 Hey, good evening Amy Welcome to the podcast of our Hangout on Agile India 2016 conference pretty excited to have you kick off the Hangout series that we have here. I'm thrilled to be here I I'm just really excited to share my perspective today and and then when I come out to Bangalore in March It'll be my first trip to India and I feel like I had so much to learn So Amy you this is your first trip, and I'm sure it's exciting Let's kind of jump into some real meat here to show people what we have here Coming their way You you know you have a PhD in behavioral neuroscience You're an avid game designer you're a community architect and And more recently you've been a startup coach and you've been helping some amazing start ups You know discover their true potential. How's the journey been so far? It's awesome. I'm Really enjoying my work. It's ramping up and I feel like I'm really being able to have an impact on On Startups all over the world that I wasn't really able to a few years ago. So it's just amazing And we're hoping the same the ones you come here to India you'll be able to inspire a whole bunch of startups here and This is just amazing looking forward to that. Let's go. I can't wait Sorry. Yeah, let's quickly go back a bit in time and look at you know, what inspired you I mean, you were probably one of the first people I know of and maybe I could be wrong But you're one of the first people I know of who actually brought the whole game design or game thinking You know, what is now more popular as gamification into you know software development and software design So what inspired you to kind of start with the field of game design? That's a great question So I came out of science and engineering and I was a software programmer and a scientist and Through that I learned about user interface and I learned about building products at Sun Microsystems and Apple and Paramount Technology and I first got into game design when I was working for Paramount communications the company who owns Star Trek and you know, all that were a lot of great brands and They asked me I was working for them as a designer a new product designer and they asked me to go to the game developers conference Back in the 90s when it was very small as kind of a forward scout to find out more about what was happening with online gaming and I went to this conference and I felt like I found my people. I felt really comfortable there I really liked how brilliant and really wacky and super imaginative people were I felt like my Systems engineering background really came into play in a way in game design that it hadn't as much in product designs I have a lot of system background from science and engineering and games are really Systems are more likely sets of interlocking systems that require a lot of balancing to work right So I felt very comfortable in game design. I At the time didn't encounter sexism certainly less than I had in other areas of tech And I felt that I could really make a contribution as a user interface designer as a system designer And as a community designer all of which were areas I developed So I got inspired originally because of meeting other game designers and really falling in love with how they saw the world and how they approach Bringing their products to life and from there I started working in the field I got jobs as an interface designer and as a social systems designer and then as a co-lead designer I really worked my way up working on teams Helping to bring lots of different games to life and for me, you know You say I was one of the first people to blend gaming with product design I've never really differentiated them because I always thought I was always working in both There was never really a time in my career when I didn't have a game project I was working on and also an app or a website or a product and I really found that App and web design had a lot to offer game design and vice versa. So part of my I would say part of my brand or part of what I brought as a designer at all my products was an expansiveness that encompass both Because it just seemed to end up with better design And that's I think that game design and product design have so much in common at the heart of it it's all about creating a great design that makes people want to come back again and again and Gives them a satisfying Experience the main thing that's different about a lot of game design is that it's really based around the concept of skill building So a lot of what I'll be sharing in India for our game thinking workshop is how to Get past the clutter and often the irrelevant clutter of points and badges and leaderboards and Really get at the heart of creating an experience that makes your customers more awesome that makes them better than before That's really the heart of great game and great product design That's awesome. I think uh, you know that that kind of summarizes the key value of how we can blend the two things together Now let's kind of shift gears a little and kind of go from the past to the future or rather the present and Tell us a little bit about now. You've been helping a lot of entrepreneurs kind of build awesome products And what what do you think are the typical challenges that the entrepreneurs are running into these days? Well, there's a lot of different ones, you know, it kind of depends on how Experienced the entrepreneurs are and I work with everyone from first-time entrepreneurs to a lot of serial entrepreneurs but I would say the number one challenge that cuts across those groups is finding real product market fit and Finding it efficiently and effectively Many many entrepreneurs I work with Come to me and they say well, I think we've got product market fit and it turns out they really don't for a variety of reasons sometimes they do and you know, that's a great place to be but finding quicker faster more efficient ways to get real signals as To