a step by step guide to your first 🚫 AI mvp
I have a little trick I pull out when a client is having a hard time articulating their value props. I write what my best guess is, and, instead of asking what their value props are - I ask them to articulate what they are not.
It’s amazing how a group comes alive with a few lines of wrong copy in front of them. People get heated about what’s missing. They start making lists of non-negotiables. They debate every. little. word.
You can think of those little value props a little bit like an MVP - they aren’t where we’re going, but they’ve given our customers a sandbox to play in. To tell us what’s missing, what they love, what they hate - what they can’t live without.
All well and good, right — but how do we know where to start?
My favorite MVP starter formula is this:
Find a pain point you have experienced in trying to deliver a service for (insert audience you care about here). That’s X. That’s the starting place. Y is something you care about changing in the world.
step 1: find your X + Y.
This was exactly where Lauren Lotka of LOTKA&Co. was sitting when we started conversations about an MVP earlier this year.
📚The back story:
Lauren is an executive search consultant and cultural builder with decades of experience transforming teams at The North Face, Specialized, Reformation and Foxtrot. It’s not hard to spot Lauren’s Y: she cares deeply about helping companies center healthy, impactful culture at the center of the business (and, we centered her messaging strategy around this when we worked together in 2022).
One of Lauren’s greatest blockers in delivering insights around meaningful, healthy culture, and how to help her clients get there, is in her diagnostic work. In effect, she becomes a sleuth and a fixer and a therapist level listener all in one. She watches. She asks questions. She notes dynamics. And, she makes magic. Obviously, being this thorough takes bonkers amounts of time and energy.
Lauren wanted to know if we could help her make magic with less time - thereby being able to make even more of it. That’s step two.
step 2: align on a win-win KPI.
For Lauren, it was about saving time on inputs and analysis, while finding a way to more equitably elevate more voices inside the business into the c-suite.
So, we got to work.
First, we designed her an ecosystem of four cultural, company phases. Then, we assigned archetypes for each of these phases.
We designed her two type forms that intersect around the same sets of cultural phases and archetypes, showing us where companies have cultural gaps - and which talent is meant to fill them.
Then, we automated both those forms to go into an Airtable, through GTP, and into a google deck, so that we could quantitatively give cultures a placement, and, within them, begin showing where talent is being grouped - and where the white space is for new hires (and when I say we, I mean Ulu, our no-code super whiz of a friend who collaborates to build early ventures with us).
step 3: talk your way to your value prop.
While we were busy working on the backend, Lauren was out doing what she does best: meeting, literally, everyone. She shared different iterations of our value in conversations, in pitches, at networking events and with her clients. What she came away with was a solid vision for the value we needed to solve for, and how clients across at least 3 different use cases would put our product to use to do it.
step 4: find the gap between your value prop and your product.
Lauren’s clarity on the value prop, plus our automated process, got us to our first round of user tests with a clear, impact goal, a KPI we were looking to hit - and a value prop we knew we needed to deliver on. We had trusted friends go through our experience and then, in calls, talk us through what we needed to build to close the gap between what Lauren had sold them on - and what became increasingly clear we needed to deliver.
Wondering what’s next for LOTKA&Co.’s story? Reach out to join their beta, as we move forward to a new iteration of our product process, launching in September.