Leadership Skills: Validating, Start with a Minimum Viable Test

Validation Is Starting with the Minimum Viable Test

Not conducting an actual market test is high risk. Instead of making a million widgets and then trying to push them onto the market, define the minimum viable number to test to see if people will purchase, at what price they will purchase, and if they have a good experience with what they purchase.

Validating programs, products, speeches, and other ideas with a test market before creating that massive product launch is risk reduction.

I’m working with entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders launching enterprise entities. Many of them are at a higher level of risk because of the lack of validation. Making assumptions that others need your product or service without validation is not the best strategy.

Statistics show that half of the new nonprofits formed each year will close without reaching their vision. There are many reasons for this kind of failure. One is not doing the validation of the market and another is finding out if another organization is doing similar work or even the same work.

In the Lean Startup, Eric Ries defines the following steps for validation:

• ELIMINATE UNCERTAINTY – Check to see if the market will support your work before launching.
• WORK SMARTER, NOT HARDER – Create a plan and create a high-performance team.
• DEVELOP AN MVP – Create a minimum viable product or process to test the viability of it and to rehearse delivering it to the market.
• VALIDATED LEARNING – Validate what you have learned from the test and adjust accordingly.

We spend way too much time, energy and money on value creation when we have not tested whether people are going to want what we have to offer.

Leaders set up programs. To finish strong, it’s essential to set up a sound process from the beginning. That’s effective leadership.