Fail Faster with Lean UX!
So, you have a product idea – congratulations! Bad news – it’s most likely not going to make you rich. Let's bust that myth right away. Expect success stories, fail guides, memes, and a $440 book.
Agile Matinée is a fortnightly dispatch curated by Panaxeo, one Agile topic at a time. We bribe five Agile enthusiasts with croissants and expect them to collect interesting and read-worthy content in return. Here’s one centered around getting Lean. (UX-wise. For lean bodies, look at other newsletters.)
tl;dr: The vast majority of successful products you know weren’t miraculous ideas from a bath tub. They also weren’t based on a thorough analysis of the market alone. Validating an idea effectively requires a lot of ingenuity. Today’s hustling market and scarce funding landscape are ruthless.
Meet Lean UX, the holy savior of your business. It provides the framework to conceive, build, and validate product ideas effectively. No time and money wasted on building the whole thing right away. Master it and you’ll have tripled your chances of becoming the next Steve Jobs!
This one is a banger, enjoy.
1. Smart from the Start — How Uber, Airbnb & Dropbox Released MVPs on a Budget
These three illuminating stories show that you don’t need to build the whole shebang before validating the market. Engaging your brain cells first and your purse later can get you quite far with the initial market validation. If it takes you 12 months to build an MVP, you might want to rethink the “M” part.
2. The GOAT - Y Combinator’s tips on building an MVP (16-min video)
Y-Combinator is the most notorious startup accelerator with some of the best ROI within the tech VC scene. That should be convincing enough to listen to them on the topic of building products effectively. When was the last time a 15-minute video actually saved you months?
3. Fail Faster! — 15 Lean Techniques to test your MVP (without robbing a bank)
Failing fast is an art. Not only it saves a ton of time, but it also gives you the opportunity to find the right pivot before your startup runs out of money. There’s a plethora of Lean UX techniques that can help you set up an efficient validation experiment to confirm or reject your product hypothesis quickly. Here’s a helpful list of a few of the best ones.
So, if you dream of having a personal concierge, you might as well concierge your startup idea first. Not following? Read up, and you’ll understand!
4. Beware the Crowd — Risks when Crowdfunding to validate an MVP
Hey, we all know the upsides of crowdfunding. But as with all silver bullets… Well, crowdfunding is not a silver bullet. So, before you launch that campaign to test out your billion-dollar idea, have an honest review with this nice checklist and see how these risks apply to your “AI-powered Web 3.0 Blockchain Toothbrush”.
5. The WTF - r/ShittyKickstarters
Reddit at its best — collecting the worst of fakery, crappy products, and botched Kickstarter campaigns. While the educative value might be limited (unless you are about to release a really stupid campaign yourself), fun is almost guaranteed. Memes write themselves here.
6. O’really? — How to Write Lean UX Experiments User Stories
So far, we’ve mostly talked about the grand scheme of things. It’s time to get hands-on because fluffy concepts and ideas won’t bode well with that JIRA backlog. Luckily, the Lean UX course by O’Reilly published a video excerpt that teaches you how to make them bode! Scrum-compatible, JIRA-ready, nitty-gritty – four minutes of your time.
7. The Bible – Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden
If you are serious about creating a new product, and you haven’t stumbled upon this book yet, well… You have a program now. The fact that the paperback goes for $440 on Amazon (as of June 4, 2023, at least) is a good indicator that there are some prime spots on collector shelves reserved for this one. The saner of us can opt for a hardcover, Kindle, or Audible (our fav) version for just a few bucks. Get a quick intro to the wonderful concept of Lean UX product development.
That’s it; we’re off.
Hope you’ve basked enough in this Agile well of inspiration. Now go about your day and put this stuff into practice! Oh, and unless you want to miss our next digest, follow us on LinkedIn or share this post with your friends and frenemies!
Hasta la Agilista, baby!