The Exchanges

Q There's a lot of lyrics. I know some lyrics. Uh, and just to understand, is the next step the design sprint and that's where you actually start testing?

A Exactly. So we zoom out now, we see now they're going to head into a sequence of design sprints, running one after another. Each of those design sprints starts with the founding hypothesis. Then the team is going to say, okay, what are the biggest risks that, you know, that hypothesis not being true? What do we need to assess right now? Going to make a map of how customers discover the product, what that core experience looks like, and then figure out using that map, where's the Where's the key moment for assessing that risk? So for them, the biggest risk is do people even, will these artisans even want this thing? Are they actually going to want to have a community sharing sort of sales platform? And they decide the key moment for us to test that it's actually on the landing page. They figure we can prototype landing pages that describe the product and learn a lot for our first experiment, just, just with landing pages. They're going to sketch solutions. This will be familiar to anyone who's You know, heard about design sprints, I guess each person sketching their own proposal for how that key moment should work. Choose the strongest of those in this case, they choose, they're going to actually prototype three things. So they test three things head to head against each other, fake brands for each one. So they look like three different products. And then this is a really key pa…

AI assessment note: “Exactly. So we zoom out now, we see now they're going to head”

Q week, see where this goes. They're not gonna spend months exploring. We're not gonna like talk about it and just in theory, let's just try it. I think it's really powerful. And so for folks that may want to explore this until we do a follow-up episode, is it just by the book? Is there anything else you could point them to to think about this idea and implementing it?

A Yeah. Well, if you are thinking about, or in the very early stages of starting a company, a great thing to do is to get in touch with us, character.vc. And actually we're, um, just opening up applications to our labs program. So character.vc slash labs. Our labs program is a, an intensive program for startups, and we will run a sequence of sprints, including some New formats that are not in the book, but are excellent. And we've been, this will be our third time running through this. We found that it's especially, especially valuable for AI startups. So it just turns out that a lot of the complex issues you have to figure out with turning something that may not initially be trustworthy, may require a big behavior shift to customers who aren't used to working in this way. And sometimes artificial intelligence can Produce things that feel kind of alien to people. And so making this stuff actually useful more than just a chat bot with little stars. It's in the corner that says, Hey, would you like to ask the AI a question about this? But something that's really meaningful. Doing this kind of repeated, and we'd run a sequence of sprints, doing it again and again. You work with directly with John and I, that's, we find a really powerful way to get started. Anyway, that was a big advertisement for Character Labs, but, um, but yeah, in general, check out the book. Um, also would say i…

AI assessment note: “if you're not quite ready to dip your toe in the whole book, you can go to the sprintbook.com”

Q And you've just spent so many hours studying this, refining it, crafting it, and now you're just here to share all the answers, save us so much time. Just like the ROI on this is incredible for us. So I appreciate you guys doing this. Let's get into it. Let's talk about the foundation sprint. Uh, walk us through the process. How does it start? What are the steps?

A So specifically what we talk about with the foundation sprint is it's at the very beginning of your project. We recommend this kind of crazy idea that you clear your schedule schedule. You clear your calendar. So the core team, this is the co-founders. If it's a startup, if it's a product team inside a larger organization, it's the, you know, it's the whoever's in charge of product. It's whoever's in charge of engineering. It's whoever's in charge of design. It's whoever's in charge of marketing is the core leadership team. They're going to come together for It's going to be 10 hours roughly, give or take. And during those 10 hours, we're going to go through a sequence of activities, very highly scripted sequence of activities so that we can make all of the key decisions together and identify the basics of the project. What's, what's going to differentiate us in the marketplace and what's the best approach or implementation path. All of those together form a hypothesis. And then we recommend, so you finish. Now that's your foundation sprint. You've got your founding hypothesis. Once you've got that founding hypothesis, then you're going to go and do design sprints. And we recommend you clear the calendar for two to three weeks at least. So you have the chance to be wrong about your hypothesis and we're going to run experiments. And again, the design sprint, highly scripted cale…

AI assessment note: “during those 10 hours, we're going to go through a sequence of activities”

Q help you move from planning to execution in record time. To try it for yourself, go to Coda.io slash Lenny today and get six months free of the team plan for startups. That's C-O-D-A dot I-O slash Lenny to get started for free and get six months of the team plan. Coda.io slash Lenny. Anything else on differentiation before we move on to the third step of designing your approach?

