BottomUp - Skills for Innovators

Hello, welcome to the bottom up skills podcast I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of quality Qualitance. And today we're going to talk about emerging trends. In fact, today is the start of an entirely new series talking. In depth about emerging trends for 2021. And boy, I mean, the reason we really needed to do an emerging trends report was it just feels like things are changing so quick.

And I know you're thinking, yeah, we say that every year, Mike, but I really did feel after 2020 kind of a year to forget in many respects, it really felt that we needed to get the pulse of what's happening. So I'm so delighted to share with you an eight part series. In fact, I [00:01:00] think I'm going to go further than eight.

I'm going to go nine or 10 episodes where we're going to go really deep into the trends. That are happening in the tech design product world. Um, and this will help us work out what's happening. This will help us if we know what's happening, we'll know what to do. And that's really the whole aim of bottom-up is to bring to you a podcast that really highlights to you.

Sort of a snapshot of what's happening in the world with product, how to think about it and how to take action. And today we're going to start with the big picture and obviously the way we kind of orientate ourselves here is understanding kind of where things are at and we're going to stop blowing them up.

So, uh, you will enjoy that, but here's the other important thing I'm going to. Touch upon not only technology trends, but also collaboration [00:02:00] trends. And this is really new for us because we've been doing this trends report for five years now. And this is the first time that we've had a collaboration section to this report.

And we really felt that if you want to build great product with great technology, you need to understand how to collaborate, how to work together, how to get everyone on the same page. So that's why we have both trends in the technology world and in the collaboration world. So let's start by kind of trying to grab the moment the here and now the present.

And I would propose to you that having studied the responses of over a hundred people from all around the world, experts, product people, entrepreneurs, you name it. There was a really big starting point to which everybody had the same experience. It didn't matter what industry, what role. What geography.

[00:03:00] And that is what I call the complexity conundrum. The reality is no matter whether you're a startup scale up or enterprise. Everybody is facing a level of complexity, which is really unheard of. And we were able to kind of grab this moment, the here and now that is really, there's a lot of complexities and interdependencies.

When we're trying to launch new products, trying to do a big upgrade to an existing product. It really is a question of sorting through the complexity and it comes from everywhere. It's like data insights, you know, analytics, uh, customer feedback, you know, stakeholder management. There's just a lot of things happening when we talk about the big trends of how we build brand new products that truly make a difference in the world.

So this complexity conundrum is. The starting point. It's the complexity engine that you [00:04:00] experienced when someone says, Hey, let's do something new and you instantly have this. This feeling, Oh, a new product or a new feature on a product. And you're like, Oh, that means we're going to have to do all this stuff with, uh, customers.

Then those we're gonna have to change the marketing. Then we're going to have to work out what customers want. We have to do the UX and the wire frames. And we got to look at the data and make sure that that matches to the qual. So we got a quote-unquote match. Oh. And then we have to like, think about the integrations that we have.

What do we need to update? In our analytics, is it mix panel? Is it Google analytics? Oh, by the way, then there's other content that we need. Then we need to do business process design. You kind of get where I'm going. I could go on, but you kind of get the, the sort of complexity that if you're a product owner, that's really all landing at you.

So for this, uh, trends report, we really wanted to capture where we're at, but also bring a message of, Hey, don't worry. It's okay. Uh, take a breath. It'll be all [00:05:00] right, because we broke the world down into tech and collaboration, and we've got a ton of answers for you. I think the next thought I want to go to.

So if the first one is look everyone's at this complexity situation, the complexity conundrum. This really marks a very new distinct chapter of digital transformation. If the first era of digital transformation was all about exploring, well, now we are definitely in the second wave of digital transformation, which is about.

Execution. So there, you've got this second idea that we took from the trends report. We're no longer in exploring we're now in the sort of execution ear of digital transformation and obviously 20, 20 COVID quarantine that really has forced a lot of big picture trends that we've seen. Um, And this is kind of accelerated things a lot.

So there's no more time for exploration. This [00:06:00] is all about execution. Customers want to be serviced in all channels. And there's another group of stakeholders that have come along just to make it more complex. But I'm going to get to those guys in a second. So first idea, look, we're facing complexity without a doubt.

If you want to build a product it's just complex, complex. Number two. We're now really under the pressure to execute at a huge scale at a huge speed. Um, and really omni-channel multi-channel whatever the word that you'd like to use is to describe being everywhere for your customer and, um, Really interesting thought here.

This is probably the third thought that big picture thought that we got from the, from the report is that you really need to have this idea of continual learning. And for those of us that are not engineers by birth, we don't need to become engineers, but we need to have the basic [00:07:00] ability to understand and think.

Like engineers in order to interface with them and the products, the platforms that they build. So we, uh, we did an expert interview with Marie and ignite, who is the head of retail distribution. At the bank BCR out of stir. And he talked about this idea, you know, code has to become a language in teams.

Everyone's got to understand these basic principles of how we build software in order to come together. So this was really interesting, particularly for those of us who are business stakeholders, who are maybe not engineers by birth. It really means we have to do this continual learning to get our skills into the right place.

Okay. So. Let's now kind of frame, uh, before we get to the, uh, for technology trends in the, for collaboration trends, let's understand why these trends exist. And I want to touch on some key points here. Now [00:08:00] earlier, if we look at the factors, the environmental conditions that are really affecting us as product creators, designers, builders, entrepreneurs.

I talked a lot about omni-channel the multichannel for your customers? I think that was something that was happening well and truly before last year, but what will did that get accelerated? You know, particularly when people can't go to the store, then obviously you really need to be, omni-channel all the digital touchpoints, but here's the one ...

Hello and welcome to the BottomUp skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons, the CEO of Qualitance and we have reached the final instalment. Of our growth marketing series here on the podcast. That's all right. We are going to tackle this final chapter growth teams and, you know, growth teams are really critical to the success of a growth marketing program, because it is such a diverse, um, more multidisciplinary team than a traditional marketing team.

We do need to sort of. Revisit this whole idea of team. And the interesting thing is in a, in a world, which is full of data and automation, I am here to tell you that if you want to have, uh, great results in growth [00:01:00] marketing, you're still going to need good all human beings to do some of the work. So let's discover together how you can build a cross-functional growth team and how you can get your product into as many hands of users as possible.

Now where I want to start this story is with our, one of our sort of benchmark growth companies, which is Revolut. Now we did a very in-depth case study on Revolut, which has proven to be really popular. In fact, I think it's almost challenging design thinking as being the most popular course on bottom-up dot IO.

And of course, if you're interested in that you can jump over there. Bottom-up dot IO, the course, uh, for design thinking the case study on Revolut, these are all free. So just jump in and enjoy all right back to Revolut and growth teams. Now, the thing with Revolut, uh, what has driven their incredible growth [00:02:00] story, uh, is that they have employed the use of a de-centralized cross-functional growth team.

Now in their case, what they do is they tend to have the country manager head up their growth thing, and then they have. Four or five roles, basically that work within this team. Someone who's sort of a marketing expert, an expert in business development, a comms manager and a community manager. And so this is actually a pretty front end marketing flavored, uh, growth team.

