Where's The Evidence? | Customers, Etc.
We think what we have to say matters, but does it matter to customers?
The capstone project for the Management of Technology specialization at Georgia Tech has one main objective: defend a business that’s never existed before. You’re inventing a start-up. At the end of the program, you’ll get up in front of your peers and a group of investors and present a case for why your business should (or in some cases, shouldn’t) exist.
It’s stressful and sometimes grueling. To simulate the final presentation (which was infamously referred to as the “Thunderdome”), we would have short group presentations throughout the summer and fall semesters where we would present our research, our business thesis, and fill out the business model canvas along the way. And we would get absolutely murdered.
“Where’s the evidence for that?”, Professor Keith McGreggor would ask, challenging text on a slide that had been placed there by myself or one of my fellow classmates in a desperate attempt to do the presentation the right way, even though we weren’t exactly sure what we were doing.
It was embarrassing to be called out and not have an answer. Or you’d have an answer, but it wasn’t seemingly what he wanted. But the truth is, it wasn’t about what he wanted. It was about what the customer wanted. And that evidence was missing.
Academic achievement
I’m proud of my academic work during my MBA at Georgia Tech. I studiously wrote papers to the best of my ability1 and always aimed for a 100 on my finance exams. I wanted to do business school right and so I paid close attention the syllabus for each class and gave each teacher what they said they wanted.
Part of what was so disorienting about the MoT capstone project, especially at the beginning, was that it wasn’t about being right. Much to our chagrin, my classmates and I struggled to figure out the right way to put the presentation together in the way the professor wanted. Couldn’t we just have an example so we can copy/paste the structure and match it to our particular business hypothesis? Show us what good looks like and we’ll do that.
But that wasn’t the point of the class. The point was to get out of the building and talk to customers. It didn’t matter what we said was true about our business model canvas. It didn’t matter what our professor said was true. What mattered was what customers said.
We eventually started to figure it out, which I talked about in Bottling Empathy:
What changed for my MBA capstone group was that we came together as a group to start focusing on our customers’ pain. It was in their stories and key moments from those conversations that got us to really understand their needs.
Where’s the evidence at your company?
I wonder if the way we approach academic performance bleeds over into how we view business performance. “That’s a very well-designed presentation”, we might say to one colleague, or “that’s a very thoughtful three-pager,” we might say to another. Let’s give them an A+. But when do we ask, “where’s the evidence?”
Yes, evidence can mean quantitative data, but it can also be customer stories. What customer said they wanted that? Who did you talk to that expressed a pain that this solution would solve? You said our target persona is a mid-thirty-something senior marketing manager at a tech start-up—where are the quotes from these marketing managers that validate the gain creators you’ve listed on that slide? (And just to satisfy our data fiends), that’s a good individual quote—is that representative of the larger population or an isolated anecdote?
The more mature your company, the more you’re going to expect ample data and customer stories when making decisions. But when you’re just getting started, sometimes it’s as simple as asking: where’s the evidence?
Anecdotally, having a newsletter where I’ve forced myself to put my thoughts into writing that’s coherent enough to be shared with the public every week was incredible training for business school. I was never bothered by having to write a paper.