1. Discover details of your customers' unmet needs. You should develop a set of interview questions, meet with these suffering customers in the environment where they’re suffering, and listen to what they say when you ask them the questions.
2. Develop hypotheses. Using the observations of customer needs and your vision of the technology, you should make educated guesses about the most important product features likely to lead to wide customer adoption.
3. Build a prototype solution. The next step is to develop a quick and inexpensive prototype with those features. The first version is not likely to meet the customer’s unmet need but it should help you get a better understanding of what you need to do to close the gap between what the prototype can do, and what the ultimate product will need to be able to do in order to get the customer to buy it.
4. Test with customers. You must then give the prototype to customers and observe how they use it. You should keep track of how many customers actually use the product, and ask them what they like and don’t like about the product.
5. Analyze variance. You should compare the expected outcome with the observed results. This comparison will generate insights that shape your strategic positioning.
6. Pick strategy. Better-than-expected results are likely to confirm that you will gain market share if you turn the current version of the prototype into a product and market it aggressively.