So this has been a big part of their success, but you can also get a little bit more heavier on the data side as well. Um, so if you imagine, uh, like a really heavy. Uh, a growth team that is in the same market as the core product team, you might have like a growth PM and that they would work with a growth engineer, a growth marketer, and here's another really important one, a growth data analyst, right?

So this might be a BA or a form of analyst that is really crunching [00:03:00] data and then a pretty versatile designer to pull things. Together be it really simple email, uh, social stuff, or a bit more on the landing page. So there you go. That's two ways in, on who we might throw in the mix there, um, to build a growth team and plenty of companies have used this model.

I'm focusing at the moment, I'm telling this through the lens of Revolut, but you can pretty much look at everything from Airbnb to Pinterest. They've all had. Amazing success, building growth teams. Now I want to put growth teams and perhaps growth in a bigger picture because you know, If you've been listening to our podcasts and if you've taken some of our courses you'll know we're big on products.

And the interesting thing is despite being big on product, this is not to say that we don't appreciate the value of marketing. [00:04:00] In fact, if you really challenged me, I'm going to tell you that product innovation and growth marketing. Or in the end does product and marketing are the two most fundamental things to grow your business, to innovate, to create the new.

And in fact, they are co-dependence product and marketing brother and sister Batman and Robin, they need each other. Because just because you've got a great product, it doesn't guarantee success in terms of growth. And if you just think, Hey, I'm just going to build a great product and I'll leave the rest to chance.

Um, it's that sort of old mentality. If I build it, they will come kind of thinking. And what you have to realize is that. We're in a world where we're competing for the attention of a customers, our potential customers, and they simply, they just don't care about our products. Like we might, as creators of those very products, there's a whole bias, [00:05:00] um, that you can study, um, how creators are always sort of blind to the level of disinterest, their potential customers actually have towards their product.

And that's natural because you may have spent and committed a lot of your life to building this product. So you think it's. Damn important in the eyes of everyone. The truth is, is not. You have to be proud. You have to go out and pitch your message to the world. Because if you don't, what happens is you launch your product.

You get a little bit of a spike in, in engagement and usage on the product, but then it flattens out. So you fall into what we call the product desk cycle. So you, then you add features. You've watched the features, you get another little spike. Uh, but then grow flattens again and just try and have more features.

So this is sort of a spiral if you're not careful. So by now I hope I've made some sort of case for building a growth team. Let's have a look at the sort of fundamental formula that I encourage you to follow. We'll start with where [00:06:00] you should recruit your people from. So whether you will get to structure in a second, but.

Regardless of where you find these people, this is what you're going to need. And it's a formula of full. So let's say the hypothesis we have is we want to grow like crazy. We want our products to be in the hands of millions of users. Okay. No problem. But let's start by making sure we've got some product people involved.

This is people that can give us insight into what problems the product solves and may even make things like signup and onboarding easier so that we can grow. So that's number one, we need some product people. Number two, naturally we need marketing people. There's people know how to tell a story, connect with an audience and a segment.

They have some real need desire to be forensic and to really find the early adopters, the early majority, maybe even in the innovators, in your segmentation, but they really want to get there. And next it's all about [00:07:00] data. And this third group of people you need are. Analysts of data. They find story in the data and they not only report what the data is saying.

They interpret the data and the best data people give you actionable insights, meaning like here's what happened. Here's the causation here's the correlations is the context of this. Therefore, we recommend that that's the perfect narrative from a data specialist. And then lastly, but not least we need engineering people because we want to automate their hell out of this process so that we can scale.

And do you know what the keyword is? So we can. Grow as fast as possible so that I have, uh, four, uh, key levels of expertise that we need, product marketing, data and engineering. Now, just to build on this, I want to bring you back to where growth marketing sort of intersects with agile. I want to [00:08:00] talk about the process so naturally if you're following good agile practice, you'll have a small autonomous team, but the really.

Crucial thing in how they work is that they employ a build measure, learn mentality to remind you, we go into depth on this in the lean masterclass, go over to bottom-up dot IO. If you want to get really deep on lean, but the shortcut here is everything you build, you ...

Hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast I'm Mike Parsons, the CEO of Qualitance. And today we are a part, two of the full funnel, the full growth marketing funnel, and we are moving away from the A's that were in the first part of the funnel. The awareness, the acquisition. The activation we're into part two, it's all about the IROs, their retention, their revenue, and their a foe.

And did you know that sometimes the growth marketing funnel is called pirate metrics because when you put them all together, they spell higher, but there you go. That's just great marketers being crazy. I of course am not crazy. I am going to tell you about the second part of the funnel. Now, the second part of the phones.

Kind of all the things that start to happen [00:01:00] once you have the customer and, you know, traditionally marketers were like, Hey, that's over to customer service. I am thinking about that, but growth marketers, they think about the entire funnel, the entire user journey. That's the beauty of it. So let's look at these us first.

Ours is all about retention and that's trying to uncover how many people come back for a second. Third. Fourth or fifth time and trying to really optimize that and converting that into revenue. How many people are paying, how much do they pay? And if we're real good, if we're delighting, if we're satisfying our customers, we should hopefully get some referrals.

We might even get. What they call in the lean world, a viral coefficient. And these are really powerful things because, Hey, if we do a good job with those that we have, and we can attract more with them, then you know, you start to get efficiencies. You start to get scale. You start to, if you're really good, you get [00:02:00] exponential characteristics.

If you can design your service to improve with the more people are on it. Take Uber or Airbnb, a classic examples of this, then you're really cooking with gas. All right. It's time to get into this funnel. Let's get into retention. So retention is all about like how many people are actually coming back. So they've had the first experience, but how do we get them back the second and third time?

Now, one of the great best practices here in the world of growth marketing is to offer a freemium product. Now, there is a great example of that. We've done a full case study on this company. It's obviously zoom video and they gave away a free version of their product for consumers. You know, pre COVID. I think you got up to 45 minutes.

I don't know if they've changed that now, whether it's unlimited, but the point here is by giving away to consumers, a free version of their product, that means people could experience [00:03:00] the magic. And we spoke about this in the last episode, really getting people to the magic as quick as possible, but the freemium model builds on that.

It means that they can come back time and time again for it. And, and if you look at their large enterprise clients, over half of their large enterprise clients announced zoom, where they make a lot of money started with one person in the company using zoom personally, as a consumer for free. So that's how retaining the customer made a highly profitable high growth business.

Now another thing that you'll probably notice from services when you kind of think about your customer experience is the way in which email automation can play a great job in notifying you as a user. Hey, time to come back. A reason to come back. This is very good for retention. You'll even see. That this email marketing may be rewarding.

You and maybe sending you [00:04:00] personalized content, maybe offering you rewards and loyalty programs, but this is the world of retention. Now here at bottom up, just to give you an example of what we do for retention, every student that completes a. Masterclass on bottom-up dot IO, they get a certificate.

That's great. That's a shareable moment. But what we also do is we also notify everybody by email, when a new courses available, this is all about retaining the customers. We have getting them to use the service. As many times as possible. Now, key question to ask yourself here in retention, is, are we winning?

