New ideas abound. We all have them and play the 'What-if' game. Yet, we wonder: is that really viable? So we hesitate, second guess, procrastinate, and eventually move on. Wouldn't it be easier if could test our ideas to check viability. One day, a good friend, Jon, and I were discussing some new ideas. Our main concern was: how do we check these? So we tried some things and arrived at a pattern. We called it the Inception Journey.
Our Inception Journey pattern is not really new. We have seen elements of this pattern in other inception patterns. But we have not seen it presented as a simple step by step series of questions. Here it is.
Inception Journey
Clarify Idea - … Elevator Pitch or Pirate Metrics Canvas or something similar
MVPOC (Minimum Viable Proof Of Concept) - Tipping points to proceed
Outcomes:
O1: Viable idea to clients
O2: ~ 10x clients to creators
O3: Clients' validated potential engagement
Q: What is the minimum we can do to convince ourselves there is any clientele for our idea?
Q1: What is the problem we are trying to solve?
Q2: What is the 'new' idea we want to try?
Q3: Who is the targeted clientele?
Q4: How are we going to validate their potential engagement?
Q5: How are we going to validate our new idea?
Q6: What is that minimum experiment/activity to try?
Decide Next Steps - Proceed / Pivot / Punt
Retro - Collect feedback and learnings from MVPOC
Proceed - MVPOC was successful enough to go forward
Pivot - MVPOC indicated need for major changes to
Rerun MVPOC with changes
Punt - Go back to the start, find new idea and new MVPOC
Define Vision to Proceed - Vision Statement
From Vision start building Backlog in 'Tool'
Recruit & Charter an Agile Team to do the work
Inception Journey by Jon Jorgensen and Paul Pazderski is licensed under CC BY-SA 4
