Issue link: https://enterprise-resources.awscloud.com/i/1282535
In the digital world, we are willing to be surprised and to learn. In the old days, we relied on a plan—prepared in advance—to guide our activities. The plan was made by someone, or some collection of someones, who knew enough to specify what needed to be done over a longish period. But in a world dominated by uncertainty, in a world in which none of us knows all there is to know about our customers, about the users of our IT systems, or about what will change in our competitive or regulatory environment, how can someone presume to put together a plan that will surely deliver business value? To do so seems more and more an act of hubris. Have we never been surprised by the market reaction to our products or by the way users used our software? You might say that humility is the essence of digital transformation. Important lessons from startups In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries describes product development as a learning journey where the company tries out a business idea with a minimal viable product (MVP), gathers feedback from the market, changes its design based on that feedback, and repeats this process over and over. The goal is to maximize learning early in the process: to get something into the hands of customers and be prepared to be surprised by their reactions. At any given moment, Ries says, the company should have two hypotheses in mind: a value hypothesis about what product and product attributes will create value for the customer, and a growth hypothesis about how the product will be able to ramp up its sales or usage. Each of these hypotheses is just that—a hypothesis, something that must be confirmed or disproved through experimental evidence. This is a process founded in humility. The startup—even if it is filled with experts on the target market or the industry— admits that its ideas are only conjectures and that in order to serve a market, it must learn from that market. Periodically, the team decides whether to persevere with its current strategy or to pivot to another direction. The arrogance of old-school product design—the idea that a marketing or product expert knows enough to define a product that can then be "marketed" or pushed out to customers, seems increasingly out of touch with business reality.