Running Lean

Revisit your pricing Raising the price of your product is one of the most underutilized levers. If you double your pricing, you’ll only need half the number of customers.

not all products and customer relationships are conducive to preordering. In those cases, it’s perfectly okay to use an earlier ‘customer making’ step in your customer factory, like starting pilots or trials ,or collecting leads.”

“By applying systems thinking,” Mary explains. “Your business model is a system. And in any system, there is always a single constraint or weakest link holding back throughput. Trying to optimize all the steps is wasteful, as overall throughput will always be held back by the slowest step. If you want to increase throughput, you only need to fix th

This process of making customers can be further broken down into five macro steps that can be universally found in all types of business models: acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral (Figure 3-4). The customer factory is the second model we use in the Continuous Innovation Framework.

Defining a UVP forces you to answer the question: why is your product different and worth paying attention to?

Mindset #4 Right action, right time.

You’ll have to build a systematic process for turning these early adopters into happy customers. That starts with rolling out your MVP in waves or batches, setting expectations up front on success metrics, and establishing frequent check-ins.”

Share your customer progress roadmap with your customers Once you’ve designed your customer progress roadmap, share it with your customers. Being able to see a clear set of steps for achieving their desired outcomes boosts confidence and helps pull your customers up the hill.

“Not quite. A traction roadmap helps break your three-year goal into more intermediate milestones with specific traction goals at each stage, and a timeline. It addresses one of your questions on how you model the ramp. Once you see these milestones, you’ll be able to more clearly formulate a rollout plan.”

Taking the requisite time to deliberate and define your MSC is a critical first step. I wouldn’t advise skipping it. There is no right or wrong number for your MSC, but you should have a number.