Let’s say you have an idea for a product or service and want to present it to investors or potential consumers. All they can provide you with is their opinions, which are subjective. For instance, they think it’s a bad idea (when it really isn’t), or they think it’s a splendid idea (but it turns out not to be so!). In both cases, you end up with a bad end result (missed opportunity or lost effort).
The majority of new products or services are fiascos – i.e. only a small percentage succeed. There’s surely a need for a way to quickly evaluate ideas before settling on one that actually works, right?
“MAKE SURE YOU ARE BUILDING THE RIGHT IT BEFORE YOU BUILD IT RIGHT“ is the mantra.
Knowledge sharing
Welcome to the world of Pretotyping. The term Pretotyping has been around for some years now, but I only recently read about it. When I did so, I found it interesting and therefore decided to present it to my fellow colleagues at Queue-it. Yesterday, I presented the term and we all had a group discussion afterwards.
At the discussion session, we talked about which of the pretotyping techniques we were already using and which ones could be interesting to use moving forward.
It was a nice discussion that also featured examples of Queue-it feature launches that failed because the demand wasn’t there. This is exactly where pretotyping has its strength, ensuring that these failed launches never happen.
Queue-it delivers B2B, so it’s very important that we have a close dialogue with customers and don’t end up in situations where we do not meet their expectations. For instance, techniques like The Fake Door is one of these were you must be careful not to misuse your customers’ trust.
However, I do believe that we can focus more on the techniques we haven’t tried yet and see if it would make sense to try them out.
I hope you enjoyed learning about this, or being reminded of it if you already knew about pretotyping.
Written by: Frederik Williams, Software Developer