HackMD
First thoughts about Lean Customer Development
本文件為我在閱讀 "Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy" 一書中的初步想法及結合自身微薄經驗整理出的一些小筆記，歡迎透過留言補充或糾正！
Intro
The first time I've engaging the topic "Customer Development" was at my side project called "UniCourse". We made hypotheses like "Students want a richer course overview metadata and reviews to know what the course is about before acturally taking the course" and "Teachers and School wants to know and compare to other schools with the whole course map" to be our main goal to initiate the project.
However, we didn't do anything to help us to validate or prove the hypothes is right or not. It was until I was invited to attend an interview with Heptabase that I know the keyword "Customer Development", finally reading this book "Lean Customer Development" and know that validation is nessesary.
So these stories are my background. Here are what I learned after reading the book.
About the book
Making and Validating Hypothesis
- Hypothesis stucture:
- "I believe [type of people] experience [some obstacle] when they do [some kind of task]"
- Abstract up a level to get perspective
- be skeptical when validating hypothesis
- when exciting interviewee tells you exactly what you want to hear
- If after 5 people you still don't find the exciting one, congrats you've sucessfully invalidate the hypothesis
FINDing early vangelists
- People on Discord are a absolute base
- Find the one who can’t live without HackMD
- Wait for them saying magic words in the CD interview
What to Ask during the interview
- Listen.
- Embrace tangents
- "be deplomatic with WHY?" is GEM
- alwats ask more about what is truly happening from guests
- Asking open question instead of yes-no or leading question, or the interview will start take to your perspective.
- Ask help to do the note taking when you the interviewer is overwhelmed with processing answer and not able to take notes or think individually at the same time.
- Ask "If you have a magic wand, …" question to get the answer out-of-the-box
- Don't introduces them about what we are building
After the Interview
- Check the interviewee is really the active customer
- Keep doing interviews until nothing surprises you
- but more CD interviews
- explain to early vangelists
- in any form
- to let them keep excited about our services
Constructing MVP
- HackMD should use "Single Use Case MVP" to iterate features
- the strategy from "Hotwire" is exactly what I think HackMD could copy and compare
- how to practice customer development to minimize risk and maximize learning for HackMD
- It is IMPORTANT to find nondisruptive ways to introduce new products or features
- way to represent demo in front of customers
- indentify key pain point solved by MVP hypothesis
- make sure every step are represented consistently
Overall
- Goal to CD is to invalidate hypothesis
- let everyone in the team participate in CD is the easiest method to do CD
My thoughts
After reading the book
- It's far more interesting and useful than I'be been imagined! Not only helps me made the preperation to the product intern in HackMD but also the whole perspective every time when I tried to make a hypothesis to a problem I faced before.
- I've been practicing interviewing with my classmates about my project's hypothesis (UniCourse) and turns out this book is very helpful when I see the critical point I missed most of the time when I ask questions.
What would I like to know about HackMD
- What our hypothesis is
- What is the beta product we are trying to make
- Is the product built truly based on the hypothesis?
- How is the progress of validation process been
What I can do
- Rewatch all the past interview to make my own validation
- Make a survey to ask the HackMD team what they think to help the validation progress
- Ask g0v community users individualy if I can do the interview myself
- I think helping running the community will be the first priorty in this stage, and I am very willing to help
Immediate change considered needed
- Making breaking change announcement
- Posts on Blog (current)
- also at Primer FB Group
- let the new HackMD Discord Server has announcement chnnel with suscripton function to make further interaction
- Do the customer development interviews with
- CodiMD maintainers and end users
- Civic Tech and FLOSS Communities accross Asia
- which are exactly the userbase mostly
- Im suprised that Code for Korea and Code for Japan are mostly using google docs and HackMD as their main corss-editing platfroms
- Maybe 15~20 is enough in two weeks
- Community
- maybe we can reference from Heptabase or Arc (the Browser Company) to keep in touch with customers and audiences with updates
- TBH the must be some reason that some long-waited bugs is not fixed for quite a long time maybe we have to point these out
