The Power of Pretotyping

What is pretotyping?

What is pretotyping?

Pretotyping is instrumental to Exponentially’s Rapid Experimentation Framework — it’s not just a method but a mindset shift. It requires you not only to get comfortable with failure but to celebrate it. In a society (or a workplace) that often demonises and shames us for failing, this can be a tough barrier to overcome both personally and within your team. But when done properly, pretotyping will always be successful — you might not always like what you find, but that’s precisely the point — it will deliver you real data that will prevent you from wasting time and resources.

Unlike prototyping, pretotyping helps you validate your idea and ensure it’s the “right it” before you invest and build. It is hypothesis-driven testing that helps us understand what customers actually want and helps us get real-world data to inform decisions.

Usually, innovation methodologies rely on customer surveys, interviews, and focus groups to try and figure out what customers want. But they don’t work. Why? Because the data they generate isn’t valid, and misguides our decision making.

The key to getting reliable customer data is figuring out what your customers do rather than what they say. The only thing a customer survey measures is their opinion. And that might be helpful if you need to know how to improve your customer service, but it’s useless in product validation and development. To create products and services that actually work, you need to get ideas in front of customers so that you (and they) can see whether or not they actually want them.

This is where pretotyping and rapid experimentation comes in. 

Why should you use Pretotyping?

When you pretotype an idea, you run a series of rapid experiments that get your product and service ideas into the market without building anything. You might run some ads, create a landing page, send an email campaign, or mock up a physical product — anything that gets the idea into the market and in front of real customers as quickly as possible, for as little money as possible, in order to measure what they do with the product, rather than what they think they’ll do. The data from these experiments help you iterate, gather more data, and run more experiments until you can validate the idea. 

With a good pretotype, your customers can’t lie to you because there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer — you are just seeing what they do with your idea. If they do what you want them to do (sign up for a service, interact with a product, or otherwise put

‘skin in the game’ to prove that they’re genuinely interested in the idea), then great — you have some data that validates your idea. Now, you can iterate. And if they don’t do what you want them to? No sweat. You’ve tested your idea, and it’s failed. Now, you can either try again in a different way to get more data or kill the idea and move on.

Once an idea is validated (or invalidated!) using pretotyping, you can make better decisions about product and service development, knowing that when it does go to market, it will be a success — after all, you have the data to prove it. 

Ultimately, pretotyping and rapid experimentation de-risk your innovation process by allowing you to discover which of your ideas will work — and which will fail — as early and quickly as possible.

Things to remember

1.

Opinions are worthless. Get data instead by running experiments that put your ideas in front of people to measure what they do (data) rather than what they say (opinion).

2.

Test and validate your ideas with real customers, in real situations, without actually building them yet (and save millions in the process).

3.

Fail fast, early and safely so that you don’t pour resources into building the wrong thing.

4.

Iterate and keep testing until you have gathered enough data from multiple experiments to say for certain that your idea will work.

Pretotyping in the real world: how does it work?

Pretotyping essentially follows the scientific method: you create a hypothesis, run an experiment, gather data, and then design another experiment to test a new hypothesis. With each iteration, you get smarter — you learn more about your customers by measuring what they do rather than what they say, and you’re able to build products and services that you know they want because the data says so. It’s a rigorous process that delivers reliable data and allows innovation teams (and the wider organisations) to make well-informed decisions. When people understand that, a lot of the fear, trepidation and confusion around the process fade away, and you’re in for a smoother ride.

Here’s a story of how one of our clients used pretotyping to stop building the wrong 'it' — saving months of development and half a million dollars in the process.

In 2016, chatbots were the latest thing that every business “needed”. 

We worked with a company that thought they needed a chatbot to connect with customers. They’d formed an opinion, but they needed data to back it up.

We were called in to help them figure out how to explore this new idea and see whether it would perform the way they expected. We weren’t there to validate their existing opinion (that a chatbot was the right call) — we were there to help them gather the data they needed to make an informed business decision.

There are two ways they could have validated the benefits of a chatbot:

Option 1

First, they could launch a business case for a budget of approximately 500k and get approval to put together a team. Next, they could design, build, and eventually (around six months or so later) have a product to take to market and see if anyone wanted to use it.

Option 2

Alternatively, they could pretotype it. In 3-4 days, mock up what they wanted to achieve. Next, form a hypothesis, leverage some existing tools to replicate the real thing and see with a small sample size (looking for signals, not statistical significance!) whether user behaviour (the data) matched their hypothesis.

We went with option two. And it’s a good thing we did.

In this case, leveraging Facebook chat, we faked a chatbot with a series of questions and answers, all “automated” by a real-life person, which we dubbed “The Joshbot”. After only eight minutes, our hypothesis failed — what we thought would happen didn’t happen. 

Fortunately, we got that data quickly and with minimal investment through pretotyping. Had we gone ahead and built the thing (and dropped a half million dollars in the process), we still would have had to test it in the real world, and what we built ultimately wouldn’t have done what we thought it would. That’s the power of pretotyping!

The Pretotyping Story: From 2009 to now

The concept of pretotyping was founded in 2009 by Google Innovation Agitator and Doctor of ‘Failosophy’, Alberto Savoia, through Google and Stanford University. After several years of refining pretotyping at Google, Alberto became actively involved with the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, teaming up with lecturers Richard Cox Braden and Tina Seelig. Over the next few years, Alberto and the team worked to perfect the techniques (and the pedagogy) of pretotyping with Stanford students and Silicon Valley companies.

Leslie Barry, founder and director of Exponentially, immediately saw the potential impact of pretotyping during one of many workshops with Alberto and became the #1 evangelist for pretotyping. Convinced that pretotyping could transform companies into ‘Apex Innovators’, Leslie worked to prove pretotyping in the market. Working with Alberto, Leslie honed the tools and principles to maximise real-world impact, becoming a world-leading expert in pretotyping and rolling out the practice in organisations across the globe.

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