Are we acquiring customers faster than we lose them? This is probably the ultimate question to be asking yourself in retention, because you want to be on the right side of that. Equation. Okay. So we've got in the head retention, let's now go to revenue. This is where we kind of getting into some real metrics, almost lean analytics, if you will.

[00:05:00] This is where we're trying to think about, you know, how much people are paying, um, and how many people are actually paying. So the best practice here is you're really trying to find high value customers. Find the ones that are really active, that are paying a lot, get feedback, and build around that. And one of the other ways to give trust big thing with revenue and transaction 24 hour a day, seven days a week.

Customer support on all channels. And this will be a huge trust builder and the metrics that really matter at this stage, it's like every rate, average revenue per user average revenue per paying user. And if on the more mature products you might be getting into lifetime value. And alike. Now the best example I can give you here is Facebook.

Um, Facebook, if you have a look at this, you can actually see this chart on our masterclass at bottom-up dot IO. So go check out the growth marketing masterclass, but take it from me over the period of [00:06:00] 2012 to 2020. You will see that almost every consecutive month, every second quarter, the revenue per user.

The average revenue per user increases. This is crazy. They did it not just for months for quarters, but year after year after year, this, these metrics are off the chart. This is such a healthy sign of a business. If your average revenue per user continues to increase, if you have the inverse of this. I'm sorry to tell you, warning sirens are going off like crazy, because if that number is declining, then there is something very wrong in the way you're converting through your funnel.

And you really need to go and ask questions. Like, do we have the right pricing? You have to do experiments on upsell and cross sell and you need to find out what is the most effective source of, for your customers. Why and why are they coming back is really important to ask those [00:07:00] questions. Okay. So that was the world of revenue.

This gives us one, I left the referral. Okay. So we are, we're really getting through the funnel. In fact, in the earlier episode, we did awareness, acquisition and activation. That's the top of the funnel. Now we've done retention. We've done revenue. We are all into the world of referral. And of course, this is all about asking the question, like how many people are referring, how many happy customers.

Going out there and saying, you got to use it now. This is such an important measure of customer satisfaction. And the key metric I would always go for here is your net promoter score, you know, score of one to 10. How likely would you be to recommend this product or service to a friend or family member?

Really important because whilst it's actually not much work for the person to leave that number, to give that score, it's one of the, I've found it to be one of the best indicators of, are you doing a good job overall as a business? [00:08:00] Now, when we think about referrals, you should be thinking, well, there's a whole practice on r...

Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons it as I'm the CEO of Qualitance. And today we're delving into the full funnel. This is part one that funnel. That growth marketing. Forfar it's so big. I got to break it into two parts because we can't fit it all into one episode. So today, part one, we're going to deal with the letter a three times awareness acquisition activation.

In fact, those are the first three steps. The first three parts of the full marketing funnel and this stuff is good. We're getting into three. Fundamental questions. So you've got a product or service, a business you want to launch it to the world. You want to take a growth marketing mindset. This growth marketing mindset [00:01:00] is all about.

First of all number one data insights throughout that full funnel, with a real focus on how much you convert your customers and trying to obviously improve those conversions. That's what growth marketing is all about. So the funnel that we mentioned has six steps. We're going to deal with the first three at the top awareness, acquisition and activation.

So. Awareness is all about how many people do you reach? This is big picture stuff. And then we're going to talk about acquisition, which is of all the people out there. How many actually come to you and we'll use a website as an example, uh, to explain growth marketing. And then we're going to talk about activation, which is all about getting them to, you know, for example, to sign up for something on your website.

That is the first three steps of the funnel. So let's get in it. And today it's this gonna start with this awareness thought, how many people do you reach? [00:02:00] And so we'll use the example, uh, actually of bottom line.io. And I'll share with you some of the things we do throughout the whole funnel. So as you're listening to this, you can actually look at the website and I can actually share with you the things we do to practice full funnel marketing.

So the best practices that I would recommend when you think about awareness, I mean, the ultimate goal here is that everybody can know about you to the best of your ability. Obviously won't be the whole universe, but you want to try and be everywhere. That's best practice. Number one, being Google, being all of the directories that review products and services in your industry.

But also be in all the social media platforms, um, create all of the different, uh, types of content. Now with a growth marketing hat don't want her, you don't have to like be in 25 different digital channels. You will [00:03:00] find that some of these ultimately will deliver you far better results than the others, but the big.

Advice that the best practices for awareness is experiment everywhere. So find out which of those channels. Usually you get three to five of the digital channels truly do work and have a real obsession about owning. Key words. So SEO focus. So if you're all about, you know, rare, exotic, organic bananas, when people type in organic bananas bananas in your market, you got to own that search phrase.

That's for sure. The start of great awareness. There's obviously lots of other things you can do in our case. We've got, you know, press relations, actually just very recently we announced the bottom app learning platform. We've got lots of press because it's obviously, as you probably all know, it's free to take all our masterclasses we're in all sorts of product [00:04:00] review sites, when you probably are very familiar with is, um, product hand.

And we're also in G2. And if you were to search different things, such as a Revolut case study, actually, you know, we're probably one of the top two listings that you will find for that. So that's an example of how we get awareness done for us. And we asked lots of questions to improve that. Uh, how can we be found, uh, for different phrases?

Um, have we got as many people linking to us as possible and trying to take a journey. Of someone looking for maybe a course, uh, you know, Cognito in Google and see how you might find your own company. And you'll be surprised sometimes that you're not always as lit, highly listed as you might expect. Okay.

So done a rip-roaring tour of awareness. Just a quick note here I am giving you just, uh, a touch, uh, a little intro to some of these [00:05:00] ideas. If you would like to go much deeper. We have a full, complete master class on bottom-up dot IO. There, you can go in, take your time, get the slides. There's a lot of information there, here today.

We're just introducing you to some of the best practices. Okay. Step two. In the funnel from awareness, we go to acquisition and that's really about if, if awareness was all about being in Google, step two acquisitions. How many people from Google actually come to you? And, um, particularly when they do come to you, one of the big focuses on acquisition is not only search, but how can you get the most out of the people that do come to you?

Some best practices, there would be, uh, something like Dropbox. We talked about that in the previous episode where they actually created incentives for customers to actually recruit other customers. Or you might do what PayPal and zoom have done, which is offer a fantastic integration to a much larger platform.

So for example, zoom made [00:06:00] integration with Google calendar, a top priority. And the rest, as they say is history. So those are great ways to drive your acquisition for us. Our big focus is that because we are there in the world, uh, really well-placed on, on awareness. We really focus on the journey from people landing in on our site, particularly on our blog content, which is a showcase of what's in our courses.

They go from the blog, they to go to a course landing page and from the course landing page, they go to a signup page. So we're always looking at that funnel, trying to optimize the steps through, keep it clean and simple, and really tweak the percentages. So that's how we fulfill on this second step. The second part of the funnel, which is acquisition.

Now, if you're a. Thinking about, Hey, we get a lot of traffic to our side, but we don't seem to convert much. You should really go and have a look at which channel, [00:07:00] uh, which is which sources delivering the best traffic. Um, so that might be in volume, but the best. Thing to do is ask which channel has the highest conversion rate.

