right, you can see that gardeners can check in publicly with their plant’s status. Also, you can see where gardens are around you and what other people are growing.  
So, given what I have laid out so far, is this something that you are interested in?  Or, what would you change? If you are interested in trying this app, please leave a comment so we can connect and I can get you a build of the app.