Jake Knapp: evaluation

Transcript context

…Amazing. Okay, let's keep it going. So we've done the basics. What comes next? Yeah, so we've done the basics and another important thing that we've accomplished while going through the sequence of activities and the basics is to boot up the right context into everyone's head so that we're ready for the main event of this first day, which is differentiation. And I still have very firmly in my mind, I grew up with a Mac plus computer and you'd put in the disk and the drive and you'd have to boot up the app that you wanted to run. That's kind of the way our brains work. We have limited working memory and we've got to have the right stuff in there when we're going to make a big decision, when we're going to think hard about a certain problem or question, it's important to have the right context fresh at hand. So the basics is really the context for thinking about differentiation. And differentiation is the heart of what we're doing in the foundation sprint because it goes without saying perhaps, but we like to say it. When you are making a new product, people want to ignore it. People want to not pay attention to it, and if they do have to pay attention to it, if it gets in their face, they want to not try it because we just are all bombarded by so many things and that's never been more true than it is now. And so we have defenses up to save calories in our brain. We don't want to engage. It's crucial then that a product has a clear promise that it makes, and that promise is radically differentiated from the alternatives and that that promise is strong enough that you'll try it and then that the product delivers on that promise. And so when we talk about differentiation, we're saying, look, we want you to be really clear on your promise, not the promise you're making to investors about this technology and what's special about the technology or what's special about the market opportunity, but what the customer at the center. We've started the basics by talking about the customer and the problem they have and the way they see the world. And we want to talk about what you're going to offer to the customer and how it's going to separate from the alternatives. And so in the end of this next phase of the foundation sprint, we're going to have a two-by-two diagram that's going to look like a business school one-on-one diagram. And in fact, we often refer back to this Steve Jobs iPhone introduction slide where he talks about the iPhone and he makes a joke about it. This is a business school one-on-one diagram, but it's really helpful to start developing your product with this clarity about this is the promise we'll make to customers at the end, and we're going to deliver on that promise because we can test and prove that in design sprints. So anyway, we start off, we talk about differentiators and we talk about classic differentiators, fast to slow, smart to not so smart to borrow from the iPhone slide, easy to use to hard to use, and so on. yway, we start off, we talk about differentiators and we talk about classic differentiators, fast to slow, smart to not so smart to borrow from the iPhone slide, easy to use to hard to use, and so on. And we just start off and have the team, okay, let's just score those up against the competition. Put a sticky note on those continuums showing where you think the product could be. And usually you'll do this and maybe you'll start to see there are a couple places where we can stand out on these classics. That's great. These classics are easily understandable by any customer. We're all sort of familiar with these kinds of things. So okay, that's great. Then we get into writing custom differentiators. So we're going to write a bunch of good things on one end, crummy opposite on the other end, and then we're going to score those. And so for the Latchet story, we'll pick up with Chris and James here. They've written, well, we could really differentiate on networked versus siloed. Our approach is networked. If you're using Shopify, you're siloed, or maybe we can differentiate on painless business growth versus labor-intensive business growth. So that might be the specific way we describe the promise of our product. So after evaluating a bunch of these, writing a bunch of these, voting on them quietly, and then the decider's going to say, all right, I don't want to choose a couple of these and we're going to try them out. The teams are going to... If you're running a foundation sprint, you're going to try out a few differentiators. You're going to score against your competitors. You're going to create a scale and you're going to say, okay, let's be honest. Let's be tough. Where do we really think we could stack up against the competitors on this differentiator we've chosen in great detail plotting each company or product one at a time. Okay, so you do that for one differentiator, you do it for another, you do it until you feel like we've got two that are really strong, and then you make that business school one-on-one diagram. And so here's this one for says Lyric, they changed their name to Lachit, so I'm going to edit that real time.…

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