Can you fail in next 15 minutes?

Earlier this week, I was conducing a Lean Startup workshop for NASSCOM Product Conclave. After explaining the concept and nuances behind Business Model Canvas, I asked the participants to take up a table topic and ‘build’ the canvas around it. Some of the folks were entrepreneurs and decided to take up their own venture, while some others wanted a build a fictitious product like some kind of a modular phone where except for the processor, you can basically replace any part over the lifetime of a phone.

After the teams were done, I asked them to share whatever they learnt — good or bad. The most interesting answer was one group of entrepreneurs when they told that their most important learning was that they were in the wrong business! Oops…! I almost felt guilty for being the medium to bring them in touch with reality, but I also felt happy for them that they could now pivot to other options, and explore another hypothesis. The fact that a mere fifteen investment of time just filling up business model canvas could be so powerful that it makes founders realize they are on the wrong track is simply awesome!

So, here’s a question: how soon can you figure out if you are on wrong track? This is not about rushing the feature delivery that an agile methodology could help you with, nor delivering higher value to the customer. All that is super critical, but only when you have kind of figured out what do the customers really want. But when that guidance is fuzzy or non-existent, and you are flying blind on a leap of faith assumption, you need some feedback if you are on the right track. If you are on wrong track, rushing the next feature out the door sooner is not going to help salvage business — other than sinking an already doomed product much sooner, which is not that bad either — but then it perhaps is far better to get that insight while you still have opportunity to change course.

Building an MVP is a great way to test those hypotheses and fail fast if you must but even more importantly, learn faster about what sticks and what doesn’t. When I coach teams on how to go about thinking an MVP, I remind that MVP is not about adding up features so that we ‘build’ an MVP. Rather, it is a reductionist approach — you start with a fully functional product in mind and start stipping features off it till you can’t take out any feature without making the product unviable anymore. What’s important is to understand why do you want an MVP? Or is it to confirm what you already know, or to test our some assumptions or risks that have a major bearing on how the customers are going to respond to your product or service? One major mistake I often see is people confuse their MVP with an MVP Product! Just like in a startup, your ‘product’ is the entire business model canvas nine boxes, even the MVP should consider all those nine boxes, and not just limit itself to the single box that says what is your product or solution.

Any while you are at it, why not fill up that canvas and even without spending a penny, fail in next 15 minutes so that you can set yourself to the next option…