how close you are to building a product that really meets your market needs is Super hard to do and a lot of the coaching I do is around that as One of the foundational elements of doing great product design work or a great game design work so that whether the entrepreneur knows it or not that's really a Common common challenge even for serial entrepreneurs the big difference I see between serial entrepreneurs and first-time entrepreneurs is serial entrepreneurs know how important and hard it is They still struggle with it, but they have an appreciation for how hard it is So a lot of my clients or serial entrepreneurs they come to me and they learn about my game thinking framework and they go Oh, okay, I get exactly why this is going to save me so much time. So they get it quickly But you know some first-timers do as well. So that's a big one. There's a couple of others one is the just the basic challenge of taking an Expansive compelling idea for a product or a service or a game and then figuring out how to build a Stripped-down high learning minimum viable product that is the right thing to build So how to build the right MVP to maximize learning Many people I work with talk the talk like they get it. They understand what a lean startup is They understand what an MVP is they understand why they would want to do it and they buy into it Actually doing it is hard. There's a lot of decisions to be made and so Many people struggle with that I myself struggle with that every time I work with a client or work on, you know My own projects so that's pretty universal and again That's part of why I've devoted a lot of energy to specific step-by-step techniques That make that easier at least give you a roadmap to follow because it's really hard and then a related Element that is just pervasive and it doesn't stop even after you've you know shipped something and Started to get closer to product market fit a related challenge that every entrepreneur faces is How to filter all the feedback coming out you about your product in your business who to listen to who not to listen to How to really it's related to product market fit because I work with a lot of people and you know Maybe they want a hackathon or that you know, somebody some kind soul gave them some seed money and Didn't think too much about it and they Don't really know who to listen to and they don't understand that that doesn't mean they found you know a viable product for the market so understanding who to listen to to get product feedback who to listen to to get business feedback and How to move a law, you know really efficiently? Toward product market fit in a focus way Navigating all the feedback coming at you. That's a pervasive issue and when I talk to clients I've worked with you know months after we completed our project a lot of times They'll say that's one of the things they really took from our work was a model for filtering feedback and And you know it can as you can imagine and I'd love to hear people's stories, too That can save you a lot of time and it can also save you a lot of wasted effort Building stuff that maybe your investors think are cool, but doesn't make sense for your market Absolutely So I think if I were to summarize the points Basically finding the product market fit. This is this is a big one. I think this is where we all struggle And once we've kind of got an idea around that how do we take our hard? You know grant your idea and strip it down to to the the least I can do of the least I think I can build to actually validate that Idea and then finally once we put something out there We're gonna get tons of feedback and how do you kind of filter that feedback? I think these three things are really powerful challenges in my opinion Yeah, it's pretty universal So I'm excited to be on the path toward helping people solve those challenges more effectively because they're so Common and I mean there's really nothing like having that aha moment where you realize you just save six months at time Absolutely, I mean opportunity cost is everything at this point. Oh, yeah I think you you mentioned briefly about lean startup and this conversation Go a little bit deeper into that and I know of course lean startup in my opinion has a profound impact on how I do Validation of my riskiest assumption and how a lot of companies do that But every now and then I kind of run into situations where I feel maybe beginning too prescriptive about The whole lean startup thing. I mean, what's what's your take? Do you see drawbacks with how we are going with the whole lean startup approach? Well, I think like any approach it can be or like any tool It can be wielded effectively and it can be welded in effectively. I think one of the challenges That people have is exactly what you hinted at which is customizing it to their situation people some people take What something that's not meant to be prescriptive and they apply it in a prescriptive way a really good example is The idea of a fake landing page We can talk about that more later a fake landing page can be a really powerful tool a fake landing page Can help you test your marketing message a fake landing page? Can help you know whether or not you should you know use you can do an A B test and find out whether this Tagline or this tagline resonates more fake landing page can let you sort of see who on the open internet might be interested None of that has anything to do with testing your fundamental core Value prop of your product like you're not testing your product experience at all by doing that so one of the drawbacks I see sometimes is somebody who Really needs to test the core product experience or test the validity of their tech or test some other fundamental assumption Just says well, I'm gonna build a fake landing page and that's all I need to I know what to do for an MVP So, you know That's often not the right thing to do But people have