The Lean Entrepreneur

5 CORE LEAN ENTREPRENEUR

THE 3 ES: EMPATHY, EXPERIMENTS, EVIDENCE

The Value Stream Discovery tool provides a means of hypothesizing the activities a business must conduct in order to move customers through the seven states from Aware to Passionate. How we discover whether our assumptions are true; how we measure the customers’ behaviors; and how we decide whether to pivot our idea, keep on (persevere), or iterate (test again) are to use empathy, experiments, and evidence.

The quality of our hypotheses is directly proportional to how well we understand our customers. The experiments that measure behavior give us an indication of whether we are right or wrong or need more data. The evidence, experiment data, and insights from empathy accumulate until we are shown the direction to proceed, from assumption to assumption and from Value Stream Discovery state to state, throughout the business model.

EMPATHY

Is there any more divisive a topic in the entrepreneurial world than the proper role of the customer in innovative endeavors? Other than the (near) universal acceptance that customers should either pay for product or amass in such numbers that they can be otherwise monetized, advice on how customers should influence business decisions is all over the map.

Countless books, blogs, and bloviating business gurus repeat common customer clichés: the customer is king, be customer ...