Back to Blog

Webinar: Speed up problem and customer validation

Graeme McCubbin, July 2, 2015

Martyn Evans hosted the second in our SpeedAgile webinar series: Speed up problem and customer validation. In this session, Martyn explored how to unlock development by quickly and deeply understand:

1. The real problem that your digital product or service needs to solve
2. The exact customers who will pay for the solution

Listen to the audio of the session:


The session slides:

Webinar: Speed up problem and customer validation from Unboxed Consulting


Topics covered included:

  • Does the problem exist? Will our solution solve it? Will people pay for it?
  • Validating your personas
  • The interviewing process – how to get the most out of each round
  • Applying a scientific approach to interviewing and the Lean Startup approach
  • Structured personas and breaking these down
  • MVPs (Minimal Viable Products) and the different types
  • Paper prototyping

Other insights shared:

  • Interview people who give you the insights, the people who experience the problem that you think you’re going to solve
  • Identify your assumptions, go out and talk to people
  • Prepare for your interviews by knowing your goals ahead of time
  • Encourage the end user to talk by using open-ended questions
  • Measure the success of an interview by how much you’re listening and not talking – get the chance to hear what the end user has to say
  • The key thing about hypothesis: You need to know what you’re looking for, what result will make it valid or invalid?
  • Have minimum documentation – take the key pieces that people have strong opinions on, put these on paper, make any notes and share this with the team
  • Keep iterating, keep revisiting – this will form a deep understanding of your customer and what’s of most value to them
  • There is nothing that replaces hearing the problems you’re trying to solve than directly from the customer’s mouth


Join us for the final session:

We still have one more session in the SpeedAgile webinar series – get your place now.

If you have any questions on this topic, or any topic similar to this, tweet us with the hashtag #SpeedAgile at @Ubxd, or tweet Martyn directly at @martynrevans – we’d love to hear from you.