read somewhere that Eric reset to build a fake landing page And then they see that there's ten companies that sprung up that'll build you a fake landing page And they go well that must be the way to do it when in fact those companies are just jumping on a band line They don't know anything They don't know I mean they don't know they are just saying hey There's people who will who will buy this right and then at other times That's exactly the right thing to do, but it depends on your situation So that's one issue. I see with Lee and started I think there's also there's people a lot of people Get the iteration part, but they don't understand how to meld that with a strong vision and how to get how to take customer feedback and iterate it within you know your vision and your Your team's unfair advantage, you know really important things for product design So I think that the great gift of lean startup is that it provides a shared language That many of us can use to discuss concepts that frankly existed long before lean startup I mean to me a lot of the way I learned to do game design is a lot of early prototyping early iteration Scoping you know a lot of the stuff that lean startup sort of discovered and said wow look what you can do You know Those of many of us in game design scoffed and said oh this is silly He's got new words for what we've always known was really a smart best practice blah blah blah it doesn't matter What matters is that it got popularized and people in the C-suite and people at the New York Times and Disney and in Europe and in Asia and in India and everywhere can Get these concepts and then have this shared language and say no You know and say okay. Let's look strategically which you know, which of these makes sense for us And so I really think the big disadvantage of lean startup isn't in the core Concepts Which are very strong. I think it's in how they're applied and the extent to which somebody Applies them and tweaks them to make sense for their situation And that I think that's the way they are always meant to be applied and so that's what part of what I'm doing I'm not jumping on the lean startup bandwagon, but I embrace the lean startup terminology and I provide a series of shortcuts and a step-by-step method that embraces that but is its own Methodology for getting from point a to point b quickly and step-by-step The other thing missing from a lot of lean startup particularly from Eric Reese's original book is just a how to it's like Here's what you should do But how exactly do you do it and that's part of why I think you see you know ten companies that build big landing pages Is there's a gap and that's part of why you see me doing what I'm doing is you know, okay? Great now that we get the concept, you know, how do you actually apply it? How do you actually apply it in a smart way? So I think that's really what's next Awesome. I like the reason I asked that question is that I often find a lot of companies in hindsight Say, oh, we did this lean start. This was an MVP. We did this and you know, hey, but this Doesn't make sense. I mean you know, you're saying oh no no that was an MVP in and I said that's where I think there's There's a lot of confusion that people kind of try to fit this in retrospective or as a justification for why They did something but is that really the thinking behind their actions is sometimes I wonder and that that's something I have personally experienced myself as well You know, I try to justify why why we did something why we put our little mini version of our app on the app store It's like oh, we wanted to validate this but And this was an MVP but sometimes it was not it was just like we went with a gut feeling and then we found words to Kind of put in anyway It's funny because a friend of mine from the game industry her nickname for MVP is CYA Which stands for cover your a you know the a word Cover your tuchas as my people say That's a Yiddish word But yeah, I mean You know for that, I don't have very much to say about it I'm very solution focused person. So sure. I've seen people do that. Sure. I've done that Here's the thing learn from it right if you do that learn from it I think a big part of what lean start-up embraces is As they call it validated learning and a lot of that is be really clear about what it is You're trying to learn from your experiment and this goes back to my background in science It's if you're gonna run a useful experiment and you're not just You know bullshitting your funding agency because they need to see certain certain results Which by the way, I've definitely seen in my time working in science If you're actually trying to learn something from your experiments step one is have a really clear hypothesis that you're testing You know your hypothesis might be that This feature that you're gonna ship is not enough and you release it to people and you wait to see if they complain that you know or your Hypothesis could be that a really specific group of people will find this indispensable or your hypothesis You know might be that people will like it, but they won't pay for it You know people what makes so what makes you really accelerate toward product market fit using lean start-up methods Is when you have a really really crisp clear hypothesis About why you're testing this particular MVP with these particular people What is it you're trying to learn and the clear you are about that the better everything goes you can make a lot of mistakes But if you're clear about that you'll still get some great learning and I've seen that a lot I mean I make so many mistakes and The mistakes can lead you to feel like you wasted your time But there's certain things that make you more resilient to mistakes and one of them is having a really clear hypothesis Absolutely and I think this is this is one of at least for me personally has been a real struggle is how do you define clear