Learning Launch

My challenge is one I’ve already experienced, but without the advantage of  design thinking tools. Instead of applying design thinking to a current  challenge, I will apply them in retrospect to a startup company I worked for,  which had trouble finding product market fit. We were a well-funded and  intelligent group with passion for cyber security. We had big ideas and the  ability to build, so that is exactly what we did. We built whatever we thought  was cool and then immediately tried to sell it. Our key performance  indicator of a particular feature was revenue. If we had conducted a  learning launch to test our cool ideas, we would have found product market  fit much faster and without gratuitously wasting a lot of money. A learning  launch would have tested our key assumptions about what our customer  was looking for in a cyber security product and how to build these features  in a way that provided maximum possible valuable to the end user.

Our initial approach to finding product market fit was to build, market, and  attempt direct sales with whatever feature set we had (or were promising  existed) at the time. A learning launch would have required us to form  hypotheses and test them with potential customers. Instead, our test via  sales tactic actually damaged our brand value and resulted in a very  unfocused product. I feel a mistake that design thinking and a learning  launch would have solved for us is that we were chasing money instead of  solutions. If we had begun with our focus on what problem we were solving  rather than what are people willing to pay for, we would have been able to  build a much more focused product that more people would be willing to  pay for. For instance, we had built a suite of tools system administrators  can use to mitigate their organization’s exposure to cyber threats. What we  found among early sales leads and customers was that these tools were  tool complex or did not produce enough perceived value and consequently  were abandoned. We really didn’t understand the problems our target  customers were trying to solve.

Placing many small bets quickly was something we did well. We could  iterate and pivot extremely quickly. And while we did listen to our  customer’s feedback, it was mostly focused on usability and design, rather  than how effectively it is at solving their problem. Part of the reason for this  is that the field of cyber security is a moving target. We never know where  the next threat will come from or how to stop it. So, to say we solve one  problem and solve it well leaves our product sorely lacking in the eyes of  our customers. It wasn’t until many months into building and pivoting that  we discovered a potential panacea for our customer’s woes, education.  95% of successful cyber security attacks are the result of human error  (although I would argue that at the end of the day 100% of successful  breaches are the result of human error). This was the problem that needed  solving, human error. Once we focused on providing a focused education  about cyber threats an organization faces, and did it better than anyone  else, sales quickly followed. I would argue that we could have reached this  point months earlier than we did if we had used a learning launch.

The insight gained from a learning launch would have helped us  understand that it wasn’t one problem our customers were facing, it was all  problems. Beginning with looking at what solutions exist regarding how  organizations protect themselves against cyber threats, immersing  ourselves in this information to find the common denominators and trends  would have allowed us to understand that education was the critical  component that was missing. We were particularly adept at imagining what  could be and then building a scalable solution. And I was particularly good  at creating a product that wows. But the rest of the process did not matter  because our core assumptions were not tested or validated. Our eventual  insights were proven correct as we were later acquired by our largest  competitor.

I think about how we could have done better to find product market fit more  quickly and more effectively on a daily basis. It haunts me in fact, which is  why I’m grateful for the design thinking tools this course has empowered

me with. My fellow entrepreneurs, as myself, did not have much respect for  structured thinking tools, formality, process, or procedure. It is only now that  I understand that these things do not exist for their own sake. They are  powerful frameworks developed by experts who have devoted their lives to  solving the problem of how to solve problems more effectively. If I could  start again I would have insisted on more testing up front, a closer look at  what exists to gain an understanding of how customers are solving their  problems and recognizing if a gap exists, improvement could be made, or  the current process could be scaled more effectively.

