Hypothesize customer value
“If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” This quote, commonly (and possibly incorrectly) attributed to Henry Ford, highlights a problem that product managers have when looking for new features or new products. Customers may simply not know what they want or cannot imagine innovations that may come from different approaches or out-of-the-box thinking.
A way of working through the unknowns in product development is to take the approach highlighted in Eric Ries’s book, The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. In this book, Ries shows a way of collaborating with the customer for iterative product development. Some of those ways are captured in the learning cycle he proposes, the build-measure-learn cycle.
The build-measure-learn cycle is an iterative product development cycle where Lean Startups discover the product and feature...