Hypothesis and once you actually have what do you think is a clear hypothesis? How do you actually design an experiment to to validate whether whether you know your hypothesis holds good or not You know and I'm looking for any quick tips You might have even just a teaser here So we can kind of then go into detail during your workshop But any any kind of quick tips you have on how should one go about designing an experiment to validate that hypothesis So if that's exactly what we're going to cover in the workshop I've developed a specialized canvas called the MVP canvas that's specifically to help you do this and The quits so that's the it's absolutely. It's the first unit in everything. I do is Giving you a tool to help you design your experiment So basically what you do whether you use my methods or anyone else's is You answer you write that it's pretty straightforward to design a good fair experiment You start by writing down your current Hypothesis about your product value your customers who you think they are You know why your solution is actually meeting what what unmet need they have that your solution meets You know, it's all these questions that I ask in my canvas, but they're pretty basic what your unfair advantages that you're why your team Why should you solve this? you know, what kind of metrics you're going to use to to Yeah measure success and you ask yourself these really fundamental questions and you write down you write everything down That is your strategy for what you're doing as if it was a hypothesis. So you say what's my customer hypothesis? So for example, I have a client right now and to in fact Yesterday that client had a really big breakthrough in her process. We've been working. I think it's like week five in our process And yeah, and it was really exciting because it really told me how well our the process is working for her So at the beginning of our get I'll just I'm not going to say who it is. It's private, but I can tell you in general It's higher education. She's developing System that has mentoring and some other things in it for community college students from disadvantaged background To increase completion rates to help them actually like complete college and get a job and lift themselves up so it's a great project and So who is her? Her audience and the key thing when you're doing early innovation is you don't want to say who's my big audience Who's my mainstream audience? Who's my eventual audience? You want to get extremely specific and say Who are the first 25 to 50 people that are the early adopter customers for this? that need this yesterday and whose pain point for what I'm building is so great that They would go through friction and they would pay and they would use something that was half broken Just to get a little piece of their problem solve those early adopters Those are who you want to find those are who you want to make a hypothesis around and those are who you want to test Your project with first and that's actually something almost nobody gets right and they waste a lot of time Some people do get it right a lot the best game designers I've ever worked with they all get it right frankly some of the best product designers I've worked with they get that right too, so it's one of the patterns I've noticed from the really massive hits that I've worked on and if you go look at my resume You'll see I've worked on six or seven massive breakthrough hits. They all got this particular thing, right? Very interesting for me. They all could figure out how to find that early small Tweaky passionate customer base to get started with yeah That's pretty awesome, and I'm really looking forward to the workshop where we can dive into more details about this Let's go one thing. Let me just let me just close that off So to make a good experiment you frame all of that you frame who your customers are what your solution is what their unmet need is what your value prop as Hypothesis and then you prioritize all those hypotheses, and you pick the highest risk ones to test first what you want to do is Test the thing that if it wasn't true your whole project crumbles and doesn't make sense If your project is dependent on a particular technology if your project is dependent on really hitting particular customers Right, you know in their wallets. You got to test that really early Because if that doesn't turn out to be true you have to pivot or tweak or maybe even drop the project And so that's you know, how do you do a good experiment? You figure out what you need to test early? What your highest risk factors constraints and hypotheses are and then you design something to test that Cool. Yeah, I think that's what I have been trying to practice and honestly It's it's it's kind of when you start off It's very vague and you kind of go in all directions But I think once you kind of practice it enough, you know, you and you spend enough time Maybe a week or so things start kind of falling in place and a lot of early customer validations that you do Like MVP hacks and stuff like that to really get To crystallize your hypothesis itself like you know, I think at least for me I've gone from vague hypothesis to kind of getting to clear clearer hypothesis and it itself is an iterative process and That's that's why I think You know a lot of us kind of feel a bit lost when we start but as we go in, you know, suddenly clarity emerges from that Absolutely, that's a great point That it's iterative and so the whole point isn't to be perfect The whole point is to get started and then keep iterating Yeah, I often say perfection is the enemy of the good kind of thing, right? It's just like perfect right away and we struggle through it and we get disappointed And that's something as entrepreneurs. We all learn that you know It's not about coming up with the perfect solution day one It's about getting something good enough and validating your kind