Product #71
Learn More Faster, Can Strategic Planning Pay Off? And more.
Learn More Faster · Michael Margolis · 2024
A practical discovery approach that’ll help you develop a value proposition and define your bullseye customer. Think of this as a more precise and practical alternative to ‘Sprint’ by Jake Jake Knapp.
Key Ideas
Your Bullseye Customer is the specific subset of your target market who initially is most likely to adopt your new product.
‘The Bullseye Customer Sprint’ helps validate and refine a hypothesis about who will be your Bullseye Customer AND identifies the features and unique value propositions those customers will value most.
Recruit 5 bullseye customers: After 5 you get diminishing returns - the big takeaways should already be evident and you’ll get more value from iterating on the prototype vs hearing from more customers.
Interview them about 3 different prototypes - it stops you falling in love with one and increases the chances you’ll be surprised by what you learn. Customers will speak of the pros and cons of each (with 2 they tend to pick a favourite). Customers struggle to keep track of more than 3 concepts.
Do it in a day - it makes it easier to agree on next steps and reduces admin and comms.
Conduct ‘Bullseye Customer Sprints’ early - before the team invests time, money or repetition into building, launching and marketing an MVP. The ROI of research is greatest when the cost of building the wrong product is high. Running a ‘Bullseye Customer Sprint’ before doing other research will help streamline and reduce the cost of follow on efforts.
Break research into bite-sized chunks → so you can take onboard feedback and iterate. Don’t try to answer all your questions at once → focus on the highest priority learning objectives
Qualitative one-on-one interviews provide the best value → you can draw on customers stories, ask follow-up questions and dig into the why behind their answers AND leave room to discover the unexpected.
Keep prototypes simple - don’t mock up more than necessary, and take advantage of competitor products (they can be one of your 3).
Prompts to help teams prioritise what assumptions to test:
What are your hypotheses about your ideal customer and their problems?
What are your hypotheses about your unique solution?
What do you most want to know about your ideal customers?
What are the nagging debates on your team? What keeps you up at night?
What must be true for your product to be adopted and to succeed?
What would increase your confidence in your prioritisation and sequencing of what you’re building?
How relevant are the questions to your product roadmap?
What decisions or actions will you take based on the results?
What’s the risk of not answering this question now?
Does the answer already exist somewhere in your organisation?
Defining and aligning on your Bullseye Customer helps streamline your approach. Interview stakeholders about the distinguishing traits, behaviours and past experiences that identify the subset of customers who’ll be most likely to adopt their product.
Triggers: recent events that prime people with a desire for your product.
Exclusion criteria: past experiences or attitudes that don’t represent your target customer and can help you avoid wasting time. Prompt: What might you hear in the first minute of an interview that would make you realise you’re talking to the wrong person?
When defining your bullseye customer write specific, unambiguous, measurable criteria you can use later on to sort responses when you recruit:
Defining a bullseye customer makes recruitment easier. If you can’t recruit 5 bullseye customers for research - how are you going to sell to them? The quality of your recruiting is the biggest determinant of the insights you’ll gain from your Bullseye Customer Sprint.
Write a screener questionnaire to help find bullseye customers. One for each criteria - make sure questions don’t reveal the right answer, focus on past behaviour.
Get as many people as possible to fill it out. Offer an incentive that’s big enough to get people to reliably turn up.
Select 5 customers: Select those that best match your criteria. Be picky.
Schedule 5 interviews on the same day.
Use 3 prototypes with distinct combinations of product features, benefits and messaging. Mock up some front pages or app store pages - that mimic the shopping experience. The pages should speak for themselves, make copy clear, headlines should capture the essence of each version. Make them look realistic.
Think about what prototypes will help you elicit the feedback you need from you customers to help answer some of your prioritised questions. Sources: Use what you have, use your competition or mock up landing pages.
Split your interviews into 2 parts.
