Most teams have more ideas than evidence.
I help them work out which ideas deserve investment.
Exponentially helps product, innovation, and AI teams run fast, cheap market tests before money, roadmap space, and political capital get committed. The method is pretotyping, turned into a repeatable operating system for enterprise teams.
Most innovation work stalls in research and slides. I get teams running real experiments in week one — and bring back data, not opinion.
Leslie Barry
Founder · Exponentially · since 2017
Evidence beats opinion when the stakes are high.
$38M+
Value generated
$30M+
Saved by stopping weak ideas early
4,000+
Ideas tested
50+
Practitioners trained
Pretotyping isn't about running clever experiments. It changes how decisions get made: which ideas move forward, which get killed early, and which teams can defend their choices with data instead of seniority.
At Swyftx, a six-week experimentation program added 8 new products to the pipeline, validated over $400K of annualised revenue from a single test, and proved out a 34% conversion rate on their core hypothesis. The same method now runs inside Treasury Wine Estates, Reece, and AGL — where over $7.5M in build costs has been saved by stopping weak ideas early.
The number I'm proudest of: 1,000+ people who pause to ask "should we build it?" and "Do we have data or opinion?" before wasting time, effort and money on the wrong "it".
Install a system where ideas have to earn their way forward.
A team starts with an idea. We turn it into a testable customer hypothesis, design the cheapest credible experiment, run it quickly, and use the evidence to decide whether to kill, change, or fund the idea.
That might be a Fake Door, a landing page, a concierge test, or a Facade. The format matters less than the decision it enables.
Alberto Savoia created pretotyping at Google and taught it at Stanford University. I trained directly with him, then spent years adapting the method for enterprise teams where the hard part is not understanding the theory. It is keeping the cadence alive after the workshop ends.
Speed without evidence is just faster waste.
AI has made building dramatically cheaper. It has not made customer demand any easier to predict. That makes evidence more important, not less.
The teams that win will not be the ones that build the most. They will be the ones that learn fastest what not to build.
Background
Enterprise, 4 startups, 2 exits
Nearly a decade running national services delivery for resources, petrochemical, retail and industrial clients, then a $100M professional services business. Board member at PHORIA since 2015. Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
Teaching
Stanford guest lecturer
Guest lecturer, Stanford MS&E 265, Introduction to Product Management.
Practice
1,000+ practitioners trained
200+ workshops delivered across product, innovation and enterprise teams.
Speaking and media
Stanford, Techstars, AFR, TechCrunch
Guest lecturer at Stanford MS&E 265, Techstars mentor since 2017, and featured in AFR, Smart Company, and TechCrunch.
Bring one idea you are under pressure to build.
20 minutes. No pitch. You bring an idea. We design the fastest credible test. You leave with a one-page experiment design and a yes/no on whether pretotyping fits your problem.
Or email [email protected].