So don't be fooled that a particular site drives a thousand clicks a month because maybe few of those actually sign up. So if you start from who signed up and from where did they come, you might unlock some new insights. Okay. So that. That we just did then together, that was acquisition. We've done the awareness.

So now what we can do is we can go to the third step of the marketing funnel activation. So it means you're out there in the world. You actually get people coming to you, but can you. Put forward a proposition that they are totally engaged with and are prepared to sign up with and complete that first step.

And that's a really important thing. Um, in fact, I think for activation, you could ask yourself [00:08:00] how good is the users or the customers. First experience is really essential here that people can sense. The magic that is in your product or service as quick as possible. So some best practices here would be to reduce any heavy signup forms with a gazillion different, uh, fields in the, in the form, make it light.

Um, maybe if you've got a free trial, g...

Hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons. I'm the CEO of Qualitance. Since we are into a brand new series. And it's all about growth marketing. And today I'm going to give you sort of the big picture. If you will, I'll give you some of the context and background to growth marketing.

I'll give you a sense of some of the practices that make up growth marketing and where it kind of fits in on the product journey. Yes. The journey of building a brand new product or service, maybe even building a business. It all, uh, will be put into order at the end of this 10 minute session together, which will be really fun.

Uh, so what is growth marketing now? It's very likely that you've probably heard about growth marketing. [00:01:00] Uh, but you know, like a lot of things, I think it reminds me a bit of design thinking. Everybody's heard of it, but not everybody really knows what it is or there's a lot of different points of view.

Well, it's the same with growth marketing. Let me try and help you with having been on both sides of the fence on the product side and the marketing side. I think it's made up of three, the first growth hacking. That's really what. Super smart startups have done to get, you know, big results with small investments.

Then there's the second piece of it, which is sort of more the performance marketing world, which is where people are all about cost per click cost per action. And lastly, it's the full funnel marketing world. Where you test every step of the user journey. For me, if you think about growth marketing, it really is made up of these three main ingredients.

And of course, different people use different balances between the, between the three. But [00:02:00] these really are. Great starting points for thinking of the fusion, to what has become growth marketing. Now, another way to think about growth marketing is it's a combination of lots of data experiments in the, in that funnel that we were talking about.

Lots of creative design, whether it's for marketing materials, sort of product entryways. Or as some serious automation and tech, uh, in the backend, that's also a very good definition of growth marketing. And already you can start to feel that it's pretty expansive because it's not just marketing. It really is a very multidisciplinary practice.

Here's my favorite definition of growth marketing. It's got three ingredients, the full funnel data insights. And conversions, aha. Conversions, big piece here. So now that I've kind of primed you with these different ideas and combinations, [00:03:00] what I've pulled together is just a simple written definition, which I'm going to read to you now that you've got a little bit of context and let me see if I can really make the case for defining growth marketing.

Here we go. Growth marketing is the fusion of data and conversions throughout the full marketing funnel. It is a continuous process of building measuring and learning the steps involved practices, such as technology, automation, data experiments, and design creativity. The end objective whilst hard to achieve is a healthy growing product and business.

All right. That was my shot at it. Here's another guy who's really kind of caught the magic in growth marketing because it really flips traditional marketing. And this is from one of my favorite authors Ryan holiday. Here's his definition of growth marketing. Instead of bludgeoning them public with ads or dominating the front [00:04:00] page of a newspaper to drive awareness.

They growth hackers, use a scalpel precise and targeted to a specific audience. Ryan holiday. He's such a good writer, isn't he? So there you go. We've got a definition. Now I want to try and map it to kind of where it pops into the process where you might expect to start doing growth marketing. Now I'm going to be a little bit contrarian here, and I'm going to say if you're building a product, it begins on day zero.

That's right. I think step one, before you've launched the product, you should be baking in the marketing into the product itself. And I think Strava is a great example of where the marketing really has been baked into the product from the start. And the next step before you're into these massive global campaigns and buying lots of paid media, the growth marketing team can really get involved in the second step, [00:05:00] validating customer satisfaction, and then, okay.

And then go crazy. It's Showtime, find traction and look for what we call distribution conversion fit. Now a lot of marketers will say until you have product market fit, you shouldn't be doing growth marketing. But I challenged that notion. I say, get growth marketing and get it right in to the very beginning.

Now there's many different case studies that you can find on growth marketing, probably the two most richest, most powerful examples are Dropbox and Airbnb. Both of these companies, did, I mean, archetype or growth marketing thinking to transform how they products grew, how they achieved product market, fit, how they got traction and how in the end, they just went to the stratosphere.

Dropbox grew massive.  bye bye. For it, baking in the marketing right into the product so that if you were using the product. Back in the day as [00:06:00] oldies like me, remember when cloud storage was like a really scarce commodity. And what they would do is they would give you free extra storage. If you upgraded your account, if you referred a friend, I mean, you got white for this, a whopping 500 Meg per friend.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that was a big deal once upon a time. And they even rewarded you for connecting, uh, your, your Facebook or Twitter account. The point here is that they baked in referral right into the product itself. And that's how they grew Airbnb. On the other hand, they did some cool stuff with integrating with Craigslist, but I think such a great growth hack was changing from amateur to professional photography.

So what they went out and did is. They looked at the listings and they realized that if they did a professional photo shoot where you know, what the bed was made, the lighting was good, proper [00:07:00] lenses. That whole thing is shot at a good time of the day. Um, signups for that listing, uh, increased 2.5 times.

That's it 2.5 times. So these are two just fantastic, uh, powerful, uh, stories that show you sort of the growth mind, a growth marketing mindset in practice. Now the, the last, uh, thought that I want to leave you with, as we really try to. Lay a foundation of definition of understanding of growth. Marketing is a great quote from Sue Hale, who is the chief executive officer at Mixpanel panel, which is a great product in your growth marketing stack.

And he's got a quote, which I think really speaks to the mindset of growth marketing. So here we go. Most of the world will make decisions by either guessing or using their [00:08:00] gut. They will be either lucky or wrong. So they have it CEO of mixed panel kind of laying down the absolute truth there. And I think what this really points to is how much of traditional advertising and marketing were just guesses having been.

On Madison Avenue. I have witnessed like a lot of hard work. Don't get me wrong, but in the end is still traditional. Mocking was a lot of guessing, maybe some good taste. And when in doubt, blast the reach and frequency and it will kind of work out right. Well, in this day, in age, Everything is turned. You know what it ain't top-down here's now here's an ide...

Hello, welcome to the BottomUp Skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons, I'm the CEO of Qualitance and we are at the final chapter of lean hypothesis. I've really enjoyed sharing with you, the real nuts and bolts of how to do the lean hypothesis, how to apply lean thinking to your product. So now what I'm going to do is in this final chapter, I just summarize best practices.

So it really does assume you've listened to the previous two shows. Just go and jump into your app, have a listen to those super short 10 minutes each, um, that that will help you get the most out of this. Episode, uh, I'll do my best to give you all the context, because really what we're going to do today is isolate a few things that can really ensure that [00:01:00] you get your problem solution fit, that you get the validation you're looking for.

