isbn-13: 9780062884657
Hardcover
Albert Savoia makes a compelling case for how to improve the odds of your new product succeeding in the marketplace, with a number of practical tips and tools to go along with the theory.
Theory
• The Law of Market Failure: Most new ideas will fail in the market-even if competently executed.
• Most new ideas fail in the market because they are The Wrong It-ideas that the market is not interested in regardless of how well they are executed.
• Your best chance for succeeding in the market is to combine an idea that is The Right It with competent execution.
• You cannot depend on your intuition, other people’s opinions, or other people’s data to determine if a new idea is The Right It.
• The most reliable way to determine if a new idea is likely to be The Right It is to collect Your Own DAta (YODA).
XYZ Hypothesis
At least X% of Y will Z.
X% is a specific percentage of your target market. Y is a clear description of your target market. Z is how you expect the market will engage with your idea.
Hypozooming
The goal of hypozooming is to take a specific but broad hypothesis and zoom in until you have a version of that hypothesis that is actionable and testable right now. It’s a way to go from XYZ to xyz, a smaller, simpler, more immediately verifiable version of your Market Engagement Hypothesis. The idea is that if XYZ is true, then xyz must also be true-but xyz is much easier to test and verify.
Pretotypes
Prototypes and pretotypes serve different functions. Prototypes are primarily designed to test if an idea for a product or service can be built, how it should be built, how (and if) it will work, what’s the best size or shape for it, and so on.
Pretotypes, on the other hand, are designed primarily to validate, quickly and cheaply, if an idea is worth pursuing and building in the first place -a different objective that is best accomplished with a different set of techniques and best served by having its own vocabulary.
TRI Meter
The Right It Meter, TRI Meter for short, is a visual analysis tool to help you interpret the YODA you’ve collected as objectively as possible. More precisely, the TRI Meter is a gauge to help you estimate how likely it is that an idea will succeed in the market, but it’s a gauge that is not too technical, complicated, or confusing - which can easily happen whenever probability and statistics are involved.
Skin-in-the-game Caliper
Assign skin-in-the-game “points” to different types of target market responses. The caliper can be customized for specific products and markets.
Overall process
Start with an idea.
Identify the Market Engagement Hypothesis.
Turn the MEH into a say-it-with-numbers XYZ Hypothesis.
Hypozoom into a set of smaller, easier to test xyx hypotheses.
Use pretotyping techniques to run experiments and collect YODA.
Use the TRI Meter with the Skin-in-the-Game Caliper to help you analyze the YODA.
Decide on the next step:
Go for it! You can’t be 100% sure that your idea is The Right It, but the YODA looks promising enough for you to take a calculated risk.
Drop it. As much as you’d like your idea to succeed, the YODA stubbornly indicates otherwise.
Tweak it. In the process of testing your idea, you have learned invaluable things about your target market and its willingness (or unwillingness) to engage with your product. Don’t hesitate to tweak your original idea (or your hypotheses) to reflect what you’ve learned along the way. You may find that although there is not enough market interest in your original idea, there may be great interest in something related to it. Or try flipping the idea on its head and see what you come up with.
Publisher’s Description: “The Law of Market Failure: Most new products will fail in the market, even if competently executed. Using his experience at Google, his remarkable success as an entrepreneur and consultant, and insights from his lectures at Stanford University and Google, Alberto Savoia’s The Right It offers an unparalleled approach to beating the beast that is market failure. Millions of people around the world are working hard to bring to life new ideas. Some of these ideas will turn out to be stunning successes that will have a major impact on our world and our culture: The next Google, the next Polio vaccine, the next Harry Potter, the next Red Cross, the next Ford Mustang. Others will be smaller, more personal but no less meaningful, successes: A little restaurant that becomes a neighborhood favorite, a biography that does not make the best-seller list but tells an important story, a local nonprofit to care for abandoned pets. At this very same moment, another group of people is working equally hard to develop new ideas that, when launched, will fail. Some of them will fail spectacularly and publicly: like New Coke, the movie “John Carter”, or the Ford Edsel. Others will be smaller, more private, but no less painful failures: A home-based business that never takes off, a children’s book that neither publishers nor children have any interest in, a charity for a cause that too few people care enough about. If you are currently working to develop a new idea, whether on your own or as part of a team, which group are you in? Most people believe that they either are, or will be, in the first group—the group whose ideas will be successful. All they have to do is work hard and execute well. Unfortunately, we know that this cannot be the case. The law of market failure tells us that up to 90 percent of most new products, services, businesses, and initiatives will fail soon after they are launched—regardless of how promising they sound, how much we commit to them, or how well we execute them. This is a hard fact to accept. We believe that other people fail because they don’t know what they are doing. Somehow, we believe that this does not apply to us and to our idea—especially if we’ve experienced victories in the past. Filled with detailed case studies, a lesson on creating your own hard data, a strategy for market engagement, and an introduction to the concept of a pretotype (not a prototype), The Right It is a groundbreaking, entertaining, and highly practical book delivers a proven formula for turning ideas, products, services, and businesses into successful endeavors. As Alberto writes, “make sure you are building The Right It before you build It right”.”