Hey, B. Thanks but you didn’t offend me. Takes a lot more so keep trying! :)
I know Lean Startup wanted to get people thinking about better product-market fit, but has it? If Lean Startup has been the bible for startups for 10 years now, why do so many fail? Why are so many still getting it wrong? Why do so many move forward with shitty ideas? Why is product-market fit still so hard to get right?
To me, the book doesn’t do enough. But the point of my article, which might not be your situation, is that the not great Lean Startup book’s ideas are being used by big corporations. Fortune 500s. And they’re also getting it wrong. They think if they find 3 people and ask them (the wrong) questions, they have “validated” the idea. Stuff like that. It’s ugly out there!
I come from science too so I get ya. I don’t know of books on that, but I’m in the middle of writing 2 that will be relevant here. :) They should hopefully come out this year, but I’m not close to done on either.
The key to the right research is observational research that seeks to learn people’s tasks. How they do things now. What you observe as not going well for them. Room for improvement. MI, CL, EP, and KD (was that in this article? Now I can’t remember!). Where did people create workarounds to try to improve a task?
The gold is in creating something that improves users’ task and serves an unmet need. The right observational research should uncover that. You don’t need a hypoth. You just need a potential target audience and a general area of product, service, or invention.
Example: we were hired years ago by a Parkinson’s disease foundation to study people all roughly the same age who have had the disease roughly the same amount of time. They wanted to know how they used fitness wearables and social media to see if the foundation should fund some sort of app. We ended up learning what people wanted, but what they wanted would have been SO expensive to design and build that I don’t think the foundation did anything. But we DID find the insights and opportunities. It just wasn’t very feasable at the time.
I hope that helps!
