Introduction:

1. Digital Product Management specialization comprising 5 courses is taught by Professor Alex Cowan , UVA Darden School of Business through Coursera

2. The five courses in this specialization are as follows:

  1. Digital Product Management: Modern Fundamentals
  2. Agile Meets Design Thinking
  3. Hypothesis-Driven Development
  4. Agile Analytics
  5. Managing an Agile Team

3. The notes below are based on my learnings in Course 3: Hypothesis-Driven Development

A. Week1: Hypotheses Testing:


i. Types of Hypothesis:

  1. Persona Hypothesis
  2. Problem/Job to de done (JTBD) Hypothesis
  3. Demand/Value Hypothesis
  4. Usability Hypothesis
  5. Functional Hypothesis // Part of Continuous Development (DevOps)

ii. Framework of Hypothesis Testing:

  1. What is it?
  2. How do you know if you need it?
  3. How do you test it in one week?
  4. How do you apply the results to making the product better?

iii. Design Sprints:

  1. Keep them collaborative, time bound, and output focussed.

iv. Time Boxing:

  1. Just enough time.
  2. Show and Tell.
  3. Dot Voting.

B. Week2: Deep dive into Demand Hypothesis

i. The Lean Startup Process: The continuous cycle of Build->Measure->Learn->Build->Measure->Learn

  1. Idea
  2. Hypothesis
  3. Experimental Design
  4. Experimentation
  5. Pivot or Persevere


ii. Customer Acquisition Storyboard: AIDAOR:

  1. Attention
  2. Interest
  3. Desire
  4. Action
  5. Onboarding
  6. Retention

iii. Three main engines of growth and retention:

  1. Paid
  2. Viral
  3. Sticky

iv. Interview with Tristan Kromer, Lean Startup Coach:

  1. Our minds are biased against testing our own hypothesis, especially for entrepreneurs who are looking to think big and change the world.
  2. Lean Startup: Learn to doubt yourself, you have to test and validate your assumptions and ideas.
  3. To think big and to simultaneously test all your ideas/assumptions involves a certain amount of cognitive dissonance.
  4. You have to do the process of testing with your whole team.
  5. The basic philosophy of a startup is that we are creating knowledge of a new business model.
  6. You have a goal and you are moving in a systematic fashion.
  7. You build a culture of experimentation.
  8. At large corporations, be careful while applying Lean. In Finance, Healthcare => failure may not be an option. For instance, there can not be something like minimum viable heart-transplant. Use tactics like off-brand testing. Ex. Sony launched an electronic ink watch on Kickstarter anonymously.

iv. Interview with David Bland, Founder of Precoil and longtime Agile & Lean Practitioner:

  1. Strong beliefs but held loosely is the personality that works best in Lean Startups/Agile. You have a vision, but you are ready to be influences by data: qualitative or quantitative.
  2. Cross-Functional team of designers, engineering, and product together is necessary. Further, the teams need to be dedicated and focussed on the product at hand.
  3. Leaders have to lead with questions, foster a culture of learning, and let bring the team bring in their passion, instead of Leader imposing and saying I know best.
  4. Daily Standups, culture of experimentation, pivot/persevere/shelve meetings in your agile cadences.
  5. Informative Teams: Visual Management, get out of the building, you need to be talking to the real customers
  6. Teams should have a healthy skepticism of what they are doing. Understanding and interacting with real customers is a hallmark of lean startup.
  7. All great teams today, understand the Why of the product.
  8. Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics: The AARRR Funnel: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referral. When you add a feature, introspect which part of the AARRR funnel it is going to impact and then measure that impact. Make product analytics fundamental to your decision making.
  9. As a team, not be afraid of removing features.
  10. When introducing lean-startup to your team, focus on something small that you can achieve with your team. This will help in internalizing the importance of Lean. Show results. Lead with the goal, instead of the process to ge the buy-in of people.
  11. Problem-solution fit to Product-market fit.
  12. We have to democratize innovation in the company. Let people self-select and not mandating.
  13. User Stories are the focal point of Agile, and Hypotheses are the focal point of Lean Startup. Have measurable Hypotheses at the Epic story levels. The returns from micro-hypothesis for smaller child stories diminish. So you don’t need hypotheses at all levels.
  14. Product Owner use Lean Canvas to articulate the strategy of the product/team.
  15. Scrum masters help facilitate the process.
  16. Sprint Demo: Share the data and discuss the results from features released in earlier sprints.
  17. I am seeing pairing of design and engineering, engineering and product in interesting ways.

v. Interview with Laura Klein, Author of UX for Lean Startups:

  1. Test your Problem, Solution, and Implementation Assumptions.
  2. Finding out the places you are wrong is a gift.
  3. Lean is a loop: So it is not only early-user research, but user research is an ongoing process.
  4. Let go long-term roadmaps because what you will be doing a year or two from now would depend on the outcomes of the experiments and learnings you gather along the way.
  5. We need to have good qualitative research to generate good hypothesis.
  6. Use quantitative data to assess if the metric you were looking to improve, actually improved.
  7. You have to constantly combine qualitative (Why - understanding the user) and the quantitative (What and How - the way user is interacting with your product)
  8. Always be looking at your data (quantitative) and always be looking at your users (qualitative)
  9. There is no excuse for internal IT projects failing. Because, every single user is right there in your company. You don’t even have to go out of your company. One of the reasons that they fail is because of - Let’s fix all at once - approach. You have to define your scope very sharply.
  10. Imbibe the “User-centric” design.

C. Week3: Deep dive into Usability Hypothesis

i. The Always Test:

  1. Always have clear user stories with testable rewards.
  2. Centerpiece of prototyping.
  3. Qualitative usability testing+Analytics based Quantitative Testing
  4. Isolate Motivation, and test usability

ii. Good Design:

  1. The loop of Validated Learning->Understanding->Focus->Consistency->Stay simple

iii. Terminology of Design:

  1. Signifier: What the user understands a feature/product does
  2. Affordance: What the feature/product actually does
  3. Constraint: Limiting the feature/product to be used in only certain ways as per the intended goal
  4. Feedback: The user should be able to understand what’s going and tie it back to the Signifier/Affordance
  5. Mapping: Users are able to bridge their understanding between Signifier and Affordance

iv. Donald Norman’s 7 Steps:

Goal->Plan->Specify->Perform->World->Perceive->Interpret->Compare->Goal

Goal ↓ Goal ← Goal ←
Plan ↓ Reflective Layer Compare ↑
Specify ↓ Behavioral Layer Interpret ↑
Perform ↓ Visceral Layer Perceive ↑
World → World → World ↑

v. Visual Design Program:

  1. Strategy
  2. Creation
  3. Application
  4. Stewardship

vi. Order of Testing:

  1. Exploratory
  2. Assessment
  3. Validation

D. Week4: Functional Hypothesis:

i. Continuous Delivery:

  1. Integrating Development, Testing & Operations (DevOps).
  2. Make fewer things better.

ii. Behavior Driven Development:

  1. Integrate tests driven by user behavior to test your code.
  2. Use Given, When, then pattern: Given[], when[], then[].
Testing Scale
Unit Small
Integration Medium
System Large