How do you know what to build when you're surrounded by opinions, uncertainty, and the seductive chaos of a big idea? In this episode, we tackle a listener’s question about testing product ideas, avoiding overbuild, and learning fast—without fooling yourself. Along the way, we revisit an obscure PlayStation metaphor, share painful lessons from financial services UX, and lay out a practical path to avoid launching yet another bloated Figma-instead-of-Illustrator mistake.

• Why most "customer interviews" are secretly fear-dressed-as-research
• The difference between designing with someone vs for someone
• How to spot when your idea is turning into a Katamari Damacy chaos ball
• The simple mental shift that helps avoid product bloat
• What the “hard test, easy life” mantra looks like in practice
• Why your slick UX might be hiding a terrifying mess
• A 48-hour rule to force real-world contact before you overthink it

References:

• Multiverse Mapping, our framework for co-evolving ideas with real-world signals https://multiversemapping.com/
• David Ogilvy “People don’t think what they feel, don’t say what they think, and don’t do what they say.”
• Katamari Damacy – surreal PlayStation game where you roll a ball that picks up stuff and grows absurdly large [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katamari_Damacy]
• Figma vs Adobe Illustrator, as a metaphor for building lightweight, use-first tools vs bloated, fully featured ones
• Curse of Knowledge, the cognitive bias where experts struggle to imagine what it’s like not to know something
• Noah Kagan’s 48-hour challenge – get a paying customer within 48 hours of an idea. From Million Dollar Weekend https://noahkagan.com/mdwbook/
• Hard Test, Easy Life https://triggerstrategy.substack.com/p/stop-polishing-turd-products-with
• Innovation Tactics Pip Deck https://pipdecks.com/products/innovation-tactics
• Safe-to-fail probes – idea from Dave Snowden https://cynefin.io/wiki/Safe_to_fail_probes

Find out more about our work at crownandreach.com/

Find out more about us and our work at crownandreach.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hands up, who else loves a spot of brand-flavoured navel-gazing? 

Two years ago we picked the company name Trigger Strategy Group in a last-minute scramble for our first client project. The name has, shall we say, one or two issues. (On the upside, it was a perfect example of Hard Test Easy Life: if you can make something work despite its flaws, you know you might be onto something.) But it was about time we gave things some proper thought.

• How naming a company in 20 minutes can haunt you for 2 years
• The surprising violence baked into “trigger strategy” (thanks, game theory)
• The difference between command, control, and cephalopods
• What bees, psychiatric hospitals, and chatGPT have in common

In short, our company is now called Crown & Reach, and our podcast is called Tentacles.

Why? To find out, you'll have to listen...

References:

• Hard Test Easy Life https://triggerstrategy.substack.com/p/stop-polishing-turd-products-with
• Innovation Tactics Pip Deck https://pipdecks.com/products/innovation-tactics
• Dave Kang's Octopus Life https://davekang.substack.com/
• Taylorism - Frederick Taylor’s scientific management model
• Coherent Heterogeneity, a concept from complexity thinking https://cynefin.io/wiki/Common_fallacies
• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith
• Crown & Reach Website https://crownandreach.com/

Find out more about us and our work at crownandreach.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.