And likewise, I'm going to help you avoid being in a guessing game. We want to be in the knowing game when we're out there designing and building product services business, nonetheless, it's really important that you are disciplined and rigorous. In fact, I always talk about, uh, being. Sort of like Sherlock Holmes, really investigating the facts.

You can put a ton of facts and data into your lean hypothesis and it can yield you really powerful insights on how to improve your product. So let's just talk about lean hypothesis as a mini process. I've got five steps for you, and I would really strongly advise you following these. First of all, let's just imagine you have.

Uh, an existing product and, um, step one is go and gather the data [00:02:00] on what your users are. Your website, visitors, what are they doing right now? Now, if, um, you look at that data, you might need to ask a few questions just to. Uh, fill in some basic gaps, like a good example of that would be rather than just saying our customers.

It would be really good to say our very loyal customers. So you go down into a segment, you might need to speak to a couple of them just to get to know their needs. So that's step one, get all the data about how they're behaving. If it's a website where they're clicking, how they're getting there, if it's a sh, if it's a physical store, you know, talk to people when they'd come in, talk to them, when they check out really important.

And then step two is you formulate your hypothesis and your hypothesis we'll have these five. Major components that we've talked about in previous episodes, we'll dig into them in a [00:03:00] minute, but you're going to have this hypothesis about what a great new product or service is going to look like. Step three, go and test each of the variables in your hypothesis.

And you're looking to confirm what you've written there or scratch it out, reject it. We said it was the loyal customers. Actually. It's the new customers that have the biggest opportunity for us. Great insight. So you need to get, actually go through the hypothesis until it is fully tested and you will often.

Find that it's really important to document because people want to discuss particularly major pivots in your lean hypothesis, like a customer pivot, like a solution pivot. You really need to have some documentation to support that. Um, so we love, uh, the dovetail app. Uh, so if you go and Google that, it's a fantastic way to document what you're learning from your users.

So step four, you've created those documents. Step [00:04:00] five, the loop starts again, get your conclusions, create new questions, perhaps even a new hypothesis. So this is the process that you want to follow. Now we mentioned our five key things, and I want to make sure that you get these into your hypothesis. You should state.

A clear user persona, or customer state, their problem that they have right now and trying to get a job done. So there's two really important points. I love to see it when people also say here's their current alternatives. Okay. For what's our value prop. What's new that we're bringing to them and we'll observe, observe success through certain metrics.

Really important to stick to those, please don't skip because they're all there for a good reason. And it's just going to skew your results in your lean hypothesis. Okay. So we've dealt with the nuts and bolts of the lean hypothesis. We kind of put those into a [00:05:00] process. Here is some. Some very, uh, good lessons that I've learnt overseeing this implemented.

And, uh, if I was to start today, these, these four lessons, I would hold really, uh, front of mind, um, in order to make sure that we are successful. Okay. So you're going to do a lean hypothesis, make sure that the. Testing is given a very specific fixed timeframe. You know, I like one to two weeks max, because you know, you need to create a start and an end to this process.

You need to take all of the conclusions, share them with your colleagues, your partners, your, your investors, your board, whoever it is. It's really important that you just don't get into this endless, you know, fine tuning and polishing because this really leads us to the second thing. We're really only [00:06:00] proving here, problem solution fit.

So you don't want to get too carried away. So an interesting thing that you'll see come, uh, come up a lot in, in lean startup is doing the least amount of work. So this doesn't mean in this case to cut corners, but. Particularly if you're seeing that something's not working, let it go. If you're seeing something that's working.

Okay, good. But we don't need to test it 300 times. Like test it a couple of times look solid. Okay. Because obviously there's still so much testing that can happen, particularly when we're going into product market fit, we're going to be building MVPs. So do the least amount of work to achieve the proof, the validation of your hypothesis.

Now another thing, uh, that is really important is when you're working in a team structure, like who is doing what and defining the actions that need to happen, because if [00:07:00] you don't. Run these tests and have clear actions on who's doing what you're still going to have largely a bunch of guesses. So if you have an existing product, you might do tweaks in your product in order to test out your hypothesis.

If you've yet to build a product, maybe you need to go and do some research. And there's many different ways you can research. I'm going to give you those in a moment to help you out. Lastly. The expected result. For success. Now we talked about, uh, something, uh, earlier on in, uh, the previous episode where we talked about actually, when you write your hypothesis, you should also, um, actually outline your test outcomes.

What do we think being correct? Looks like, what do we think being wrong looks like. Cause there's not easy, easy. Trust me. It's not always easy to know. Okay. Does that data. Prove or disprove our [00:08:00] hypothesis. So to get you out of that endless cycle, just make sure you've got some framing of success of test outcomes.

All right. We're on the home stretch here for some best practices with the lean hypothesis. If you are enjoying this and you would love to go deeper head over to bottom-up dot IO, where you'll find all sorts of, uh, great courses, they're totally free and you can learn. Design thinking, agile lean and much, much more.

So if you want to test, um, uh, beyond, uh, your product, um, there's lots that you can do. You can do surveys and interviews. You can even rapid prototype. If you have a product right now, obviously what you ...

Hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast, I'm Mike Parsons since I'm the CEO of Qualitance, and we continue into the lane hypothesis today on episode 92. We're going to be talking about validating the product's problem solution fit. Now, this is at the cornerstone of your lean hypothesis. In fact, it's a very simple system is a problem, a solution.

And the result we expect, this is how we talk about. Our products particularly useful in the early stages. When there's so many possibilities, everyone's got a suggestion. Everyone, uh, has a recommendation to make your product better. But if you can hold onto this idea of, [00:01:00] Hey, we've got to get the problem solution fit through testing this hypothesis for our product or service.

Um, this will keep you on track. And the beauty of lean hypothesis is that it takes a narrative, a vision for the product and puts it in these three parts. And apart from it being. Just a little bit easier to remember the true magic in this is this is how you pull apart the hypothesis and you test every single piece of the hypothesis.

So in the end, if you've got problem solution fit, you're going to need roughly five different data points, five different parts of your hypothesis validated. You got three, keep going for almost there. Five bingo. Now what you will find in the world of product creation [00:02:00] and in particular, first attempts is that often somebody was solving the right problem, but they were measuring the wrong thing or maybe.

It was the wrong problem that they were going to fix. And we often see a category of the wrong problem for your product is products that are problems that are just a bit too small. For example, it's nice for your user. To have this solved, but it's not necessary. I kind of like, it don't really need it, that kind of situation.

So if you stayed true to lean startup thinking and you're in your build measure, learn loops. The hypothesis is in a really, really good starting point. So it's going to be three parts. Let's jump into these three parts and [00:03:00] let's look at well, what actually do we need to be testing? What do they look like?

How do we pull it apart? And how do we end up being more confident about the products that we're building? All right. So I'm going to read to you a very simple lean hypothesis. If you've been listening to the other episodes, you will have heard me talk about this one before I'm going to read it too. I'm then going to break it down and then I'm going to attach some things that you might want to measure.