of core loop In some sense actually that you know, I sorry I want to jump to the next question because that kind of gets into this is You talked a little bit about the core loop earlier on and I know as a game designer You know, how important that is to figure out what the core loop is Yes Tell us tell us a little bit of this kind of a game design thinking comes in and helps entrepreneurs to discover their products and how core loops help In fact, what even core loop is maybe Well, a core loop is a concept That describes the interlocking activities and feedback systems of The heart of your player experience So not the onboarding not the mastery systems The you know the engaging activity that's at the heart of the whole experience is the base of a core loop that The term gets used in different ways in gaming. What I've done is created a simplified sort of Simplified model to help people get started creating a core loop And you can think of it as your day 21 experience You know, what is the day 21 experience? You know when someone's learned the ropes they've kind of figured out if it's for them or not And now they're just using your product. What is that day 21 experience in a game like clash of clans? It's going to have you know You're like you're building up your armies and then you might attack your neighbor to gain territory And then they might take revenge on you so there's a sort of you know earn build spend Attack rebuild spend build core loop with just a few Verbs like build spend Attack those would be like the core verbs in a You know that kind of a experience But you can also look at a product as a core loop. So let's take kickstarter as an example kickstarter is a crowdfunding A crowdfunding platform that hopefully you're familiar with And so kickstarter has a core loop, which is you know, what is the the sort of typical experience of a kickstarter? Participants well in kickstarter. It's an ecosystem. So there's you know providers and consumers So there's people that put on You know a campaign looking for money And then there's the people that would look at their campaign Browse it watch their video and then hopefully give them money So if you look at the core loop of someone who gives kickstarter money It's you know, you see a social media update you click on the update. That's the trigger And then you watch a video for a campaign. You might look at the stats see how many people have contributed You know look at the comments page So you're look at you're basically um Reading and watching the campaign's Uh, you know story you're you're absorbing the story of the campaign And then you either give money or you might share the campaign if you like it, but you're not ready to give money And that's where you actually do something you engage and you get invested And then the first thing after you give money, they ask you to do is share it on social media And that's the end of the loop. So it's like your trigger is I read about this on social media Or maybe you got an email from someone and you go through the loop of viewing and consuming and then giving donating And then you share. Oh, I just donated to this campaign on social media because they asked you to And then that becomes the trigger for the next person. That's a really simple core loop That's got all the elements of a gaming core loop, which is an engaging activity Of feedback system a call to action And a core investment system that gets you more that's designed to get you more involved So that's basically what a core loop is. It's somewhat similar to what you might have heard of as a habit loop From the book the power of habit or from nereals hooked work key difference a habit loop The way those both of those books are really describing an operant conditioning um behavioral modification loop where there's a trigger, but then what you're doing is rewarding small Even not very meaningful actions in order to shape behavior and that's behavior mod The difference between a core a gaming style core loop that I teach and that Is that a gaming style core loop is designed around skill building? It's not designed to manipulate behavior. It's designed to level up your customer's skills And so it's just a little piece of the system that you need to level up your customer's skills But it forces you to really strip It's really useful for building MVPs. So you say well, what does this have to do with Building a better product. What does this have to do with focusing your product? If you focus on finding the nugget of utility or joy or delight in your core loop By definition, you're going to ignore a lot of things A lot of things go into phase two and phase three buckets when that's what you're doing That's why game designers bring their games to life this way. So a core loop isn't just a gaming concept It's actually the way that the smartest game designers operationally Bring their products to life. They don't start with a bunch of levels. They never start with game mechanics They start With getting the core loop working and then iterating it till it's really singing That's where they start If you get that right Everything else is easy to build in comparison That's brilliant. I think uh This is this is something that I I have at least got influenced by watching some of your videos in the past and Anytime I think about a product, you know, there's just a lot of stuff that comes to your mind You want to do this? This will be cool. This will be fancy. This will be awesome This will be epic and then he's like, okay, let's what's the core loop here, right? What's the bare minimum? Cycle that's that that he gets and you kind of you know The moment you start thinking from that point of view a lot of clutter goes away and I think you end up with, uh, you know, the the real MVP in some sense that that validates your core hypothesis And I think you can have different kinds of core loops for And and correct