how do you move from an Idea to developing a product or a service ? what are the steps you need to go through. The template provides you with a step by step process

1. Step 1 : Start With Customer
• Clear and tangible picture for who is your customer
• Helps imagine how they will use the product
• Helps think through product options and make decisions that directly
serve the customer

2. Who Is Your Customer ?
a. Identify customer type
who would be the typical user of what you would be potentially
building as a product ?

3. Who is your customer
Identify Facts (20-30 years old, unmarried, Techie etc.)
• Write down 10 facts about this customer
• Use the thinking fast approach and write down what comes to your
mind first
• Review the list and split into 5 most relevant and 5 into less relevant
• Use the dump and sort approach

4. Who Is Your Customer
Identify Behaviors (verbs, actions)
1. What does the person do that suggests to you that they could be a
customer?
2. How are they solving the problem now ?
3. List out 10 behaviors (verbs)
4. Break down into most relevant and less relevant

5. Who Is Your Customer
Identify their Needs & Goals (wishes, wants, likes, hopes)
1. Use the behaviors and ask why and come up with needs and goals,
what will make them feel accomplished and satisfied what is their
aspiration, what is the change they need
2. List 10 and break up into most relevant and less relevant

6. Basic Persona
Name Of
Customer
Typical
Behaviors
Facts
(demographics
etc.)
Needs & Goals
3 checks
Could someone like this exist
Is this someone you know very well
?
(Not good)
Is this a likeable person ?

7. Check Riskiest Assumptions
We have a basic persona , we now need to check on our riskiest
assumptions ( remember deal killer risks in risk management ?)
Choose the 2 riskiest assumptions being made in terms of the Needs &
goals and in terms of the user
We will need to validate the assumptions whether they are true or not
Hence, we will now need to explore doing stakeholder analysis by
planning to meet and interview key possible stakeholders
Ideally 3 interviews with a focused approach towards ensuring that your
key assumptions get validated

8. Stakeholders Interview
Ensuring that the interviews to test your riskiest assumptions are planned to
ensure validation of your assumptions is a critical task
1. open ended interviewing techniques
2. Do not ask direct questions but use stories and encourage use of stories by
your stakeholders to have a free flowing discussion
3. Identify topics which would be key and identify atleast 10 topics which would
cover your riskiest assumptions
4. Work backwards from what would it take to your riskiest assumption validated
to build your topics list
Prepare a statement around why you need an interview

9. Identify Interview Locations
List 5 places where you can find your customer types

10. Key Topics List
Riskiest Assumptions :
Topics :

11. The Script
Script : Hello Sir/Madam : I am ……… and an
entrepreneur, I would like to understand my customer
better and I believe that you are the type whom I should
talk to … would you be able to spare 10 minutes for me
?
Can you share your perspective on :
Can you tell me the last time you used :
What do you think about ….. ?

12. Why Conduct Interview
Provide validated persona
Collating raw information for analysis
Actionable learning

13. The Personas

14. i-calQ | Leanovator Accelerator

15. i-calQ | Leanovator Accelerator

16. i-calQ | Leanovator Accelerator

17. i-calQ | Leanovator Accelerator

18. Post Interviews
• Do a post mortem after the interviews
• Extract valuable facts, behaviors and needs and
goals
• Distill to persona and update the persona
• Look at all the additional information you have and
look for common patterns , if there are common
patterns emerging around use or needs which is
not in your persona, update it

19. Update Persona

20. Needs From Interview – Product
Features
• List top 5 needs

22. The Value Proposition
• Helps prioritize features based on validated customer needs
• Increases confidence on how customer would use our product to
solve real world problems
• Enables to focus on MVP

23. The Visual Map
i-calQ | Leanovator Accelerator

24. Product Feature Priority
• Use the validated persona and the value proposition to study and identify key
features which the product would need to have
• List 10 features you would need to deliver on the value proposition
• Sort them according to Important / Not Important/ Hard to do / Easy to do
• Focus only on the important features
• Stack - rank important and hard to do list
• Focus on delivering the easy and the top of the important and hard to do list
• Doublecheck that list with your persona and the value proposition
• Is this the smallest thing which can be done in 2-4 weeks ?
• Use the 2x2 matrix and rank/sort if needed again

25. Prioritized List
• Feature List

26. Metrics ?
• Direct insight into how customers are using our product
• Increases confidence when making product decisions
• Helps stay focused on reality

27. Type Of Metrics
Note down 10 ideas on how to measure 2 aspects : are customers using
your product ; are customers experiencing its value
Focus on the near term
Cluster the metrics around the following 6 buckets :
How will customers find your product and use it ?
Finding out if your customers are using it ?
Finding out if your customers are getting some value out of it ?
Finding out if your customers are using it again
Finding out if your customers are telling others about it
Percentages are more actionable than raw numbers and keeping a metric
which is numerical, has a time basis and has a unit of measure helps.

28. Metrics Dashboard

29. Model Building
• BuilD base business model
• Evaluated against what we can do and what we
cant and time it would take and monies
• Check if we have the skills in house
• Check if market is large
• Check funds needed