Part 1: A semi-structured open-ended interview that focuses on the customers’ previous experiences, behaviours, goals, attitudes and difficulties with existing solutions. Lots of who, what, where, when, how and why questions - and lots of follow ups. Ask to see examples of what they’re describing.
Part 2: Compare your 3 prototypes, Introduce them sequentially, compare pros and cons. Make sure the customers understand the prototypes - you’re not usability testing you want feedback on the value propositions. Finish the interview with each customer describing their ideal combination of features and positioning - get them to take aspects of each value proposition and build their own.
Plan a Watch Party. Watch parties save time and help streamline communication (you don’t have to spend anytime on summarisation, documentation or reports). Watch each interview one at a time and debrief after each. Get everyone to take notes. Make sure folks know: research objectives, who you’re interviewing, the schedule, their jobs for each interview. Assign everyone a slightly different note taking job and have them rotate. Get everyone to independently capture big takeaways at the end of the day.
Do a final debrief the morning after: Look for the patterns in everyone’s responses. Did you answer the big questions? Were there any surprises? Did the teams’ predictions come true? Questions that can help:
What is your confidence in each of the big takeaways? Rate them low, medium, or high.
Do the big takeaways fit and help explain other data and analyses you’ve seen?
What additional information or analyses would help boost your confidence in your big takeaways?
How should you update the definition of your bullseye customer?
Which big questions remain unanswered?
What new questions do you have about your customers? About your product?
What new ideas did the interviews inspire?
Are there any immediate fixes or changes you should make to your existing product or website?
When do you want to schedule your next watch party and Bullseye Customer Sprint?
Quick Links
Founder Mode (generated numerous memes this week) · Article
Principles of service design · Article
You really like this, don’t you? Why you really shouldn’t ask · Article
An important concept that’s new to me - Revenue growth endurance · Article
The Silicon Valley Canon · Article
Simple template for pilot projects · Article
How will AI change how we design? · Video
Increase retention without increasing study time · Article
15 mistakes PMs & PMMs need to avoid for better product launches · Article
Can Strategic Planning Pay Off? · Lou Gerstner · 1972
But the fact remains that in the large majority of companies corporate planning tends to be an academic, ill-defined activity with little or no bottom-line impact. Observations of many companies wrestling with the strategic-planning concept strongly suggest that this lack of real payoff is almost always the result of one fundamental weakness, namely, the failure to bring strategic planning down to current decisions
Practical thoughts on strategy inspired by this paper:
Focus on actionable decisions rather than just creating documents, plans and forecasts.
Identify and address 5-6 critical issues facing the company. Pay attention to competitive strategies, market trends, and broader environmental forces.
Evaluate competitive strategies.
Develop "what if" scenarios for major risks or opportunities.
Assess external environmental forces and trends.
Involve key decision-makers in the strategy process.
Conduct rigorous strategic reviews to challenge the validity of product strategies.
Create guidelines for pruning/divesting declining businesses
Reward good strategic decision-making, not just short-term results
Be prepared to adjust strategies based on changing market conditions or new information
Book Highlights
The truth is that none of these activities by itself is of paramount importance. Instead, we need to focus our energies on minimizing the total time through this feedback loop.
Eric Ries · The Lean Startup
Go where the attention is. Where’s the easiest place to get someone’s attention? Where their attention already is.
Stephen Wendel · Designing for Behaviour Change
Just like the ATM that doesn't tell me how much money is in my account, most interactive products are very stingy with information. They also tend to camouflage the process—what is happening—as well as the information relevant to that process.
Alan Cooper · The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
And yet, unlearn we must, for technology relentlessly transforms the playing field, changing not just the answers but the questions as well
Louis Rosenfeld · Information Architecture
Quotes & Tweets
The strategy required to find a great opportunity (lots of saying yes and exploring widely) is different from the strategy required to make the most of a great opportunity (lots of saying no and remaining focused).
James Clear
Commitment starts when motivation stops.
Shane Parrish
No work about work. Just Work.
Elon Musk