I had a conversation the other day with a mentor where I was explaining the work I had been doing recently—hacking on this development kit—when he posed this fantastic question:
Are you trying to prove something to yourself, or are you trying to test a concept?
I thought I had set out on this dev kit work because I wanted to develop a concept that I could use for solution testing. And yet, his question made me realize that I had also been describing this work to people as a test to see if I still had the engineering chops to get this thing working myself.
In fact, when I go back to the business risks I identified -> that informed the lean sprint experiment I kicked off -> to get this dev kit working… my mentor’s intuition was spot on—I’m actually working on this dev kit to prove to myself that I can… or can’t… build some product concepts on my own. In other words, I’m not actually trying to build a testable product concept, I’m testing my own ability to develop a works-like product concept.
What a simple and enlightening realization, and also somewhat freeing in that my success or failure in this particular task simply informs my current capabilities -> which will inform what future experiments I might run towards proper solution testing and concept development—for which there are dozens of methods.
