August 2023: Perfect is the enemy of good

Pretotyping in action

Perfect is the enemy of good

Spotlight on:

Why process beats perfectionism every single time

Once we cross the first hurdle in a company of being able to execute experiments at all , the next step is to ramp up Experiment Velocity. I use this single measure to get the experimentation wheel spinning faster.

It's important that we create a "good enough" mindset by focusing on the number of experiments out the door with real customers per month. We do this with the MVQE (sorry, MVP folks) — Minimum Viable Quality Experiment. We're aiming for the smallest version of a believable experiment that is good enough quality to test our idea of how we can solve a customer problem.

As Marc Randolph, entrepreneur and Co-Founder of Netflix, says in his quote below, speed matters. Customers will forgive many things if the problem is solved or they can see it can be solved. A perfectly executed bad idea dies fast and is a waste of resources.

You need to go fast and test as many ideas as possible to find what customers love.

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Now, this is all easy to say, but how do you actually do it?

The answer is in doing the rigorous, repetitive process stuff well:

1. Capture all the ideas
2. Prioritise them on a regular schedule
3. Shortlist the best for experimentation
4. Design the Market Engagement Hypothesis (MEH), XYZ Hypothesis and Hypozoom
5. Run the Pretotypes
6. Review the results and lessons learned
7. Do it another 4-6 times to measure the results to see if customers love it.

But, chin up — it's not so boring. Teams love doing this, and experimenting using pretotyping is exciting and 10x the learning speed!

Want your 'in the wild' featured next month (and an Amazon giftcard to boot)? Hop on over to our Slack channel!

What’s working well? What could be better?

The clients I'm working with right now are nailing this work.

Luckily, we have Rapidly to support the complexity of our idea → priority → experiment design → pretotype → decision formula, so the boring stuff fades into the background, and we can focus on the fun stuff.

And, we're getting experiments out the door weekly with Experiment Velocity increasing!

What are the takeaways?

• Focus on Minimum Viable Quality Experiments — good enough > perfect
• Focus on speed to get experiments into customer's hands as fast as possible

One more thing

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If you're in Palo Alto, don't miss out on this in-person event with Alberto Savoia!

Join the event

Until next month, happy innovating! Leslie

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