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...