Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. This post is part of a series about making better product decisions.
At the World Domination Summit 2013, Jia Jiang gave an amazing talk about his experience following his dreams. When he was young, he saw Bill Gates speak, and he dreamed of starting a company someday. But like many of us, life intervened. Jia went to college, got a job, got married, had a kid, and suddenly found himself leading a life that didn’t involve following his dream.
Jia knew he would regret this. Even thought he and his wife had just had their first child, Jia wanted to quit his job and start his first company. Fortunately, his wife was supportive, but she set a boundary. She gave him six months to launch his first company. One of my favorite parts of Jia’s story is that four months in, he hit a pretty significant roadblock. He thought he was done. His wife said to him, “I didn’t give you four months, I gave you six months. Get back to work.” I like this woman.
I’m not doing Jia Jiang’s story justice. It really is an amazing tale of personal transformation and perseverance. I highly recommend that you watch him tell it. But the bits that I have shared here are enough to illustrate an important tool that we can use in our everyday lives as we pursue our ideas and build great products. When his wife gave him a timeline of six months, she set a tripwire: a future point in time where they could reconsider their decision.
In Decisive, the Heath brothers argue that tripwires signal when it’s time to reconsider a decision by jolting us out of our daily routines. Deadlines can make great tripwires. But they aren’t the only form.
You can also set tripwires by creating partitions or setting boundaries around a particular decision. For example, you might be willing to invest $100 in a new idea, but no more. Or you might be willing to have one cup of coffee in the morning, but no more. You probably already use partition tripwires in a number of areas of your life.
Tripwires are necessary because we tend to escalate our commitments to things. When you first start thinking about an idea, it may start as a fleeting thought. But as you start to think it through, you commit to it a little bit more. As you experiment and test it out, you commit even further. Your commitment level goes way up as you start to pursue it.
Your commitment level, however, is rarely a good indicator of whether or not an idea is worth pursing. This is where tripwires can help.
You can use tripwires throughout the lifecycle of new product development to avoid overcommitting to ideas that simply don’t work.
Whether you are considering a new feature, experimenting with a new user acquisition strategy, or considering a shift in your overall strategy, tripwires can ensure that you don’t commit too soon.
Start by asking yourself the following questions:
- Is there an appropriate amount of time I should invest before re-evaluating this situation? If yes, a deadline tripwire might be appropriate.
- Is there an appropriate amount of money I am willing to invest before re-evaluating this situation? If yes, set a budget restriction.
- Is there a number of actions or events that need to take place before you should reevaluate this decision? If yes, partition based on those actions or events.
Time and money tripwires are usually the easiest to understand. But that last one based on activities and events can be a bit harder to grok. So let’s look at an example.
Suppose you are launching a brand-new service and you want to evaluate conversion rates. You did a good job drawing a line in the sand when you started and said, you need at least 20% of your visitors to convert in order for your idea to be successful. But when do you evaluate the conversion rate? After 10 visitors, 100, 1000? This is your partition size. Ten users might be too small. Ten thousand might take too long. But you don’t want to endlessly hope that you’ll get to your desired conversion rate. Instead, set a tripwire—you’ll evaluate whether or not your conversion rate is good enough after the first 1,000 visitors.
How do you use tripwires to keep from overcommitting to your favorite ideas? Please share in the comments.
This post is part of a series about making better product decisions.
This is a great topic. I had committed myself a certain time duration in my mind when I ventured into startups. If by that time duration we are not able to reach the next phase either with product launch or do customer validation or start generating revenue, I’m out. Although tenacity and patience are required for an idea to refine and succeed, you cannot risk going down that path for too long without seeing a substantial positive development.
Hi Anil,
I absolutely agree. Persistence is critical, but you still need signposts along the way that indicate you are on the right path. And without tripwires it can be really easy to ignore sign posts telling you that you might be on the right path.
Thanks for taking the time to comment!
Teresa
Great underlying point that our decisions are often based on untested assumptions and end up being wrong. Lean startups use purposeful experiments to set boundaries for product decisions, to test assumptions, and to enable quick learning. The learning from these experiments can result in pivots in the business model or tactics. (The “learning” section of the lean startup conceptual model covers these concepts.)