I love knowing exactly how the road ahead will unfold—a thing that’s happened maybe twice in my life (and that’s being generous).
Every client I’ve worked with has faced the same reality: you can’t see every twist in the road when you’re innovating.
That’s why I built IDEO’s Venture Design practice—to help companies learn and evolve fast through experimentation. Take Sensis, owners of the last profitable Yellow Pages in the world: They knew print was dying. We guided their shift to digital products for small businesses and trained their team to think like entrepreneurs.
I'm now offering this same approach to founders in any setting—no corporate backers needed!
Are you building (or thinking of building) something new? Wondering what the next step is? Perhaps it's this: I'm leading a session tomorrow where you walk away from your lunch (or breakfast) hour with an experiment to run this week.
Please share with any founder or budding founder friends. All are welcome!
Even if you're not founding a startup, you can leverage the same approach. My clients have used this technique for everything from testing product-market fit to to evolving culture in their workplaces to gaining confidence in their careers.
Try this:
One overlooked step in designing experiments is creating a clear container. Without it, you can’t isolate what worked, so even good data becomes useless.
A powerful way to do that is with a hypothesis, written as an if-then statement. Make it hyper-focused for speed. For example:
Too big: If we launch a product to help small food businesses engage more on social media, we'll be able to gauge profitability.
Why it's too big: Huge scope, contains a lot of assumptions. It’s tempting, but when the first version doesn't work (and it rarely does), you won't know why.
Just right: If we show up to a food conference and offer 90 second reels to small food businesses, we'll better understand what ROI (return-on-investment) they need to engage us.
Why it works: Focused on one action, doable in a day or two, and clear learning tied to input.
Want to try it yourself? Here's a hypothesis madlibs to fill out:
If I [specific action I can take this week], then I will [specific learning about customer behavior | employee engagement | a job I'm curious about | a problem I'm trying to solve].
And remember, if you're a founder or a future founder, tomorrow's workshop will help you carry this forward and build an experiment to gain momentum.
This is part of a series of experiences I'm running, so if you know you want more, check out Startup by Design: It begins in September.
