You’ve developed what you think is a great idea for a new product or service. But it’s complicated. To refine it, you need to find out how people react to it, how it might really work, and what you need to do to make it better. What’s the best way to do that? There are two competing schools of thought: creating a minimum viable product (MVP) versus rapid prototyping.
Lean Startup, pioneered by Steve Blank and Eric Reiss a decade ago, is the reigning template for aspiring entrepreneurs around the world. Get a minimum viable product (MVP)—something that works with only a bare minimum of features—into the hands of potential customers as quickly and cheaply as possible to gauge their reaction. This yields essential information about the real demand for the product. Entrepreneurs and their investors can then decide whether it’s worthwhile to continue development or to pivot to a significantly modified product or business model.
It’s a compelling concept and there have been some notable successes: Zappos, Airbnb, Groupon and many more. But there is a better method: design thinking. And a more efficient and less expensive vehicle for gauging initial customer reaction: rapid prototyping.
Solving ‘wicked’ problems
Since the early 1990s design thinking has provided an effective and efficient methodology for developing solutions to “wicked” problems. “Wicked” is a technical term for a problem that is so complex that describing all the constraints that define it is impossible. As our world has grown interconnected and more complex, we have faced an increasing number of such problems—climate change, malnutrition, inequality and many more.
Over the past decade, the success of design thinking in solving problems, wicked or not, has been popularized through books like Change by Design by Tim Brown and The Design of Business by Roger L. Martin, both originally published in 2009, as well as with the success of the design firm IDEO and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, otherwise known as the d.school.
Entrepreneurship is itself a wicked problem. You must begin to develop ideas with no way of knowing how the billions of potential customers in the world will react to any of the possible variations of the product or service. You know even less about external factors like potential competitors or how future events like economic downturns might affect those initial reactions.
Steve Blank was absolutely right to tell aspiring entrepreneurs that their top priority is to understand how potential customers would react to their idea before wasting too much of their time and money and that of their investors. Eric Reiss was certainly onto something when he described how customer reactions to a product, even without all its features working, suffices to determine if the product merits further development.
A portfolio of techniques
Through rapid prototyping, however, design thinking offers a much richer and more effective set of initial steps entrepreneurs can take to gauge the potential impact of their product or service idea. Rapid prototyping is a portfolio of methods designers use to gauge both the initial emotional reaction as well as any changes in behaviors that would result from their designs being implemented. Moreover, rapid prototyping is usually implemented as a progression of “lower to higher resolution” prototypes.
You start prototyping by quickly and cheaply asking questions and making observations of potential users as they explore and investigate the implications of your idea for their lives. You do not need an MVP or working model. Instead you can use pictures, metaphors and crude walk-through simulations. Done properly, such techniques give potential users a sense—a feeling—of how their lives would be different with your product or service.
With potential digital products like SaaS systems or apps this can be done by showing wire-frames or a sequence of wire-frames, while with a service you might tell a story of a day in the life of a customer. To gauge the appetite for Dropbox, cofounder Drew Houston first released a three-minute video on Hacker News showing viewers how to use the file-sharing service, though the immensely complicated and expensive to develop software that could support it didn’t exist at the time.
Oddly, the Dropbox video is sometimes characterized as a notable instance of an MVP. But in fact it wasn’t a product for sale—it was designed to solicit feedback on a concept. (The richness and detail of that feedback was impressive.) An MVP, of course, necessarily embodies the concept but it must also deliver at least some tangible value to early adopters.
These low-resolution prototypes are just as effective and much faster and cheaper than an MVP in determining if an idea has enough potential appeal to proceed. If the reaction to the lower resolution is very positive—“I would love that; when will it be available?”—then a higher resolution and slightly more expensive prototype is warranted.
The higher-resolution prototype is often a “Wizard of Oz” affair—someone behind the scenes plays the role of the product. Suppose you were offering an SaaS product. Instead of actually programming a computer algorithm to work with an actual database, you could use hand-matching (where a person performs the analysis by hand, thereby getting a better feel for which bits of information are most important and the sequence in which they’re best analyzed– this is how many dating apps were developed), or a spreadsheet to give potential customers a sense of how it works. This would help you determine whether they would use the product a second time. Similarly, booths at street-fairs, trade shows, and conferences get potential customers to experience a product or service even though no working prototype exists. These Wizard-of-Oz prototypes are doubly useful because the person playing the role of the product or providing the small-scale service also learns a great deal of what will be involved in delivering it.
A better MVP
What the startup world calls MVP is usually the next higher-resolution step for testing an idea. Since an MVP constitutes an actual sellable working model without any complicating features, it requires a significant investment of time and money. You must make sure it works reliably enough so that when you give it to strangers to test it won’t embarrass you—and irritate early adopters who have paid for it.
In the design thinking world, prototypes often incorporate two different levels of customer feedback before a great deal of time and money has been invested in an MVP. When you do get to the stage of creating an MVP you already know what features will excite customers. Then with your MVP you can capture a richer, more accurate and more essential set of information about potential pricing, repeated usage, deliverability and reliability—getting the most out of your MVP because you prototyped first.
