(2013-10-12) Cagan The Biggest Risk

Martin Cagan: The Biggest Risk. One of the things I like about a Lean Canvas is it helps to quickly highlight the key assumptions and major risks facing a startup or a significant new product in an existing business. This is a good thing. The idea is to tackle the biggest risks first. That’s the theory at least.

the reason for this note is that in practice, I keep running into entrepreneurs and product leaders that are focused on secondary risks rather than the primary risks

I try to point them at what, in my experience, is the biggest reason that startups and new product fail. You are probably thinking that I’m speaking of market risk – that the new product is focused on solving a problem that customers just don’t care enough about. (compelling)

I need a couple caveats here:

• the vast majority of the teams I meet are not actually solving new problems. They are working on long-standing problems with long proven markets.
• Second, if the market is indeed new, then today the techniques we have for validating demand have never been better

So I argue the major risk facing most efforts is solution risk. Discovering a solution that is compelling to customers. A solution that your customers will choose to buy and use.

we need to embrace product discovery as the most important core competency of a product team.

valuable, usable and feasible solution

you don’t need to be spending your time doing pricing optimization testing, and sales tools, and marketing programs, and working to cut costs until and unless you have discovered a viable product.