One Knight in Product

Test Business Ideas Ethically by Experimenting With, Not On, Customers (with David Bland, Co-author ”Testing Business Ideas”)

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An interview with David Bland. David is a Lean consultant who aims to help you make good business decisions by testing your business ideas and making sure they're worth pursuing. He's doing this through his day job as founder of Precoil, and also as the co-author of "Testing Business Ideas", a desk reference with 44 different experimental techniques you can use to do the same.

We talk about a lot, including:

  • The story behind "Testing Business Ideas", the idea behind the visual design, and how it's part of a box set that will make you the ultimate businessperson
  • Whether there's anything he would have change from his book based on his work since, and whether there are any new techniques that people should be considering
  • Some of the preconditions you need to have in your organisation to enable an experimentation culture, and whether this can work at all stages of a company
  • How to tackle the reluctance to experiment with customers, either because they're seen as too important or because the company leadership think they already know what they want
  • The importance of ethical experiments, and making sure you're working with customers & not on them or against them
  • How assumption mapping can help land the idea of risk of desirability, feasibility, viability risks and how this framing can help pierce leaders' reality distortion fields
  • The importance of balancing discovery & delivery and ensuring that discovery & validation is part of the work, not an optional extra

    • And much more!

    Buy "Testing Business Ideas"
    "7 out of 10 new products fail to deliver on expectations. Testing Business Ideas aims to reverse that statistic. In the tradition of Alex Osterwalder’s global bestseller Business Model Generation, this practical guide contains a library of hands-on techniques for rapidly testing new business ideas."
     

    Check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.

    Contact David

    If you want to catch up with David, you can reach him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

    You can also check out his work at Precoil.

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