Testing Business Ideas – David Bland on The Product Experience
David Bland is the CEO and Founder of Precoil, an author, and a long-time practitioner of agile and lean startup. He joined us on the podcast to talk about how to create focus around what matters to your users by using different testing methodologies – a topic he and Alex Osterwalder cover in their book, Testing Business Ideas.
Quote of the Episode
If your leadership starts to think you're more excited about the process than making an impact, then they're not really going to be excited about supporting you…
So what my advice would be – is just find that thing that people are worried about: in your backlog, in your strategy, in your roadmap, and find the smallest test you can do to help generate some evidence around that thing.
Listen if you'd like to learn more about
- Experimentation
- Who should be involved and when to do it
- Testing business ideas
Links mentioned in this episode
- Follow David on Twitter and LinkedIn
- Precoil
- The Strategyzer Business Model Canvas
- Testing Business Ideas, by David Bland and Alex Osterwalder: US, UK, DE
Hosts
The Product Experience is hosted by Lily Smith and Randy Silver.
Lily enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. Lily has spent 13 years in the tech industry working mainly with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She has worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank in Bristol, the Product Managers' meetup with regular events and talks on Product now with 800+ members and growing. Now the Product Director at Symec, Lily also runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.
A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy has been working as an interactive producer and product manager across the US and UK for nearly 20 years. After launching Amazon’s music stores in the US and UK, Randy has worked with museums and arts groups, online education, media and entertainment, retail and financial services. He’s held Head of Product roles at HSBC and Sainsbury’s, where he also directed their 100+-person product community. Now a trainer, Discovery and Leadership consultant, he's spoken at Mind the Product Engage (Hamburg and Manchester), the Business of Software, Turing Festival, a number of ProductTanks (London, Zurich, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Oxford, and Brighton… so far!) and at conferences across the US and Europe.
Music
Our theme music is from Hamburg-based Pau, featuring ProductTank Hamburg’s own Arne Kittler on bass. Listen to more on their Facebook page
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About the author
The Product Experience
Join our podcast hosts Lily Smith and Randy Silver for in-depth conversations with some of the best product people around the world! Every week they chat with people in the know, covering the topics that matter to you - solving real problems, developing awesome products, building successful teams and developing careers. Find out more, subscribe, and access all episodes on The Product Experience homepage.
