PM weekly: Pretotyping and Lean Startup — Isn’t it the Same Stuff?
If you ever asked yourself this question, you’re right, Pretotyping and Lean Startup have a lot in common. They were both born — at the same time and independent of each other — in Silicon Valley, around the same idea of iterative validation of an innovation against the market to guide the innovation’s development.
Several other similar approaches originated around the same time — some of them building on past research — like Rita Gunther-McGrath “Discovery Driven Growth” and John Mullins and Randy Komisar “Getting to Plan B,” each one with its own flavour and main focus.
Pretotyping and Lean Startup have so much in common, however differ in several respects:
Financial Resources vs. Innovation Pipeline
Lean Startup was born from and for startups, to increase the chances to get to product/market fit before depleting relatively scarce financial resources. It increases the efficiency in the innovation discovery process.
Pretotyping was born in a large company facing the issue of reducing failure rate among the many innovations in the pipeline, hence willing to improve the innovation pipeline efficiency. It creates leverage by multiplying the impact of the innovation team 10✕.
For an excellent perspective of efficiency vs. leverage check Henry Ward post:
Exclusive Focus on Market Validation
Pretotyping exclusive objective is to validate that a particular innovation is interesting for a market (it is “the right it”) and is not directly concerned with the development of the product itself.
Since the focus is exclusively on market interest and actual use, pre-totypes and pro-totypes are just a mean to experiment with.
Pre-totypes are artifacts to give customers the experience of the innovation. They are preferred to prototypes as long as it is easier (cheaper, faster) to recreate the experience of the innovation rather than to build the innovation itself.
Coping with Corporate Culture
Originating within a big company, Pretotyping has been conscious of the importance of corporate culture and corporate processes from the very beginning.
Pretotyping is an important cohesive force within companies doing innovation, since it represents an objective approach to decide whether to invest time and money on an innovation and how to spread resources across innovations.
Pretotyping is a process for innovators and top management to agree on the development of an innovation and get rid of subjective judgements.
After several experiences I did personally with large companies, I noticed some recurring positive effects of Pretotyping on people and processes:
- increased engagement of middle management in the innovation process
- enthusiastic employee response and development of a can-do attitude
- channelling of the innovative tension already existing among the employees
- realising that experimentation and failure are OK as part of the innovation process
- bridging middle management and top management perceptions of each other
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