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by Neil Chheda For my LTV project, I helped develop and launch the minimal viable product of Docphin, a platform that allows physicians to easily find, personalize, and share medical news, research, and other hospital-related content. I used three tools: 1) product trial, 2) focus groups, and 3) interviews. The goal was to understand product-market fit and get customer feedback to iterate on the product in lean style. Unlike releasing social gaming products at Zynga—which immediately had millions of users—we launched Docphin only to 200 users of three types—residents, administrators, and attending physicians. As a result, we surveyed and interviewed every user to solicit feedback. While the outcome of this feedback will guide the next version of the product, I learned some critical meta-lessons about using these tools. Here they are: 1) If you want to hear your users, stop talking. Immediately after we launched Docphin, we pushed a lot of content onto our initial 200 users. Fi...

by Mike Joslin and Brady Broadbent Today’s entrepreneurs are increasingly using hypothesis-driven lean testing methodologies to launch early, learn fast, and iterate quickly, and as a result an entire industry is rapidly developing around the movement. New web-based products and services such as Unbounce.com and Usertesting.com continue to pop up and, for both competitive and technological reasons, the costs of conducting such tests are falling dramatically. While this has provided entrepreneurs with an amazing new opportunity, it has also created new problems. Given negligible costs and significantly lower risks, many entrepreneurs are now falling into what we consider the “testing trap.” In a rush to test and learn quickly, entrepreneurs are jumping immediately into testing before putting enough thought into which tests they will conduct and in which order they will conduct them . By not following a logical testing sequence, entrepreneurs are left with random statistics and feedback...

by anonymous The first interesting observation I had from my project is that unlike an internet startup that the host of an A/B test is the website itself, finding a suitable host for my hypothesis test (film projection technology would attract more eyeballs) is important. In other words, in addition to the design of the test, the subjectivity of the testing venue matters. Unlike many of the other internet related projects with focuses on A/B testing and usability tests, my key takeaways actually involve many of the soft skills, such as how to make cold calls and how to conduct interviews. When I was trying to get in touch with the retail mall owners, I had a difficult time overcoming some of the inhibitions about cold calling initially. Hearing “nos” multiple times in 10 minutes could be discouraging yet a necessary step to achieve epiphany. When I positioned myself as a company trying to sell a product / service, the person on the other end often gets defensive. I found helpful to ma...

by Jayme Mendal It’s an elusive goal, a moving target…I’ve heard some call it the holy grail. Yet I’m convinced that 90% of people who throw the term around have no idea what it actually is. “Product Market Fit”. The buzz word is used so often, but how should first time entrepreneurs think about actually assessing product-market fit? I began this project overwhelmed by my lack of knowledge of technology and e-commerce. As a result, and not by choice, I was forced to keep things SIMPLE…and I’m glad I did. I tried to distill assessment of Product Market Fit down to the bare bones…something I can chew on to gain meaningful (albeit simple) insight, which can inform actual decisions, which hopefully drive my business one step closer to that holy grail. SterlingKane.com is a vertically integrated e-commerce brand of high end men’s leather goods. Simply put, we sell our own brand of products through our own branded website. Assuming we drive the type of buyers we expect to be visiting our si...

by  Barry Malinowski, John Phillips, and Daniel Heller   When the three of us sat down to solve a complicated educational problem with a simple technical solution, we each had different goals. Combined, we wanted experience wireframing, prototyping, and testing an application that we would shepherd from mere idea to working product. Over the span of a semester we took deep-dives into these elements of product management and technical development. At every step of the way we were faced with a myriad of choices. Here is some of what we did and learned. We hope it can serve as a guide and roadmap for other product managers facing similar choices. Wireframing Wireframing tools span simple pencil and paper, multi-purpose vector graphics editors, etc. We chose to use Balsamiq, a web-based application designed specifically for mockups. Balsamiq retains the benefit of pencil and paper (i.e. stakeholders don’t get distracted by details at this early stage of development) by mimicki...

