Book Review: Methods To Avert Failure
A pretotype essentially leverages miniscule investments to conduct market experiments. Pretotypes utilise shells that pretend to be complete devices or services by taking appropriate inputs and providing realistic output. In his book, The Right It, the author Alberto Savoia makes a strong pitch for pretend prototypes or pretotypes.
As an example, Savoia provides the case where IBM utilised a hidden human typist to do the first voice typing experiment, while the users are led to believe that the computer is performing voice recognition. Savoia goal is to help “already successful” companies and entrepreneurs become even more successful. Savoia, who was Google’s first engineer and their current Innovation Agitator Emeritus, writes about several other examples like the wooden pretotype Palm Pilot, which the inventor Jeff Hawkins took around pretending to use it for various activities to validate the usefulness and the cultural acceptance of such a device.
A key element of Savoia’s approach is to ensure that the customers have real skin-in-the-game and are paying for the products and services as part of the pretotype market experiment. The book also provides tools to frame the market engagement hypothesis with subsequent detailing, tools to develop the pretotype for different scenarios, analysis methods to validate skin-in-the-game and ‘the right it’. Savoia debates the ethics of pretotyping as it involves, in many cases, presenting consumers with false information.
It is difficult, for the informed reader, not to compare ‘the right it’ to the Lean Start Up methods of Eric Ries and Design Thinking approaches popularised by Tim Brown. One could argue that the business model canvas of the lean startup and the visualisation emphasis of design thinking have elements that are not only common but are more mature than in ‘the right it’. Key differences would be the amount of investment required to build prototypes and minimally viable products vs. pretotyping.
Savoia talks about minor tweaks versus major pivots (pivot being the language of Lean Startup) in the journey towards ‘the right it’. Also, his emphasis on customer skin-in-the-game as the precondition for valid feedback is well made. The pretotyping variants provided in the book are comprehensive and cover various scenarios that could be faced by startups. The analysis methods for skin-in-the-game and ‘the right it’ are very minimal if Savoia intends to create a new development platform. He introduces terminology such as MEH (Market Engagement Hypothesis), XYZ Hypothesis (Quantified MEH), xyz Hypothesis (specific, testable XYZ), YODA (Your Own Data), and, of course, pretotype. The terminology is simple enough, should the ‘the right it’ methods be adopted. The flow from idea to ‘the right it’ is explained through many simple examples and definitely adds value to the startup community, particularly in the B2C space.
Savoia starts off his book talking about a particular case of a failure he encountered in the startup world after several successes. It would have been great to see more details of that particular example, with an analysis of how the methods he presents in ‘the right it’ would have averted failure.
Overall, the book is a good read filled with ideas for the startup entrepreneur or an intrapreneur.