me if I'm wrong, but you can have different kinds of core loop for value hypothesis versus growth hypothesis I mean you can have a different Absolutely, and if you've got an ecosystem of any kind you've got multiple core loops that the different players are engaging in So it's uh, you know, it's a flexible concept Just like with MVP, you know, you really have to interpret it But I think the key thing is that there's an engaging There's an engaging activity of some kind some pleasurable activity At the heart of it and then there's a feedback system of some kind that lets the player know the user the customer Know if they're on the right track if they're getting better at something You can't get better at something without feedback You can get better at something without a bunch of progress metrics, but you can't get better at something without feedback Yeah, and I think twitter is a great example where they have the core loop implemented in some sense And I uh, do you want to spend just a quick minute explaining? What's the core loop of twitter? I think that's a that's an example a lot of people can relate Sure, it's it's very similar to the core loop of facebook although twitter has clear stat so twitter Um is a great example of something well first of all let's talk about what you're getting better at In the twitter core loop because that really helps focus everything That's like the strategy. So the thing you're actually getting better at in the twitter's core loop is you're getting better at expressing yourself coherently in 140 characters Right. Yeah Haven't we all gotten better at that and you learn you learn what works you learn how to phrase it You learn what things get a reaction what things don't all the reaction you get on twitter's social reaction other people react to it You know, they like it. They retweet it, etc So the so in in twitter Your your internal trigger a good core loop starts with an internal trigger not an egg You don't want to be dependent on external triggers You want there to be some emotion and the internal trigger is you know You're either bored or you're between projects or you're procrastinating or you just woke up And you just you want a quick hit of social interaction or you know social news People use it in different ways, but that's basically it So for me twitter's like my water cooler when I get done with one project and I have another one to go I'll go check twitter typical So then your engaging activity is reading and responding to tweets Um, you know, you see what's in your timeline. You look at your notifications, you know, blah, blah, blah That's what you're doing. You're reading and responding to tweets You also might check your stats Uh, that's another thing but checking your stats doesn't get interesting until you start sharing Some people on twitter don't check their stats because they're just lurking. They're just reading, right? They don't necessarily have interesting stats Once you start sharing content and building up your followers Checking your stats becomes much more interesting And we call that an engaged trigger a trigger that oh, I want to check my stats Oh, I tweeted something controversial last night before I went to bed. Oh, I can't wait to see if anybody reacted That's called an engaged trigger that only happens when someone's engaged So it's a special kind of trigger And so twitter's got a core loop like that But the core thing is, you know, you want your board or you want to you know, you want to read some stuff You go you check your tweets you check your stats And the feedback is social did anybody respond to the things that I you know or did any of my friends You know do anything interesting And then the investment the investment system Which is part of a core loop is building up your followers And getting people to respond. That's the investment system And you know at this point, there's a lot of people that have a lot of followers, but I've got like 13 0.1 thousand followers And That makes it a lot harder for me to walk away from twitter as a platform Because I've invested So even though it's so simple it actually has all of the hooks of the classic core loop So would you say the mvp has to address each of these else you would not have Absolutely not a lot of mvps don't have any investment system engaged in them for instance No, the core loop is a model to build A compelling experience that drives re-engagement through skill building But To you know a lot of core loops might be an engaging activity and a rudimentary feedback system And that's kind of all but what what the core loop model helps you do is think about You know your You know your most atomic activity that you're offering In a particular way that Where you don't just think of the activity itself, but you think of how it's going to evolve over time That's what it gets you to think about but what your mvp should be is a different question. That totally depends on what you're building Cool, awesome We have a question that's come in from the qna and I think let's quickly take that In line with that. Uh, so we have the target varma here who's asking hay me We often see crossover ideas like building an uber for schools or air bnb for hospitals Ideas that have a footprint beyond an app and require much more heavy Lifting to validate the mvp in terms of the time effort What has been your experience when when you have crossover ideas like this? Well, there's two really different questions there one of which is crossover ideas the second of which is Validating something that requires you to build out something bigger So crossover ideas, you know If there's market need for them, then they're interesting ideas So a lot of times people ask me. Well, what do you think of this idea? What do you think of that idea? I have opinions, you know, I've been designing games and products for 20 years My opinions matter so much less Than your