I want my product to be perfect—it will be everything a user can imagine and then some more and then it will go viral and I will have changed the world forever. By the way, our value to price ratio will be off the charts so it’s a no-brainer to use. This insight into the future consumes me. I wish you could see it.  The post below is about the steps we took to realize this future and the lessons we learnt from them. The case to do lean testing Back in January, I was convinced that since we were a B2B company, lean was not applicable to us. How can we take a half-build product to a company (who are so hard to reach) and expect to test our value proposition. I mean what would we test?—we had done customer interviews, polls, focus groups and were pretty comfortable that we were onto something big. Development was underway; we were focusing on exploring sales channels, creating a pitch deck to raise capital and life was great. Then came the Business Model exercise as part of the LTV cl...

by Anthemos Georgiades There are various lessons I could have discussed here regarding the UX tests I ran for my startup Zumper. But, instead, I am going to focus on one challenge that these tests created for me: my ability – or lack thereof – to let my own opinions and intuitions drop. In the three lean tests that I ran, two of them confirmed something I had suspected. The third one however did not. In my ‘banner’ test, I tested (1) the price users thought a standard bed frame was worth, under three different themes of page banners and then (2) if the user could actually remember the site’s name after use. I found that what I considered to be the most ‘boring’ white and grey banner drove the highest price estimations from users and beat our other two banners hands-down on brand recollection. I had actually only included this ‘boring’ banner in the lean test as a control. My hypothesis had been that our green banner would drive the best engagement given that this was the predominan...

by Bryan O’Connell For my project, I used a combination of customer surveys and expert interviews to build up a profile of potential customers for my business (and indeed to stress test whether the idea was of value). I learned a number of important lessons on how to gather effective survey data, many of which seem incredibly simple and obvious. However, from looking at other surveys I have received recently, they are seldom followed. 1) Keep it short For any business plan, there is probably a small number of datapoints that provide huge insight into its viability. For this business, it was whether or not teachers actually already vacation outside North America, as if they do, this would imply that our business would cannibalize existing sales and would not be viable. Information on where teachers vacation is not publicly available, so the only way to gather these data was by means of a survey. Once you have convinced a respondent to open your survey, it is incredibly tempting to ask t...

by Mark Lurie I’m a big fan of the lean methodology, but it has its flaws. In implementing lean methodology over the past few months, I have learned several things. First, you can never prove a hypothesis, only negate it. More practically, you can negate a hypothesis with a very negative result. And, while you can’t prove a hypothesis, you can get really confident on it with a series of great results. However, it is hard to know how to interpret a middling result. Unfortunately, middling results are the most frequent! It is easy to interpret middling data in a positive or negative light, depending on your state of mind, which is problematic. For example, what does It mean if 50% of your initial customers also use the competition? Does this mean the market need is being met already, or there is an untapped market that the competition isn’t addressing? Regardless, you have to make a decision and keep moving. Second, the fastest route to an answer isn’t always quantitative. We...

by Julia Kastner For my field course project, I wanted to test a set of hypothesis around customer preferences. I’m launching a women’s jeans company, Kismet Denim, making better-fitting jeans for sophisticated women using Fair Trade and Organic materials. In order to afford the Fair Trade and Organic premiums, I’d like to be able to cut out some of the expensive processes jeans go through as they turn from a dark blue indigo to lighter, more royal shades. But which processes could I cut out? To answer this question, I wanted to know which jeans attributes where important. I developed a set of hypotheses but I had to choose between two tools to test them: Conjoint analysis : a type of survey that breaks a product concept into relevant attributes and estimates the value potential customers attach to each attribute Survey tools : showing photos of two alternate products to customers and asking the survey taker to choose the preferred picture  Here are five questions that can help...

by Jason Lorentzen My work focused on vetting potential demand for a web/mobile-based application that could be used to help people better understand the nutrition content of restaurant dishes. My approach was to use a sizable survey ( link to survey ) and user interviews to understand: people’s behavior as it related to restaurant selection  whether or not people cared about nutrition  how satisfied / dissatisfied users were with the lack of nutrition data at restaurants  differences between different demographic characteristics  All in all, I received some good feedback ( see survey results ) that helped me determine not to go forward with my area of investigation. But my process was far from perfect. Below are my reflections on what I learned, what I wish I had learned, and how if I did it over again, I’d take a different approach. What a Large Survey and Complementary Interviews Accomplished Well Get a large set of data on general behaviors, cheaply. In re...

