As a management consultant, regardless of how many awesome ideas you come up with, they are always put to user testing (either with your leads or directly with clients). I’m using the term MVP here to represent any idea that you may have come up with, that you’ve expressed through a presentation deck or wireframes or any form of deliverable.
Setting expectations as to what should be evaluated in your deliverable is critical as it directly impacts your reputation and people’s judgement about your capabilities. It is also important because with your context setting, the evaluator will not waste time evaluating something you’ve planned doing at the next iteration already.
So how can you generally get started?
Is your MVP customer centric, yet answering the business problem at hand?
The easiest way to think about evaluating the deliverable is whether it addresses the problem statements brought forward by the stakeholders. Most of the times, the business problems put forth by stakeholders are focused at solving their customer problems. However in some cases, stakeholders and the project team tend to drift away from the ‘user’ as they focus all efforts on just finishing up product features. It is essential that you adopt the customer centric mindset, whilst addressing the business problem at hand.
Articulating the ‘call to action’ clearly
Think about your deliverable — does your presentation deck call for clients to act on something? wireframes prompt users to do ‘something’ on the app? excel sheet showing data points indicate your lead to decide something? Articulating these ‘actions’ clearly also shows that you know what you are doing.
Addressing the risks and threats
Have you already researched about the risks involved around a solution being proposed? What are some of the threats to implementing this solution? Asking these questions to facilitate the evaluation conversation also forces the reviewer to foolproof the solution.
Do not ask them if they like it
Always ask open ended, specific questions as it makes it easier for you to facilitate the conversation. And observe the terms that they use to describe your MVP. These terms are your keywords to address in the next iteration. Asking “Do you like my idea?” means that you’re limiting their perspective. Sometimes they may like it but feel it’s not “ready” yet, which doesn’t fall under Yes or No category.
What if they like your work
Good news- if they indeed mention they like what you have delivered, never hesitate to ask them:
- What makes this MVP client ready?
- What about this MVP makes it useful to customers?
- What area can be progressed to land next iteration of the MVP?
If you’d like to learn about interviewing customers directly, and the preparations involved, check out this article by Atlassian.
If you’d like to simply learn more about the specific questions to ask customers, you can refer to this article.