A I think it's worth taking a look at what it looks like when you have a bunch of sort of these custom crafted differentiators, what that might look like, because in the case of Mellow, we've got, I don't know, there must be 25 here. And, you know, so they've written purposeful, magical, clear, personal, provides direction, flexible, human, creative, beautiful, all kind and on and on. What they're trying to get at and what we want every team to sort of think about here is what is a new version of reality, a new lens that you can offer to your customers on the world? Because a lot of times you're building a new product. You actually have to change the way people think about what's possible and what matters to them. Those classics are often already well-trodden ground where other people have differentiated. They've already thought about it, but these, these new particular things that you know are, are possible. With your technology that you know is possible with the customer problem, the things that you believe might matter. It's really interesting to try some very fine tuned list of slight, sometimes just a slight variation. We slightly change this wording or the way we describe what's great about what we do. And that is the thing we think is really going to stand out. And again, you can see, even on this list that they've custom written, when we see where they score it, They're n…

AI assessment note: “I think it's worth taking a look at what it looks like”

Q know all this stuff, so obvious, like, like, it's like, okay, I get it. I have an idea. I don't need to do this. Where do you find people most are often surprised by something that emerges out of this? Is like one of these buckets often, wow, we, this is often not what you expected, or is it generally a lot of surprises? What do you, what experience there?

A I think the moment where you immediately start to see value is when everyone on the team is writing down their answers to these questions, and then people put their heads up and look at what everyone else has written and they realize, oh, that's not what I would, that's not what I said, or I didn't think of that one, or, you know, gosh. The actual concrete reality of going through with the team And, and being very transparent and clear about how we're making decisions too, about each of these things. When that basic sheet comes together and you see the specifics, the specifics are surprising, but it's also familiar. We look at it and say, yeah, that looks, that all looks right, but I'm surprised by the specifics. They're not what I would have written if I had written it down. I might've gotten two of those things, two of the, you know, six items on there. And I think that's what's, that's what's most surprising. And I think it's also kind of a sense of relief that like, okay, well, that's very reassuring that we have, we have clarity about that and we've made it concrete.

AI assessment note: “the specifics are surprising, but it's also familiar”

Q Before we get into it, one last question is just like real talk. How, how is your guys' productivity? Like you wrote this book. It sounds amazing. There's 87, I think, pieces of advice. How is it going for you guys? I want to, as we go through, I want to hear like what you're actually using, but just broadly, like how's your productivity?

A At the, at the top of the interview, when you asked, what do people, what do most people get wrong about, you know, when they think about this productivity, time management, whatever. And I'll, I'll frame my answer in those terms. So most people, I think they, they try to get better and faster at doing like what's right in front of them. You know, we don't change the defaults in our environment so we can focus and spend time on these different, more important things. And if you think of That, that sort of, what do I want to do? What's my goal? What do I want to spend time on that John referred to as like Project A? Generally, the, the things we want to do, these Project A things, they're, they're big, they're not easy to start, they're slow to create dopamine hits, they're non-urgent, like boss is not asking for them if you have a boss, and generally the tasks and activities that stand in our way that keep us from doing Project A They're small, they're medium sized. It's obvious how to start them. They create dopamine right away. They're supposedly urgent. Email meetings, TikTok, Instagram news, what's on your OKRs, all these things are like, and I know what's on your OKRs may not sound like it's a peer of those others, but in a way, like it really can be. So these big things, they're like at odds with, with these, these little things that get in the way that the busy bandwagon…

AI assessment note: “And so for me right now, it's a constant battle”