Running an entrepreneurial pilot to identify value

an early entrepreneur, the lines between product, brand, and sales are very fuzzy. We teach students to tell stories about how they will reach customers, how they will communicate the promise of their product, and how they will react to issues like customer service or support. Role playing and method acting help students explore various scenarios by urging them to consider non-perfect situations that are sure to arise (“What happens if you put up a website and no one visits it? ” or “What happens when someone wants a refund? ”). • React to a deadline. We create an artificial sense of urgency by requiring that students acquire one engaged customer by a certain deadline (typically within two weeks), and that they consider that flagship customer as a co-designer. Engaged means they are trading their resources—their time or money—in order to recognize the value provided by the service. Without such a deadline, students work to polish and polish their idea, never considering that it may be the wrong idea, the wrong manifestation of the idea, or the wrong communication of the idea. • Scale. We create additional urgency by requiring that students identify and acquire 10 subsequent customers by another deadline, typically six weeks after the start of the quarter. This requires students to explore both traditional and nontraditional forms of advertising and networking, as well as other ways of articulating their value proposition to a potential audience. • Build a financial model. While students are working to acquire customers, they are also refining a business model that focuses on pricing, customer acquisition, and business expenditures (salaries, rent, utilities), in order to understand the scale Over the past decade, design has become more user-centered, as designers champion a process that focuses on people, and stakeholders increasingly realize the benefits of including the people they are serving throughout the process of design. This shift began with a broad acceptance of evaluative research, where designers worked to ensure products were usable, and gained momentum with generative research, where designers spent time with users to identify latent wants and needs and to drive innovation and usefulness. Most recently, designers have utilized behavioral research to identify levers for engagement or to support behavior change through service design. As designers now find themselves in product management roles in entrepreneurial contexts, there is a new way we can leverage our usercenteredness: in understanding if the products and services we are making are valuable. Just as a user test is a way of assessing usability, a pilot test can be a way to assess value—to understand if people find your product valuable and are willing to spend their resources (money and time) to use or experience it. Value is a measure of worth, but it’s more complicated than simple utility, because value is relative to both a user’s context and a larger market landscape. To be user-centered in assessing value, designers must consider an array of attributes (like awareness, immediacy, delivery channel, and brand promise) not typically part of their creative sphere of influence or training. Students of design typically learn methods, process, and theory in order to conduct usability testing and assess usability. They can also learn methods, process, and theory in order to run a pilot test aimed at assessing value. Students at Austin Center for Design spend three quarters leveraging a user-centered design approach to build a new product or service, and then spend their fourth quarter planning and conducting an entrepreneurial pilot study. Over eight weeks, students follow a process that looks like this: • Create a form of prototype, suitable for use. As a prerequisite, students need to build a manifestation of their vision. Sometimes this includes working code or actual builtout technology. More frequently, it includes creative human shortcuts that simulate technology. For example, one group envisioned a tool to help K-12 educators communicate with parents through automated SMS messages. Rather than build a functioning automated server to send and receive these messages, the team manually sent text messages from their personal phones each day at a certain time. It’s clearly not a scalable solution, but it allowed the team to focus their time on other aspects of the tool, such as the user interface or service model. • Identify target users and buyers, recognizing they may not be the same people. Many of the services developed by students realize their value by connecting multiple constituents or stakeholders, such as teachers and parents, or healthcare professionals and patients. We urge students to establish a clear definition of who will use and benefit from the product, and who will pay for it. • Tell an engagement and go-tomarket story. Students often view their work as self-explanatory—that the value and allure of what they have made will be obvious to people, and that it will spread organically and quickly. As Running an Entrepreneurial Pilot to Identify Value