Chapter 8. The Solution Interview

Test the solution with a “demo” before building the actual product.

What You Need to Learn

Armed with a prioritized problem list and an understanding of existing alternatives, you are now ready to formulate and test a solution.

You will start by double-checking your learning from the Problem interview, then look to test the following additional risks:

Customer risk: Who has the pain? (Early Adopters)

How do you identify early adopters?

Product risk: How will you solve these problems? (Solution)

What is the minimum feature set needed to launch?

Market risk: What is the pricing model? (Revenue Streams)

Will customers pay for a solution?

What price will they bear?

Testing Your Solution

The main objective here is to use a “demo” to help customers visualize your solution and validate that it will solve their problem.

Most customers are great at articulating problems but not at visualizing solutions.

I use the term demo loosely to mean anything that can reasonably stand in for the actual solution. The assumption here is that building the “full solution” is time-consuming and could lead to waste if you build the wrong solution or add unneeded features. You want to build just enough of the solution (or a proxy, like screenshots, a prototype, etc.) that you can put in front of customers for the purpose of measuring their reaction and further defining the requirements for your minimum viable product (MVP).

For software products, mock-ups and videos are a great way to “demo” ...

Get Running Lean, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.