Customer Development Requires a Willingness to Be Surprised

Customer Development requires an openness to new ideas from prospects and a willingness to revisit assumptions and to be surprised.

Customer Development Requires a Willingness to Be Surprised

And by “surprised” I mean:

• able to admit that your assumptions are wrong
• open to new insights from prospects
• willing to change your plans for your product or your startup
• willing begin again with a better frame of reference

Inspired by Bob Lewis’ “Holiday Card to the Industry, 2010”

In business we expend tremendous effort to avoid surprises. It wouldn’t be wrong to define professional management as the discipline of surprise prevention. The best-run businesses understand their marketplaces and inner workings well enough to predict the impact of every initiative they envision before they put them into practice.

This, in fact, is why business theorists have been so fascinated with process design and management. Process is supposed to provide repeatable, predictable results.

But that isn’t where value comes from. Value comes from uniqueness, and from surprise.

Apple, for example, succeeds by developing products that aren’t just like everything else. Does Apple have a process for innovating unexpected products?

I’d say no, by definition. A practice, perhaps, but not a process. No series of steps can, in the absence of inspiration, lead to the brilliantly new. 

Processes that prevent innovation, on the other hand? Heck, that’s what most of ‘em are for.

In a capsule review of his book “Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21st Century Information Technology,” Lewis offered a useful definitions for metrics, process optimization parameters, and three key ways to organize work: as a process, a practice, or innovation.

Good metrics are connected, consistent, calibrated, complete, communicated and current.

There are six process optimization parameters:

• overhead cost,
• unit cost,
• cycle time,
• throughput,
• quality
• excellence

When the time comes to get work done you can organize it as a process, as a practice, or use invention. The best way to decide which is the best fit for a situation depends on which combination of the six parameters most requires optimization:

• Processes (well-defined flows of thoroughly specified steps) tend to minimize unit cost, maximize throughput, and improve quality.
• Practices (sequences of broadly defined steps within which personal expertise and judgment play vital roles) tend to minimize cycle time, and also encourage excellence.
• Invention (figuring out how to handle a situation when it arises) has very low overhead costs, but otherwise has little to recommend it, unless you’ve never had to deal with a type of situation before.

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