And remember if you do. Test and learn what, what is working with your lean hypothesis? I think you're going to just feel so much better about where your product's going. Okay. So I'm going to hit you up now with the hypothesis here it is because we know our customers prefer colder lemonade in warmer weather.

If we add ice to each cup of lemonade, we sell. We expect higher customer satisfaction and more sales. Okay. So that's the full [00:04:00] hypothesis, the old classic entrepreneurial lemonade stand. Let's just Frank and Danielle. Now the first part was the problem statement and it's because we know our customers prefer Coda lemonade in the warmer weather.

So, what you can see here is we're calling out a preference, a desire, a struggle in the problem statement. And what we're doing is we're also mentioning the user segment now. Some of the best lean hypotheses will actually not just say customers, but they'll even go a level deeper and say early adopter, uh, early minority, early majority, this kind of segmentation.

However you break your, uh, customer base down your user base down. You might have personas or something of that nature. The more specific you can be here, the better. Now we've talked about what's happening is that folks [00:05:00] are, you know, Preferring cold eliminate in warmer weather. So our solution is we're going to add ice to each cup of lemonade that we sell.

Now, one of the things you can do in a great hypothesis when you state the problem is you can also give some context and say, they're currently solving this problem. How bringing big water coolers , uh, to the beach, this kind of thing. You can, you can definitely do that for context. That's also very good as a reference point, too.

You know, where you can research, uh, with really good target customers. Okay. So we've got the problem, our solution here. This is the second part of a lean hypothesis of a problem. The solution is we're going to add ice to each cup of lemonade. Now what's interesting here is you're essentially, uh, stating your value prop or your value proposition or the change in the product or service that you're going to be bringing.

What is the new thing you are proposing? To the world and to your customers. [00:06:00] So we've essentially got this really nice play between the problem and the solution. So sometimes what works well here as well is to describe the change that you're going to create much like him. We were talking about how to add it, a richer story to the problem, giving context on how the customer solves the problem today, the solution you can really get into your value prop and describing the change that you're bringing to the world.

Okay, so that's parts one and two problem and solution of the lane hypothesis, part three, it's all about the results. Now, this one is really interesting because in the case of what we had, we said here, we expect higher customer satisfaction and more sales, but what's interesting about that is I've seen products that can sometimes be, uh, satisfying for their customers, but they don't really lead to more sales.

So, this is actually quite a big assumption that I see here in this [00:07:00] hypothesis. So we would really want to be testing this. So if I was looking at, uh, satisfaction of customers, I mean, obviously, yeah, depending on context, you might want to do NPS, uh, exit interviews, these kinds of things. Uh, NPS stands for net promoter score.

And that that's a really effective way of getting a good directional rate on your customer satisfaction. Obviously you might have some sort of a customer recruiting customer at the end of the journey, which might trigger more sales. Um, interesting one that's often, you know, not only a measure of satisfaction, but you've kind of got to bake in the marketing, into the product there.

Um, so. It's all about the results. What are we going to measure? When are we going to know where successful? Like when we hit, what number, like, what does success look like now in this case, we've used a pretty top line approach to [00:08:00] result. What you can also do is start getting into real product metrics. You might use the pirate funnel, which you probably know.

I love a lot, which is going to really talk about revenue retention. And referral metrics. So those would be what you would be measuring if you wanted to get kind of quite specific inside of your product, particularly if it's a digital product, but it also works, um, in analog products as well. Now, one of the things, when you write your hypothesis, if you want to kind of get into a more, uh, sophisticated approach, and this is something that you'll find it much easier once you've done this a couple of times, is that you can write down what you expect in terms of test outcomes, and you can continue your hypothesis and say, well, if we are correct in this hypothesis, By adding ice to the lemonade, if we're correct, here's what we [00:09:00] would expect.
...

Hello and welcome into the bottom skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons it as I'm the CEO of Qualitance and I'm super excited today because we are launching a new series on the podcast. Are we going to delve in to the lean hypothesis and the lean hypothesis is all about making your product viable and this search for viability, you know, I've found that it's often really overlooked.

Folks are often. Hey, I've got a neat product to look at what it can do. Hey, I showed this to customers, they loved it. Um, but Hey, there's a third vector here, which is viability and, um, this perhaps nothing better than the lean hypothesis or greater, still the lean startup practice to truly make you [00:01:00] accountable.

To this notion of does this thing actually have a business model that's going to work. Is this a product? Is this a business worth building? So today we're going to start the journey in to a lean hypothesis. It minimizes the risk of product development. It actually can make it go faster because you're actually feeling a lot more confident about what's working.

So let's jump in and learn how to make your product viable. So the context I want to set here is that, you know, when we often start out particularly to build brand new products, it is the big unknown. Um, so in the face of that uncertainty testing with the lean hypothesis gives you the creator, the entrepreneur, the builder, the product person.

It gives you the confidence, the convictions, and the inspiration that you need to complete the journey. Of building a brand new product. [00:02:00] This is why the lean hypothesis matters. Now let's have a bit of a study of what is a hypothesis and how does it actually work in lean? So very simply a hypothesis is just a very precise.

And I think the key thing is it's a testable statement about what you want to test and what you think the outcome will be. And it doesn't matter if the outcome happens. Or not the point here is that you're testing and learning and that kind of situ in this broader context of the lean startup and the way that lean startup engine works, it's build, measure learn.

So the leading hypothesis is a testing approach you can use for product. And as I said, if you do this a lot, you'll find that this lean hypothesis, um, it really helps you have a lot more velocity. Um, you can actually go faster in the right direction in building your product. So that's sort of the [00:03:00] context now, what you can use, uh, The lean hypothesis on is really broad.

There's a great variety of things. So you could go as small and micro, um, into like a feature for your product. Let's say you've got a basic product you're alive. Maybe your version one, 1.5. Well, you can go test with this hypothesis, this new feature, just to make sure that it's actually a viable and worth doing.

If I go to the other side of the spectrum, you could even test an entire venture using this hypothesis. So very, very exciting, um, because you really have great elasticity to go and test a lot of different things. And when you're doing these testing and I know you might be thinking, okay, Mike, you know, how do I do it?

What is, what is the structure? The template of a lean hypothesis. Don't worry, I'm going to get there, [00:04:00] but I just want to give you a sense of the big picture here before we drill down now with talking about the lane hypothesis, but what it leads to is a really important thing, a really important moment and action that you can take when you're employing lean thinking.

And if you are very curious to learn more about it, Lean startup. We have an entire [email protected] where you can learn everything about lean. So you can go over to bottom-up dot IO and you can find out more about that there that said, if you're really into this lean hypothesis, we also have a course on that.

Again, it's free and it's a bottom-up dot IO. Okay. So this big action that I was talking about. So you run all of your, uh, testing and validation against your lean hypothesis. And what might you do? It is the classic lean moment. Do we pivot or persevere with the [00:05:00] direction of our product? If you're getting positive results, keep going.

If you're getting negative results on your tests, you cannot prove your hypothesis. So therefore you need to change it. This is equally good because whether it is a positive or negative response, the truth really is you're still learning. You still have the chance to say, okay, well that didn't work. Let's try a different approach.

