Ash Maurya's Blog, page 2
September 11, 2015
The Many Ways to Spin Competition
Competition is a strange concept.
We can spin it to be all inclusive or all exclusive.
If Google is in the search business,
they have only a handful of “search” competitors.
If they are in the advertising business,
they have hundreds.
If Facebook is in the social networking business,
they too only have a handful of “social networking” competitors.
But if they are in the consumer attention business,
again there are hundreds of things that compete for our time.
If Apple is in the phone and tablet business…
A much simpler concept is thinking in terms of jobs.
As a consumer, I hire Google everyday to find things on the Internet.
I hire Facebook to discover what my friends are doing and stay connected.
These jobs compete for my time,
but they don’t directly compete with each other,
because I get to choose where I spend my time.
Forget describing what you do in terms of categories.
The next time someone asks: What your company does?
Answer in terms of what your target customers hire you to do for them.
For instance:
I am not in the software business, the consulting business,
the business modeling business, or the lean startup business.
I can similarly go broad or narrow depending on who’s asking.
This however doesn’t change:
My customers hire us to help them build successful products and businesses.
Therefore, what do we do:
We build better entrepreneurs.
People want to know what you do before how you do it.
The next best question is why do you do what you do:
We build better entrepreneurs because…
That’s a topic for another time.
September 10, 2015
Running Good Experiments
Every grand strategy can be tested with one or more small, fast, additive experiments.
Internalize theses 7 Habits for running highly effective experiments:
1. Declare you expected outcomes upfront.
2. Make declaring outcomes a team sport.
3. Emphasize estimation not precision.
4. Measure actions versus words.
5. Turn your assumptions into falsifiable hypotheses.
6. Time-box your experiments.
7. Always use a control group.
September 9, 2015
Finding Good Problems
I am now getting asked this question: “How do I find a good problem to solve?”
A lot more than the usual: “What do you think of my idea?”
While progress, it’s still not a good question.
Don’t get me wrong.
I still consider it great progress in mind shift –
prioritizing problems over solutions,
and it is a step in the right direction.
But, the question is impossible to answer as asked.
With an open-ended question like that, the possible solution-space is infinite.
The only way to narrow down is imposing some constraints.
What is driving your ambition – is it money, purpose, impact, something else?
What kinds of people do you want to serve?
What things interest you?
Notice the constraints I list are intrinsic versus extrinsic.
Things you would list under your “key resources”, for instance,
are extrinsic constraints.
I am not interested in those.
Entrepreneurs are in the business of creating something out of nothing.
Don’t limit yourself by the assets you currently have in your possession.
If you can tap into a big enough problem worth solving,
resources present themselves.
Use your intrinsic constraints to focus your problem search.
The more you narrow down, the faster the search will go…
September 8, 2015
Note and Vote
The Note and Vote is a technique,
created by Google Ventures,
to help teams make group group decisions quickly.
Each person gets a pen and some paper.
In five minutes (set a timer),
they write down as many ideas as they can,
without discussing with anyone else.
Next, a timer is set for two minutes.
Everyone picks one or two of their favorite items from the list.
Then, each member says their best idea aloud,
without any justification or elaboration.
You capture all the ideas on a whiteboard.
Set a five-minute timer again, and this time,
each person writes down one favorite idea from the whiteboard –
without any discussion.
Once the timer goes off,
everyone take turns to say what they wrote
and you tally it up.
15 minutes later you’ve got a nice shortlist.
September 6, 2015
September 5, 2015
Where do Good Ideas Come From?
While experiments are highly effective at testing guesses,
the output of your experiments is only going to be as good
as the quality of your input guesses.
Furthermore, running experiments does not automatically
lead to new insights.
Many experiments simply invalidate a bad idea
and leave you stuck.
This begs the question:
“Where do good guesses or ideas come from?”
The answer is that good ideas can come from anywhere.
