Product development: how to overcome the fear of failure?

Article in English

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We all have ideas.

The key difference between most people and founder types is that we take action on our ideas to make them real or find out if they don’t work.

In reality, anyone can take action on ideas – if we overcome the fear of failure.

I’m going to outline my approach, and I admit, I don’t always execute this way. I sometimes skip steps and am constantly working to improve my discipline. This is probably one of those « do as I say, not as I do » situations. But the framework, when followed, can help you gain the confidence you need to execute on a great idea.

Experiment framework

#1. Hypothesis

State what you believe to be true. Traveling for business can suck sometimes. You need to establish what it means for business travel to « suck ». How will you interpret the info? When something is qualitative, you’ll need some acceptance criteria to define what is a desirable outcome and what isn’t. Quantitative is easier, but you still have to define success and failure. But don’t confuse activity (I talked to 10 people) from outcomes (four people agreed that it sucks).

#2. Design

Design your experiment. Sometimes you’ll need something simple: I’m going to talk to 10 business people and ask them about their experience traveling for work over the past year. It’s super important to figure out how you are going to measure the activity (easy) and outcomes (harder) and be clear how it will validate the acceptance criteria of your hypothesis.

#4. Evaluate

After you run your experiment, test the outcomes against your hypotheses. I talked to eight people. Four actually liked to travel for business, three couldn’t stop talking about the pain, and one wishes they didn’t have to travel at all. Use the criteria you set earlier in the design phase and stick to it.

#5. Adapt

Now you’ve created the critical element: A feedback loop. Take what you’ve learned and gone to the next step. If you validated the hypothesis, go for a bigger sample. If you invalidated it, start over. If you learned something that just needs a tweak, adjust and try again.

You can make this as complicated or as simple as you need to, but you want to keep this framework for every experiment you run.

Applying the experiment framework in steps

The framework is best applied in steps using the feedback loop to guide you:

Step 0 to 1

Go to school on the problem. Most ideas are « solutions », which is energizing. The real power is deeply understanding the problem. It’s important to talk to people who have the problem you plan to solve and dig deep to understand their point of view. Use the experiment framework to test your understanding of the problem as your initial hypothesis. This early process is often referred to as customer discovery. You are looking for a positive signal that you are on the right problem track – if you don’t have a positive signal, stay here and revise.

Steps 1 to 10

Based on what you learned in the first step, talk to around 10 people who match the characteristics you discovered and validate the problem and your solution. You are hunting for a signal and should define in your hypothesis step what you’ll accept as a signal. Sometimes you might consider three or four validations to be a win; sometimes you might assume « everyone » wants something, in which case, you are looking for nine or 10. Finding more than your expectation should increase your confidence. Less than, you may need to go back a step before proceeding.

Steps 10 to 100

At this stage, you are pretty confident. Now you need to get a little more quantitative and structured. This could be 100 conversations, but more likely it is some kind of digital experiment, like a sign-up email to gauge interest. You’re looking for a large enough success rate to take the next step of investing time and resources.

Steps 100 to 1,000

At this point, you are increasing your scale and getting more refined in your targeting. You might need to run some digital ads to drive some traffic. You probably need a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This is where some capital gets invested, but you also get some core numbers: We drove 1,000 people to our solution; 182 signed up and 27 agreed to buy. Did the conversion rate hold up? Now you have some data that stakeholders can get excited about.

Steps 1,000 to 10,000

Now you’ve validated that you at least have a product some subset of people want to engage with and buy. This step, if validated at a reasonable level, should give you the confidence to put a bigger plan together. If you are an established business testing a new product or product feature, now you have the confidence to invest more. If you are thinking of starting a company, you have to figure out if the product’s addressable market can support a full business or not.

You can apply this basic experimental framework to just about any product development process. It’s not everything you need to do, but it’s a good tool to practice and keep in your toolbox.