markets opinions. So that's what I do is I guide people to finding the right Market segment to to learn from In terms of crossover ideas. How do you mock up an idea? That's the art of the mvp I mean, that's why I have a lot of people that want to work with me one-on-one is that um, I think There's many different ways There's something called a wizard of us test where you make something seem like it's automated But it's actually just people behind the scenes, you know one-offing things That's a really common way to test that kind of idea And there's lots, you know, there's lots of I'm not going to go into that in detail in my workshop Because that's a whole-on workshop, but one of the segments in the masterclass that I teach online is, you know Here's five different ways to test your idea pick the one that's right for you So I think, you know, it's something like uber for schools or this or that. How do you test the mvp? You know, there's a lot of iteration toward it, but There's I can't just like it completely depends on the context of what you're doing Okay, that's what I can tell you And you just need to be the more versed you are in a variety of methods for mocking up something The the better you'll be able to select the right one. It might not even be digital, right your mvp But you know before uber became uber. It was a black car service and it was much more specific So, you know before facebook became facebook It was just a campus lookbook, you know with a little bit of rating system in it. So these things evolve a lot Cool. I think that's a pretty good answer that I think a lot of times these these actually depend on the context But there are lots of different ways you can go about it and what the market things is more important than What someone in the room can think Exactly So I think the tricky thing is figuring out What to build and then who to test it on Cool, I think we have one more quick question that I want to get here and then We might go into a little bit of lightning round and take audience as well. So This one, I think hopefully will be a quick one What is there a practicing customer development practice? Do you think we still need beta testing? Oh, absolutely. But it depends on the complexity of what you're building and it depends on how you define beta testing You know if you're building an online multiplayer game You're going to have an alpha test and a beta test and a closed beta and open because you're dealing with You know multiple complex systems that need to be tuned and brought to life and balanced For instance, so absolutely you need beta testing if you're building something really really simple Your customer development might just kind of smoothly go through beta testing into launch So I think it just depends on complexity and really how you're using that term And I think especially if you have products that have network effects It becomes more and more important as is based on my past experience Yes, that's such a good point and um I think You know beta testing can mean different things MVP can mean different things I like to not get hung up too much on terminology But I just will say to a client or to a student or to everyone in the workshop room Here's how i'm using this term. Here's our definition for this today. Great. Let's move on and talk about how to get your good work done You know, I've had clients come come to me telling me they're in the middle of a beta test And I would have called it a diary study Right, you know people use different terminology for different things Yeah, yeah, that's that's one of our huge challenges in this space is we all in take the same work Me very different things Yeah, I think I want to jump into a bit of firing round and how that's going to work is I'm going to shoot at you two options And you need to pick one option We'll go through all the questions if if uh, if time permits we might revisit and maybe ask Why one over the other but for now we just kind of go through very quickly and I give you two options And you pick one. How does that sound? Okay, I'll I'm gonna tweak that a little bit and hopefully it'll be okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, let's do it So the first one is uh, I mean there's there's been a lot of debate at least for for me When I've worked with companies, uh, should we do personas or should we do jobs to be done? Uh, what's your take? Oh jobs to be done and let me tell you what personas are great for audience segmentation and marketing Um, they work really well. That's where they came out of uh, when what you're trying to do is build an mvp A stripped down high learning mvp personas are much less directly useful than jobs to be done If the jobs to be done is deployed correctly And the reason is jobs to be done can surface specific customer pain points and habits in a way That personas never can Cool low fidelity prototypes or high fidelity prototypes low fidelity prototypes the reason is that Low fidelity prototypes enable rapid early iteration They have three key advantages You have much faster cycles because there's less graphics to tweak and to just deal with Two your team gets less emotionally invested in a low fidelity prototype than when they've poured their love into beautiful graphics And that means that they're more receptive to real market feedback three People are more honest and forthcoming giving feedback when what they're looking at doesn't look like it's all polished and finished Awesome. The last point. I think is very powerful. That's that's very cool Next one fake landing pages or go after core loops Core loop for all the reasons I stated above And I have a game thinking roadmap that explains why And in fact, you might want to use a fake landing page later in your process to test your marketing message Because it's great for that. But if you want to actually bring your product to life core loops much more powerful