In order to reach breakthrough you need to source ideas
from a wide and diverse pool:
Your internal team, your external team, peers, advisors, books, analogs, antilogs, etc.
The next challenge is that truly good ideas are rare
and often indistinguishable from bad ideas at first.
You need a systematic process for quickly vetting,
then testing through small, fast, additive experiments to
separate the good ideas from pack.
September 3, 2015
The LEAN Sprint
A LEAN sprint is a time-boxed iteration cycle for sourcing, ranking, and testing new ideas for moving your business model forward.
If you come from a software background, you have most likely been exposed to the scrum/agile methodology. LEAN sprints are heavily influenced by agile and scrum practices and also employ stand-ups, sprint planning, and sprint review meetings, but there are some key differences.
1. The goals are different
While the goal of a scrum sprint is demonstrating “build velocity”, the goal of a LEAN sprint is demonstrating “traction velocity”. It is not enough just to build a great product or feature during an iteration, or even demonstrating “learning velocity”. You have to build, measure, learn, AND demonstrate how your product or feature affects one or more of the key levers for traction.
2. The participants are different
Scrum and agile are typically developer-only practices. LEAN sprints on the other hand require the complete team made up of internal and external stakeholders.
3. Time-boxing does not dictate build or release cadence
I am a huge fan of using time-boxing for forcing decisions and using kanban for allowing for continuous (or just-in-time) delivery. LEAN sprints ensure these are not at odds. Time-boxes in a LEAN sprint are only used to force a conversation about progress among the team and drive next actions. It does not drive the release cycle – allowing teams to practice continuous delivery or a more traditional release cycle as they see fit.
September 2, 2015
Learning Versus Throughput Experiments
I broadly divide experiments into two categories:
Learning experiments and throughput experiments.
The difference between these experiment types is the goal.
Even though the build-measure-learn loop ends with learning,
The goal of a lean startup isn’t just learning,
But turning learning into measurable business results – aka traction.
The goal of every experiment should be testing
a bigger strategy for increasing traction
by running throughput experiments
unless we run out of potentially good strategies to test.
Then we fallback to running learning experiments
as a way to generate new strategies
which we then test with throughput experiments.
Examples of throughput experiments:
• Solution interviews
• Teaser pages
• A new feature launch
Examples of learning experiments:
• Problem interviews
• Usability tests
• Surveys
Learning experiments are for hypotheses generation while
throughput experiments are for hypotheses validation.
September 1, 2015
Avoiding Group Think
Your goal should be exposing your problems to your team
without biasing them with possible solutions.
Each team member should then be encouraged
to individually brainstorm possible solutions
before sharing their ideas with the team.
This is a highly effective Design Thinking technique, popularized by IDEO,
that both avoids group-think and also ensures the largest diversity of ideas.
“During divergence we are creating choices and during convergence we are making choices.”
– Tim Brown, IDEO
August 31, 2015
Canvasing for Disruptive and Sustaining Innovation
A disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market that eventually displaces an existing market. Both startups and innovative companies thrive in this space. This type of innovation typically requires starting with a clean slate and completely rethinking the customer-problem-solution hypotheses. This is where the Lean Canvas shines.
In contrast to disruptive innovation, a sustaining innovation does not create new markets but rather evolves existing ones with better value. In these types of innovations, the question is not one of creating a new market but finding ways to deliver more value to an existing market better. The key question here is: “What does better mean?” The Lean Canvas can also be applied for sustaining innovation, albeit differently.
More established companies typically start out by capturing their overall business model using either the Lean Canvas or BMC. They then use one or more Lean Canvases to home in on the specific customer-problem-solution attributes for driving their value proposition forward.
Whether you are pursuing sustaining or disruptive innovation, the biggest appeal for using the Lean Canvas is that it’s one of the fastest ways for sharing a “whole” idea, versus just your solution, with other people. People usually don’t see what you see. The canvas is a start towards bridging that gap.
