Jake Knapp: belief

Transcript context

…Totally, totally, yeah. And we usually see teams starting projects in one of two states. And one state is the state that Latch It finds themselves in where, gosh, there's a few different ways we could do this. How do we decide? We can discuss and discuss and discuss, but that could go on forever. So that's state one. We know there are some options. And state two is we're pretty locked in on one approach already. We think we've got this figured out. In either of those cases, we think it's worth taking, again, about four hours-ish to be really careful to lay out the options. If you think there's only one option to sort of force yourself to think, well, what if this doesn't work? What's another alternative? Or is there another alternative that we have previously considered and dismissed that we should maybe reconsider just to make sure? And end with a situation where you've made a decision clearly about, okay, we've considered alternatives. This is our first choice. And you've also identified this is our backup plan. So that failure doesn't seem quite so scary when we start to run experiments. And we're really able to pivot fast should that happen. So what we're going to do on the second day of the foundation sprint through this sort of third phase, which is the approach. Is to identify those different paths, so for Latch It here, they've got a B, C and D options. We're going to color code those and then we're going to plot them on these charts. So we've got these different lenses. We call this activity magic lenses. And the notion is, if we had a discussion about it, and we could ... as investors, if we could imagine like waving a magic wand and putting the perfect team of advisors in place to counsel the founders on this decision, we would love for them to have a customer expert, somebody who's just brilliant vision for the product and the customer experience. And they're hammering their fist on the table saying, "The customer, the customer, the customer, make the decision that's best for the customer." And so we'll plot those options on these axes of easy to use versus hard to use and perfect solution to the customer problem versus this is just an okay solution to the customer problem. And then similarly, we want an advisor who's going to pound their fist on the table for building something cheap and fast, getting it out into the market, being pragmatic, get it out there as fast as possible. That's the pragmatic lens. We want somebody who's going to advocate for growth. What's the way to reach the most customers? Get it in people's hands as fast as possible, easy to adopt. We want somebody who's going to advocate for money, for the financial health of a business. So what's going to create long-term value for the customers? Where's the biggest audience of these folks? We want to look at differentiation. Which we spent the first half of the Foundation Sprint establishing. Well, we want consider these approaches through that lens, as well. st audience of these folks? We want to look at differentiation. Which we spent the first half of the Foundation Sprint establishing. Well, we want consider these approaches through that lens, as well. And so what the teams will do is to plot these options on these lenses. They'll almost always create some lenses of their own, some custom lenses that matter to them. They might have one about their conviction. I think there's sort of a humorous one for Mellow where it's like, which founder is like, "F yeah, that's exactly what I want to build. " And on the other end of the spectrum it's like, nah, just kind of the sort of heat of excitement that you feel. That might be a really important decision point. That feels really important. That feels like that should be one of your ... you call these the magic lenses?…

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