by Genevieve Sheehan, Luke Langford, Allison Greenwell “Great. So why haven’t you build it?” Maybe Eric Ries’s reaction shouldn’t have surprised us. But we felt thrown. Hey, we’d been progressing methodically through product development. We had understood user needs, structured mock-ups for our proposed user interface, and tested those ideas with a range of users. We now knew the product should be built – we just hadn’t done it yet. The previous weeks hadn’t been a waste, though. We’d moved slower than Eric-Ries-warp-speed. But in the process, we determined the type of product we should build, built a belief that people would use it – and gained some learnings about customer feedback and user testing. Being the target user makes everything faster and easier – so long as you recognize and test your biases. Product developers are often criticized for making a product they think people want, or a product they themselves want, without listening to potential customers. But being the target...

by Stephen Elliott and Matt Noble Despite the questionable stereotype that Harvard Business School lags other institutions (ahem...Stanford) in entrepreneurship, HBS and Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) have a wealth of resources, content and expertise in entrepreneurial management. We have been exploring how to deploy these resources and/or develop new ones to launch a web-based product for entrepreneurs and innovators. The vision for Harvard StartupMentor (HSM) would be to provide on-demand educational and tactical tools, as well as to ultimately cultivate a network of experts and practitioners. At present, HSM is only an early-stage concept; it is not yet part of Harvard Business Publishing's product development pipeline. Our course project aimed to help HBP determine whether the concept is worth exploring further. As an exercise in new product creation more than new venture creation, this task required us to engage simultaneously in customer development (to understand who our...

by Samantha Lynch & Elizabeth Trongone Having prior product management experience in companies like Birchbox, Warby Parker and Group Commerce, we sought to continue to hone our product management skills through the lens of Launching Technology Ventures. Our specific goal for our LTV project was to refine our skills in usability testing and customer interviews, while being the voice of the customer throughout the initial stages of product development. As both of us are searching for product manager roles for after graduation, we wanted to be able to point to our own learnings as well as experience with working with a very early stage company. Neither of us had worked with a start-up before they reached product market fit, and we wanted that early experience. Therefore, in searching for our “ideal” LTV project, we looked for start-ups that had not yet launched in beta and landed on an opportunity with Threadflip . Threadflip is an online destination for buying, selling and sharing ...

by Jonathan Einkauf Entrepreneurs, especially those without a technical background, are often overwhelmed when it comes to building a prototype or minimum viable product (MVP). Some entrepreneurs are able to recruit a technical co-founder while others attempt to teach themselves basic programming. The first approach may require (prematurely) giving up significant equity and the second approach requires considerable time and patience. I recommend that non-technical founders instead use a service like oDesk or Elance to outsource the development of their MVP. You can save a lot of time and money by going through oDesk (the largest online outsourcing platform). By outsourcing the MVP you can get to market faster, get customer feedback sooner, and iterate faster and cheaper. However, if you are not careful you can also lose a lot of time and money. To help people who are new to oDesk, I put together the following step-by-step guide. This is based on my own experience. I would lo...

by Viet Huynh SiriNova’s online platform aims to provide innovative career solutions by enabling qualified students and professionals to find their best fit career opportunities in Vietnam and employers to find their best fit candidates globally. While our backend team are developing the platform, SiriNova team decided to conduct a pre-launch process, targeting 200 candidates and 25 employers. Our primary purpose for this phase is to share SiriNova's business idea with our personal network, get feedback to fine-tune the site, and collect resumes of interested candidates. We initially designed an online survey on www.SiriNova.com but later chose to use Google Docs ( Exhibit 2 ). The embedded survey on www.SiriNova.com may dilute our brand, and we experienced some technical glitches. After some internal debates, we decided to use a clean and temporary homepage ( Exhibit 1 ), with a link to a Google Docs survey. The Google Docs survey allows us to efficiently manage the early regist...