Running Lean, 3rd Edition

Chapter 9. Design Your Solution to Cause a Switch

For people to hire your product, they have to fire something else.

Clayton Christensen

By the end of your problem discovery sprint(s), you should have identified one or more customer story clusters that represent one or more big enough customer problems worth solving. Given enough time, money, and effort, you can build almost anything today. The challenge, of course, is that you never have enough of any of those. Yet, you have to build something remarkable anyway—and quickly. Remember that speed of learning is the new unfair advantage. This is where your minimum viable problem (MVP) comes in.

The art of the MVP is racing to deliver the smallest solution that causes a switch.

While it’s normal to want to solve all the problems you’ve uncovered during problem discovery, doing that easily leads to scope creep. Don’t automatically assume that everything has to be included in your MVP. Instead, start with a clean slate and use the next two-week sprint to design a solution that causes a switch (Figure 9-1).

Figure 9-1. The solution design sprint

Steve Learns About the Concierge MVP

“I’ve mapped out the minimum feature set I think we’ll need for the home construction use case. It will be able to accept a 2D floor plan and render a fully immersive 3D model in less than five minutes. Architects can then specify materials which get ...