Cool user interviews or play tests Oh, see that one's both It's an ordering thing Um, if I had to pick on my I would do a play test, but I would wrap it in a user interview So the most effective play tests are three parts The first part of it's an interview where you you're getting some useful info from people But you're also telling them that they're the expert and setting them up to give you really good feedback And not think that they have to please you a play test Iterative play tests are how you should bring your product to life But then the interview can really wrap around and help you also debrief After the play test and get the most out of your play test by having a really smart way to debrief And learn more about What happened in the play test cool Lean canvas business model canvas So they're both great and there's a lot of overlap If I was doing an mvp, I'd probably use the lean canvas. I think the business model canvas if what you're doing is Working out your business model your partnerships and your revenue streams and the business model canvas is great If what you're trying to do is work out How to quickly build an mvp and test product market fit the lean canvas or my own mvp canvas are a better fit awesome One last question for me is how do you define success of a product? product So I think It's an ongoing thing first of all I think it's important to define what you what you want for some so for some people they define success as This product pitch will get me funded Some people define success as I can run a lifestyle business off the revenue people define it in very different ways Okay, but rather than defining product success that way I want to share with you what I call the alpha moment And this is a huge part of knowing if you're on the right track Knowing if your idea is worth pursuing Everybody I coach and work with runs into an alpha moment the alpha moment happens when you've actually found Exactly the right people to give you feedback using my methods or someone else's Like you know, these are the right people to give you feedback on your product And you get them to give you brutally honest feedback That's your alpha moment You're either going to get you're going to get three kinds of feedback You're either going to get a oh, this is not very compelling which is hard But how much more useful to get that early You might get oh my god, when is the shipping can I have it yesterday? Which is also very powerful to get which might mean Oh, I have to quit my day job and pursue this, you know, it's hot Or you might get lukewarm feedback. Oh, that's a nice interesting idea That's interesting. That's lukewarm feedback And that's your alpha moment So how do I have to find product successes when you hit your alpha moment? Can you as an entrepreneur do the right thing with that feedback? Do you know what to do with that feedback to move forward? If so, then you're on the path to product success Awesome. So I want to look for my alpha moment now Cool, I think I'm done with most of my questions We have one other question that's come in from laxmikant And laxmikant is asking What will be impact of virtual reality on products to come in the near future? So I personally think that augmented reality will be far bigger than virtual reality. I think virtual reality Will remain niche for a long time because of the social aspects Um, I've also been through a couple of virtual reality hype cycles already So what I'm seeing now is not One of the first time I've seen all this hype. I think it'll be great for gaming. I think there'll be some great uses for You know remote collaboration or maybe remote surgery or whatever but I think that People want to be with other people in the physical world and virtual reality You know means that you're wearing a computer on your face And I think for a lot of people particularly women. It's just not that appealing to wear a computer on their face So that's my take I think it'll be niche and I think it'll be great But people that think everything's going to be virtual reality. We're going to have all our meetings and virtual reality Have drunk in the Kool-Aid and talk to me in 10 years and we'll see if that's true So so I think what you're saying is augmented reality maybe has a bigger scope than virtual reality I think so That's and that's where I'm putting my bets Cool I think we've done with all the questions and it's been Pretty awesome Having this conversation with you. Amy lots of interesting learning and more importantly kind of excited to Have you come down to india and make me to face to face for the first time? I mean that that would be you know, what I'm really looking forward for I can't wait. I'm so excited Is there any you want to leave the audience with? You know that that you think like thought of the day or something at top of your mind that you think You know something people should go and think about I would say just really think about Getting yourself ready to hear To eagerly hear brutally honest feedback on your idea as early as possible It's really emotionally difficult I know that for myself and for the the people I work with but the More that you can embrace that reality And put your ego aside and really Be in a mindset where you want to just absorb and listen to and learn from You know real market feedback from your earliest customers I think that mindset is the thing that will take you Right through your alpha moment towards success. And it's the thing I've seen the most that differentiates successful entrepreneurs from wannabes awesome Honest feedback is the way to go Cool from right from the right people from the right people of course from from the alpha moment Thank you so much. Amy. I Really appreciate you taking this time and look forward to meeting you soon in India Me too. I hope to see many of you at the workshop and at the agile India conference. Take care Take care. Thank you