(2023-08-16) Maurya The Right Way Vs The Battle-tested Way For Driving Breakthrough Innovation

Ash Maurya: The Right Way vs. The Battle-Tested Way for Driving Breakthrough Innovation. I often get initial pushback from other coaches when I first present my step-by-step continuous innovation roadmap: The biggest objection typically centers around ordering business modeling before customer/problem discovery.

This is the perfect difference between a right process that should work and a battle-tested process that does.

Unconstrained customer discovery is a recipe for aimless wandering and false positives.

most teams I encounter have prematurely fallen in love with their solution

founders always have a solution in their minds. Making them pretend it doesn’t exist and forcing them to spend weeks of customer discovery isn’t going to cause a drastic pivot or mindset shift.

Business modeling has nothing to do with validation but with cataloging key assumptions. To avoid analysis/paralysis, it’s important to time-box this step. I use 20 minutes.*

Once their “perfect plan” is laid, I show them how to stress-test their plan (not mine), and if/when it breaks, it creates the perfect opening for a mindset shift.

2. Unconstrained customer discovery is a recipe for aimless wandering and false positives.

if these insights don’t lead to a repeatable and scalable business model, it can be all for nothing

The key is uncovering problems worth solving.

Fermi Estimation and Traction Roadmap are my preferred tools for this. ((2023-06-17) Maurya Don't Create A Product Roadmap, Use A Traction Roadmap Instead)

In my experience, most ideas fail the first pass of viability stress testing, and fixing the model subjects the team to yet more mindset shifts.

The outputs from this exercise (early adopter segmentation and target pricing) act as constraining inputs that inform more productive customer discovery.

3. Lowering inertia and friction is key for driving transformation.

Having well-defined constraints for customer discovery helps reduce friction and anxiety and is a start.

If I were building the perfect right process today, I wouldn’t start with customer discovery (for the reasons above) or even the Lean Canvas, but the Rapid Viability Test (RVT) (Fermi Estimation). As a serial founder, when I get hit with an idea today, I don’t sketch out a Lean Canvas but test the idea’s viability against my minimum success criteria goal.

I say no to far more things than yes after a 5-minute stress test.