Getting to Zero: Strategizing a Validation Process with Mobilise

October 17, 2014 Rosemary King

How do you get started? This was a question that was being asked on both sides of the table at Pivotal Labs London’s inaugural office hours. Our Associate Director Robbie Clutton, Associate Director of Design Martina Schell, and I sat down with an organization called Mobilise Public Ltd to help them hash out their product hypothesis and potential strategy for an MVP launch. Mobilise asked us how these sessions usually went, we replied that the session really shapes itself and asked them to start describing the problem they are trying to solve.

Mobilise is a public sector company that is in the process of transitioning from service delivery to product delivery. Mobilise has extensive experience working with public and community sector in underserved areas and a deep understanding of their various users’ needs and desires.This wealth of experience means that Mobilise has many ideas of what products could be useful. This shift in business model was instigated when Mobilise spotted an opportunity to capitalize on underutilized public spaces that could help raise engagement in local communities. So their question for us was how they should best get started.

Their hunch on how to best evolve their business is building a platform that breaks down the barriers to using community spaces, while simultaneously giving small entrepreneurs an opportunity to engage directly with their own communities. Our aim during the session was to understand what Mobilise’s product hypothesis is for this product. Once you have a clear hypothesis the path to validate that hypothesis emerges. All product hypotheses should ruthlessly eliminate as much complexity as possible and drive to the core idea.

Mobilise’s hypothesis boils down to a simple concept: If the community spaces in question were easy to access and easy to use, then people in the surrounding community would be eager to use them.

After discussing the hypothesis it was clear that Mobilise would be well served by leveraging their existing relationships with community organizations and groups in order to help define the MVP. We identified several opportunities for research and discovery that should help them understand how their core user groups were completing these activities now. These included shadowing and interviews with organizations that have successfully built active communities with minimal help from digital products. It is also crucial that Mobilise get an understanding of what other tools to do similar work, and where gaps exist and what folks would like to see automated vs. what they would want to continue to do themselves. Lots of companies view this type of intensive discovery work as overkill but with complex problems, unclear user needs, and premium development costs, making sure you validate your hypothesis with specific answers carries its weight in gold.

Sometimes the first step is discovering the first step.

About the Author

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