Be Careful What You Believe

In a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, Reid Hoffman, the founder of Linkedin, says it’s vital to launch a product and then change it on the fly. Don’t believe him, at least until you understand your options and the circumstances in which this is true.

Here’s what Mr. Hoffman wrote:

“I didn’t want to be embarrassed by our first release, so the approach we took was to complete the entire product before we pulled back the curtain and let people sign up. This approach delayed SocialNet’s launch by a year, and when we finally did launch, we quickly realized that half of the features we’d painstakingly implemented weren’t important, and half the important things that our service would be useless without were missing, because we hadn’t thought of them…This painful failure taught me that if you need to choose between getting to market quickly with an imperfect product or getting to market slowly with a “perfect” product, choose the imperfect product nearly every time.” – Reid Hoffman, Founder of Linkedin

This is the rationale for Lean Startup and rapid prototyping in Design Thinking. The problem is that Mr. Hoffman and these approaches present us with a classic “false dilemma.” A false dilemma “is a type of informal fallacy in which something is falsely claimed to be an “either/or” situation, when in fact there is at least one additional option.”

The choice companies face is not between getting to market quickly with an imperfect product or getting to market slowly with a perfect product. Another option (that it is relatively new) is to develop a near-perfect product and get it to market quickly. In fact, it is now possible for companies to identify and prioritize a comprehensive set of their target customers’ needs, independent of any solutions, before generating solution ideas, let alone testing them. This is a breakthrough in innovation management made possible by the jobs-to-be-done innovation approach (JTBD). It also eliminates high failure rates, frustration, wasted time and resources, opportunity costs, and reputation damage that can result when”failing faster.”  

JTBD does add time upfront because it requires companies to identify, validate, and prioritize customer needs before generating solutions. But, in some cases, this can be done very quickly when you know what customer inputs to obtain. Additionally, because of the focus JTBD delivers, companies are able to generate fewer but always relevant ideas, and then develop and launch them much faster than is otherwise possible because they already know they are addressing a compelling unmet need. Rather than testing customer needs on many random ideas, JTBD enables companies to develop and launch great solutions quickly because they aleady know their solutions are addressing what customers care about most.

More and more leading companies and entrepreneurs are recognizing that failing faster and rapid prototyping are most effective after the target customers’ unmet needs have been validated. To run an “experiment” that is designed to validate your target customers’ needs and validate the efficacy of your solution is to conflate two experiments. This is not good science. Because the results are conflated, learning is often stifled, which leads to the worst of all scenarios: an imperfect product that is slow to market.

First, discover and validate your target customers’ unmet needs. Then conduct rapid prototyping and fail fast with an imperfect product, as Mr. Hoffman recommends. This improves learning, quickens time to market, and dramatically improves success rates. A little “jobs thinking” upfront can dramatically improve Design Thinking and Lean Startup.