The pivot really important part of lean, really important part of building a great product. All right, now let's break down a couple of examples of. What the hypothesis is now, don't worry. I'm going to do lots of other episodes where I break this down and get into some real best practices, but I'm going to give you a first look here, a first sense of what a lean hypothesis might look like might sound like.

Okay. So I'm going to give you three [00:06:00] examples. And what I'm going to do is show you some variations inside of that. All right. So what we're going to do is we're going to just test a whole venture idea. Okay. And I'm going to read to you. It's a very simple structure and it's made up of five main vectors.

Very simple. Here we go. Here is a lean hypothesis example. We believe families are thirsty when they come to the beach on a summer weekend. Right now they can only get coffee from a cafe. We will offer our freshing artismal lemonade from our drink truck. We expect to sell 500 units per day. So now there's something that we're going to be doing in the further episodes where you notice that I mentioned.

Hey segments. I particular niche or audience. We actually, uh, nominated the context in which they're in, how they're trying to get the solution right now, what we plan to offer and how success will be [00:07:00] measured. And you can actually, um, explore this both. Again, at a feature level of a product or a whole business like we're doing now.

And just to give you like, uh, like a slight permutation of, um, the hypothesis and this is where it gets really fun. Cause you can have all these different variations. This is a second variation based on what you just heard. I'm going to change a few of the vectors to show you the different testable parts of the lean hypothesis.

Here we go. We believe teenagers are thirsty when they come to the beach on a summer weekend. Right now they can only get coffee from a cafe. We will offer a refreshing dismal kombucha from our drink chat. We expect to sell 500 units a day. Do you notice what I did? I changed the proposition and I changed the segment.

Now what you will find if you are using. The lean hypothesis correctly. When you, when you're alive and successful with your pro, you would probably look back and go, Oh my [00:08:00] gosh, how many times did we pay for it? Maybe the customer segment, maybe the offering understanding of how they're actually solving the problem right now.

Or even how you measure success. I think the point here is this is a very simple way to communicate your product or business idea. It's a very simple way to break it into component parts and test it. And this I can tell you it's such an important discipline because in the face of all of the different variables and uncertainty of building a brand new product or a brand new company, Testing with this lean hypothesis, it'll give you confidence, conviction and inspiration.

Now, if this h...

Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. I might pass since I'm the CEO of Qualitas and we continue emerging. Yes. Emerging trends. And this time. It's what are we thinking for 2021? What has got the pulse racing now, previously in this series, we've looked at some good pigs. What did we learn from those in history?

Some bad pigs, and I've picked a few shockers, but today it's all about what's next for 2021. We're full of all those learnings and those insights. What has got us pumped up now, I'm going to tell you that. As you're listening to this, we're actually conducting a full survey of hundreds of executives to find out what they vote for [00:01:00] as the emerging tech trends and collaboration trends.

So I'm really excited that we've expanded the program this year. It's not just tech and it's just not Mike and the team. In the ivory tower, having a stroke of the chin this time we're reaching out. Uh, so if you would like to be part of it, just shoot me a note or hit me up on LinkedIn. I'd be more than happy to share the survey with you.

So 20, 21. What has got me, Mike Parsons going, I'm pretty excited about 2021. I got six things for you. This is by no means all the things that I see for the coming years, but I just wanted to pick six really interesting, diverse ideas to get you thinking about how you might build better products, how you might build a better business.

Okay. So we're going to start with tech now, something that I'm really, really, really, really into is [00:02:00] this idea of no code solutions. We are seeing such a, um, boom, and it's early days in this, uh, in this boom of no code solutions. So what do we mean by no code apps? Well, It's really interesting because what, uh, this is simply saying is you can yeah, really good application patient, really good software, and you can do it without having to be a engineer now.

I'm going to caveat this and say the real trick here is to, you know, build great, no code apps, great being really, really great products because obviously with no code, you're going to standardize a lot of things. You're going to create a lot of restrictions. So this is still a [00:03:00] real art form in how to think and how to pull things together.

But what no code is essentially doing, it's really, um, Bringing us to a world where more people can build applications. And I think that this is, um, this is really, really important development because it's going to enable us to deploy more apps, better apps. And I think also too, it will also give people the opportunity to understand that even when you have a no-code solution, building applications is, are hard.

Thing. So maybe there'll be a bit more of that love for engineers and software developers. Um, if people have actually gone out and tried it themselves, so no code apps mean that you can build like complex data-driven apps that don't require dev ops database, administrator, engineer, front end, back end, full stack, all that stuff.

So who are we [00:04:00] talking about? Like. Who are the, the sort of, um, no codes providers? Well, you might've heard of air table. I mean, they're pretty big app sheep. You could even perhaps argue that Salesforce is a bit of a no code solution as well. Um, there's plenty of them out there. Uh, another really big one is bubble.

I'm pretty fond of bubble and, um, You will find an endless stream of brand new companies that are coming out with this idea of a no code solution, because if WordPress helped you make a website tools like glide bubble, uh, Adelanto are helping you build applications without being an application developer.

So that's one of my first things that I'm really excited about. We're working a lot with it as well. So no code. Has my vote. That's something I'm really excited for. I'm really looking forward to seeing what everybody says in our survey [00:05:00] to whether they are writing that as a big new thing. Now, another one that's really got me fired up, which is pretty cutting edge stuff, which is this automatic interfaces or interfaces that are built in real time, fully automated.

We're using AI and machine learning. Mostly machine learning. So, not only does it represent the data in real time, and maybe it has some recommendations, but it compiles the interface at the same time. So you have not just a B testing, but a through Z to the power of X. Uh, this is where every journey is personalized.

Every journey is. Um, built every interface is built in the moment based on the logic and the data that we have on a user, incredibly powerful, because it creates more personal or relevant, uh, experiences. And it [00:06:00] helps you get the job done quicker. So perhaps. When we look long-term static, interfaces will be a thing of the past.

And, uh, so that's number two. So we've got no code solutions, uh, automatic interfaces. The last one I'm picking is open banking. I've been bank open banking has been around for a while, but we're now looking at a number of really, uh, really big markets, uh, UK, most of Europe, Australia, and Asia are all adopting this idea of open banking, open banking.

I think really brings us a lot of things too, that I want to focus on one. It is essentially a much more API driven architecture, meaning that. Yeah, traditionally bank systems. Don't talk to each other very well. They can do that. And lastly, data portability, I mean, users now aren't stuck with all their data in one bank, they have the right and the [00:07:00] opportunity and the ability to move around.

And I think that's a win-win because it means that users can get more value. And I think it sets a nice challenge for. Those in banking and FinTech to provide new services, new products, more value, and to compete for the hard earned cash of uses. So they've got three big tech trends, no code solutions, real time, automated interfaces and open banking.

I think these are game changes because no matter whether you look at on the backend, when you're engineering products. The front end to face or more even system-wide innovation. You've got three things there that are really going to change, you know, invigorating the marketplace for 2021. Now, if we jump over to the world of collaboration, Whoa boy has this undergone some change and disruption, obviously quarantine work from home.

