IV Summary
The Experimenter
Key Learnings and Insights
This concludes Part IV, in which you explored the Experimenter stance. In this part, you learned how great Experimenter Product Owners approach innovation, testing, and experimentation. You explored various approaches to inside-out innovation and to outside-in innovation and learned how each approach provides different results and insights. You also explored how business model innovation, doing market research, and learning from other organizations outside your industry may drive innovation for your product. You explored the truth curve, a model for helping you to select the right kinds of experiments, and you learned how to design them using Test Cards and Learning Cards. Finally, you explored different approaches to scaling and descaling winning products for future growth and how scaling is often incorrectly focused more on people and teams than on scaling the product. In order to create winning products in the marketplace, Product Owners and product managers need to take a curious, learning, and open-minded approach to product management. They need to use data, insights, testing, and experimentation to validate ideas and assumptions. In some cases, your gut-feel will do just fine. However, in most cases, experimentation and validation is the way to go if you want to maximize the value of your product in the marketplace.
Quick Quiz Review
If you took the Quick Quiz at the beginning of Part IV, compare your answers to those in the following table. Now that you have read about the Experimenter stance, would you change any of your answers? Do you agree with the following answers?
Statement | Agree | Disagree |
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New business models are always emerging as others fall out of fashion, never to be heard of again. |
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Experimentation is the only way to discover if your business model innovation is going to work. |
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Successful scaling of product development is achieved by applying a proven framework such as Nexus or LeSS. |
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A company is either innovative, or it isn’t. A Product Owner can use little to no influence to promote innovation. |
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Making decisions around bundling or unbundling products is the responsibility of a Product Owner. |
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Product management responsibilities and tasks should be performed solely by the Product Owner. |
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The team of Developers should include skills such as sales, marketing, business analysis, design, and product management if required for the product. |
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The main question to be answered when it comes to scaling is, How do we organize all our people into teams? |
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Want to Learn More?
In this part, you learned about the Experimenter stance. Various topics, tools, techniques, and concepts will help you to strengthen your Experimenter stance.
If you want to improve this stance, consider identifying a couple of experiments that you want to run. Use the truth curve model to select the right kind of experiments, and then design your experiments with a Test Card from Strategyzer or a Growth Experiment Canvas for example.
If you want to learn more about the Experimenter stance, consider reading Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries (First Crown, 2014), Business Model Navigator: 55+ Models That Will Revolutionise Your Business by Oliver Gassmann, Karolin Frankenberger, and Michaela Choudury (Pearson, 2020), and The Nexus Framework for Scaling Scrum: Continuously Delivering an Integrated Product with Multiple Scrum Teams by Kurt Bittner, Patricia Kong, and David West (Prentice Hall, 2018).
You could also explore the concepts of Lean UX, user research and testing, and user experience design in more detail. They offer excellent resources on different experiments to run.