(2018-02-14) Torres Stop Validating Start Cocreating

Teresa Torres: Stop Validating & Start Co-Creating. Sally is a product manager, Pam a user experience designer. Even though their MVP will only include a fraction of their near-term vision, Pam wants two weeks to work through the design of the near-term vision. Sally is anxious to get the MVP out the door as soon as possible and wants Pam to focus on those designs first.

To resolve this conflict, we need to expose a key assumption at play here

Pam is assuming that the near-term vision is mostly right

She doesn’t want to design A, without knowing how A will fit with B, C, and D.

This approach would be effective if we were confident that A, B, C, and D were the exact right things to build.

However, if we assume that our near-term vision and our MVP are mostly wrong, then Pam’s approach doesn’t save us time. Instead, we are doing two weeks of design work that will likely be wasted.

But we also can’t ignore Pam’s concern. We do need to care about the overall user experience. This is why we iterate

However, after we get A right, and we start working on B, our goal isn’t to ship B as quickly as possible. This is what leads to cobbled together designs. At this point, our goal is to get A and B to work well together. That means we might have to change the design of A. And that’s okay.

While Pam will still have to go through many iterations to get A, B, C, and D to work well together, each iteration is informed by the prior one. This leads to shorter cycles and faster overall design.

Like Pam, we tend to use customer interactions to validate our ideas

There are several problems with this validation mindset.

First, we get feedback too late in the process

Second, because of the escalation of commitment and confirmation bias, we are far less likely to act on our customer’s feedback even when we do have time

our customers know best when it comes to their own needs.

We make product decisions every week, therefore we need to engage with our customers every week

The first added benefit is that when we share less-polished designs, and especially when we share multiple options, our customers are much more likely to give us honest feedback

And the second benefit is that they will be more likely to jump in and share new options that we didn’t consider. Co-Creation