He's putting [00:08:00] everybody, everyone is working, uh, in a different way. So that's why we've actually added it to actions report. This year. I got three things that I think are really changing the way we collaborate. Number one, flipped learning. I think we're all getting a dash of theory and then looking to apply that theory into our job.

Today into our work of today. So this is what we call flip to learning. It's a way of you're learning new skills, where they're all in this form of applied learning. I think this is really huge because never before have we seen the need to relearn, uh, to reconfigure, to adopt new skills and practices. So flip learning, big collaboration chain, next one.

Hybrid work in getting people aligned. Now it used to be easy because you could call a meeting and say, everyone, we need to get in the room and agree on something because everyone was in the office. But how do you do that? When half the people [00:09:00] working from home. Hey, does, uh, does bill work on a Monday and does Betty work on the Tuesday who comes into the office on Wednesday?

Uh, hassle. I think this hybrid work is a brand new challenge for solo. It's here to stay. Uh, so, um, getting a hybrid work, working well, huge opportunity. Same thing, huge challenge as well. ...

Hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast I might pass since I'm the CEO of quality science and we are continuing this adventure into emerging technology and trends. And, uh, we're taking a bit of a pivot, a bit of a turn because this time we're going to talk about some of the flops that I picked in recent years now, in the previous show, we looked at the ones I got, right.

And we asked ourselves, well, what did we learn from that? And that's exactly what we're going to do in this show. We're going to look at the pics that did not work out and we're going to say, okay, why didn't they work out? Because all of this will lead to our next show, which is what's got us excited in 2021.

Okay. So let's do this in reverse order and look at some of the picks over the last four years. And let's [00:01:00] start with 2020. Uh, now we got quite a few right there. I think we got a helping hand from, uh, COVID in quarantine. We saw cloud, um, and a number of, uh, automation trends that we picked, but one that we did not get right.

Is five G we really expected 5g to take off me. Maybe I was a little bit of a victim of all the hype from the telcos and the handset manufacturers, because the truth is, uh, 5g is not the easiest thing to find. And I know some of you might say, well, there are certain neighborhoods, certain cities, but let's think about it for 5g to really.

Be alive and well, you should be able to live in New York, be traveling in Chicago and stay on your 5g connection. You need to be in Sydney and fly to Melbourne and easily access 5g. And there are truth really is. That's not possible right now. [00:02:00] Here's what I think the big thing is is you gotta, you gotta take into consideration that the handsets are there.

The telcos are willing, but I think this story is one of infrastructure. You know, 5g is tricky because we've got long wave, short wave. We actually need more towers in order to deliver 5g. And I think part of that is just the simple effort. The push the time, the cost of rolling out infrastructure in a way that it's sustainable to offer a complete.

5g all day, every day service. And what you have to remember here is we had many years of this hype and we still in many, many, many major cities around the world. Don't have this quality of service with 5g yet. And I think that this is a real lesson, that anything that requires really fixed analog infrastructure, you [00:03:00] have to factor in the delays and the time that that takes to roll out.

So moving on to 2019, um, and this is a bit of an interesting one. Um, we, um, we really picked mixed reality. Now I will say this one for, in my own defense, uh, you know, the ARV, uh, and anything in between that I think while it certainly didn't happen in 2019 and 2020. All of a sudden, I will say, I think we've deferred it for two years.

I think 20, 21 mixed, uh, extended reality will take off because there's finally, this is the big insight around mixed reality. There's finally a problem to solve, which is whether we talk about retail or health. Both of them now are really investing in mixed reality solutions because they are unable to have contact based interaction with customers or patients.

So [00:04:00] retailers can no longer deploy a in-person experience. So they need mixed reality. And in the same way we look at telemedicine, we look at AR VR solving many health problems. We see virtual consultations ramping up incredibly. This means that whilst I will admit it didn't happen, uh, when we thought it would, we said 2019, we're now in 2021.

I do think it is deferred. I think it's going to happen in 2021, but I think the lesson here is that mixed reality. Be it AR VR or anything else? We're still needing a problem to solve. There weren't enough constraints, uh, in users' lives in businesses world. That meant that it could play a role, but post COVID now there is.

Autonomous vehicles. Well, this one, much like 5g, I'm going to admit it. I think it was a bit of a victim to the hype, a lot of chit chat about autonomous vehicles [00:05:00] and we're still not there. Uh, and yes, I know we see the funny Reddit videos of someone falling asleep at the wheel. But I think the truth is we are such a long way from true autonomous vehicles for the everyday person.

And I think this is a lesson in complexity. Because you don't only have your product challenge, like say a handset for, for Apple. You've also got the fact that there is all this complexity that the car, which is the product in this case must work in integrate within the major road systems, road regulations.

And on top of that, if that wasn't enough millions of other drivers. So the variables and the permutations of all the things that could go wrong are endless. So whilst I am sure the folks at Tesla are doing great work. I think the truth is it's [00:06:00] been really over height. We try to pick this in 2018. I think we're crazy.

In retrospect. I think the lesson here is complexity. So when we see an emerging technology come along and there's a lot of complexity, I mean, think of that thing that you've got all the tech in the car and you've got to get the car on the road. The road has to be part of assistance of the cars, got to work on the road in the highway system with other drivers.

Holy smokes. That's a lot of variables, a lot of, a lot of product complexity. It's a long term bet. I think it feels like a very inevitable technology because this, the benefits are huge. The disruption is equally huge. We totally underestimated the complexity lesson learned, look out for complexity. And let's go back to 2017, our first year of pics.

And we were huge on virtual reality and hollow VR and goodbye VR because it came in, [00:07:00] it went, uh, it was so high to back in the day. And a lot of lessons here, I'm going to start with the handsets or the headsets in this case, uh, they were big, they were bulky, terrible video quality, um, terrible battery life.

And the, he looked pretty awful big and bulky and heavy and strapping on your head and all this crazy stuff. Um, and two interrelated things is it was actually really expensive to make VR content. I worked on a couple of big VR projects, huge amount of effort for a small VR experience. Everything has to be custom designed, created, developed engineered, um, yeah, a lot there.

And as a result, put these two things together. Big expensive headsets that nobody wants really expensive to make content. Then there is no content. So there was no big hit. There was no app store, like moment, like the iPhone had. VR, just too many barriers. [00:08:00] I think the lesson here that too early, too early, and as you'll note, I do think that VR will come back as some sort of mixed extended reality play in 2021 because simply retail and health providers need it.

It solves a problem. So some interesting lessons here. So infrastructure takes a long time, watch out for complexity, make sure there's a problem we're solving and look out for the expense. Um, I mean VR and so funny. It's amazing. It's this too damn expensive to make. And it's a really fascinating product insight.

So there you have it. Those were the flops and the lessons learned if you want to learn. And you want to dive into the world of being a product person, head over to bottom-up dot IO, where you can learn design thinking. You can check out all our, uh, old emerging tech, uh, presentations in keynotes. There's a ton of free courses there.

Bottom-up dot IO. It's the perfect place for product [00:09:00] people. All right, that's it. For the bottom up skill...