We've talked about a systematic approach to innovation and taking your ideas on what propositions are invaluable to the user and on bundling those into testable assumptions. Now, the next step here is to set those up into experiments that you can run in around [INAUDIBLE] the very best experiments on motivation are generally things that can be run in 48 hours. That's the good news. This idea of experimenting may sound kind of formidable, sort of new. But I think that you'll find as we go through these ideas and we go through some examples, that they're pretty accessible to you. The concept that we'll sort of start with is this idea of an MVP, and this also comes from this body of work around lean start up, and if you pay any attention to Silicon Valley, either the real life or the dramatized versions of it on HBO, You have probably heard of this before, and so this stands for Minimum Viable Product. Now, what does that actually mean? What do these letters mean? Words are faulty instruments, and there are many misperceptions about what an MVP is. So, minimum means that it is the fastest, least expensive way to validate or invalidate an important assumption and as we'll see in a minute here, this may or may not mean that it's an actual working product. And viable just means that it will be able to deliver us a definitive result. And product, this is probably the trickiest part of the acronym here. Because this doesn't necessarily mean, quote unquote, real software. This could be an interactive prototype, or the kind of product proxies that we've been talking about. So, for instance, We talked about HVAC in a hurry, and the team there setting up a text message based service to help the technicians find out about the parts that they need. Well that's an NVP, even though they basically don't have to build any new software to do that. Going out with the technicians and kind of acting as their assistant to learn about what's valuable to them, what's important, what's hard and how those things work. That's also an MVP. So, it doesn't necessarily mean product in the terms that you would traditionally think about. Now, the key thing about the MVP and and what will really challenge your thinking about these more traditional, scale orientated methods, is that it's not an actual product. It is a learning vehicle. It's not part of your project plan in a sense of building up a big piece of software necessarily. And it's not a product development plan. Now it may intersect with your software development activities, but, and this is the really, really, conceptually, emotionally hard part you have to subordinate with the MVP the scaling mission or the output mission to the learning mission or the mission of learning about outcomes. And that's what's really different about an MVP versus a traditional product cycle. Is that it's main role is to learn what's going to be valuable to the user instead of just creating output that may or may not be valuable to them. There are these three major archetypes that we'll talk about over the balance of the module. Wizard of Oz is where we kind of basically make a demo or sort of a fake experience that the user can check out and then, we kind of watch what action they take, do they sign up for an update or do they hand us 20 bucks or we have to have some kind of evidence that they actually cared about it, that's proportional and appropriate to the setting. And we'll look at some examples. The concierge MVP is where we hand create the user experience. So the HVAC in a hurry Example that we've talked about of setting up a text message based service to help the technicians get parts, or just writing along with them and sort of acting as the human version of the software assistant that you think may be valuable to them. Also a concierge MVP. And then finally the sales MVP is a whole bunch that you can do where you effectively just trying to sell the customer this thing before you have it without misleading them and seeing if they you know sign a provisional order or even sign-up for e-mail update if you're advertising it online. So, these are the three main kind of archetypes or patterns Of MVP or experimentation vehicles that we'll talk about as we go through the material. Here's how it might fit in with HVAC in a Hurry. These are the same set of assumptions we reviewed earlier. This business of emailing, even though this is an internal initiative, this business of emailing the technicians and seeing if they care enough about this problem to sign up to use the tool or come to a online meeting about the difficulties they have around ordering parts. I would put that under this sales archetype pattern. And then both of these as I said, both of these other ideas, they would be concierge vehicles. Here are the set of assumptions we talked about for enable quiz, and how they might map back to these vehicles. I would say this thing of promoting a link through Google AdWords, Twitter, whatever. Bringing these HR managers, or whoever happens to click on them to a landing page and looking for 10% sign-up. That's sort of a sales MVP, where we're sort of of pre-selling and advertising, combined with the Wizard of OZ MVP because I'm assuming here that they're going to show them some kind of a demo, be it a video, or a set of screens, or examples. About what the product is. So this is sort of a composite MVP. And this idea of hand creating quizzes for specific open positions for the HR managers, seeing if they use them, seeing if it helps, that would be concierge. And going out and just trying to sell to some people which is a great way to do this if a sale is involved. That would be a sales MVP. There's no evidence that's ever as definitive as people handing you money at the level that you would need. I mean that's always a great, simple vehicle. Now, here we've gone through some ideas about test vehicles that you can use and ways that those might apply to the assumptions that we teased out for our two example companies.
