Test Your Assumptions the Amazon Way
One of the most common reasons for project failure is not testing your assumptions prior to starting.
Prototyping is a great way of testing assumptions and there a multitude of tools and techniques for doing this. Amazon has a very interesting approach for testing ideas. Before releasing a product amazon makes its staff write a press release detailing how exactly the product solves a problem. Ian McCalister, a general manager at Amazon, notes
, “iterating on a press release is a lot quicker and less expensive than iterating on the product itself”. I think this process lends itself nicely to innovation in healthcare. This is an example of an outline of a press release (with an example related to one of our projects)
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Heading- Name the product in the way reader (ie your target customers) will understand
Ex- mobile application to summarize patient reported symptoms
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Sub-Heading- describe who the market for the product is and what benefit they get. One sentence only underneath the title.
Ex- Patients and Physicians
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Summary- Give a summary of the product and the benefit. Assume the reader will not read anything else so make this paragraph good.
Ex- The app will let patients summarize their symptoms so their physicians can
devise a bette plan of care specific to each patient
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Problem- Describe the problem your product solves
Ex- Currently the patients’ symptoms are recorded at a single clinical visit and it
does not represent a summary of symptoms over a period of time
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Solution- Describe how your product elegantly solves this problem
Ex- Our mobile app combined with wearable sensors allows us to measure
symptoms and their psycoholigcal and physiological correlates in an ecologically
valid way
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Quote from you- A quote from a spokesperson in your company
Ex- This represents a paradigm shift in the assessment of symptoms in patients
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How to get started
Ex- build a simple prototype to show that baseline symptom reporting is not a
reliable way to measure symptoms
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Customer quote- Provide a quote from a hypothetical customer that describes how they experienced the benefit
Ex- I was able to send the information on how the disease affects my life to my
doctor before the clinical visit, and as a result me and my physician were able to
spend the majority of our time discussing treatment options.
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Closing call to action- Wrap it up and give pointers where reader should go next
Ex- All patients should start using this app to summarize their symptoms before
their next visit to their doctor
Jeff Bezos also uses his version of Lindy Effect (future life expectancy of some non-perishable things like a technology or idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy) to come up with new business ideas
“ I very frequently get the question: “whats going to change in the next ten years?” ….I almost never get the question: “what’s not going to change in the next 10 years?” And I submit to you that the second question is actually the more important of the two, because you can build a bussiness strategy around things that are stable in time.
In healthcare we know that consumers will want to be happier, live longer and pay less for higher quality services. Now, that is a good place to start