The Right It: test the idea before you build it
Alberto Savoia was an early engineering director at Google and later their "innovation agitator". In The Right It (2019) he wrote down what he taught there for years: most new ideas fail, and you should find out if yours is one of them before you build it, not after.
In the course I say this is lesson 6 in book form. And thats really what it is.
The Law of Failure
The book starts with a quite brutal observation. Most new products fail, even when they are executed well. Not because the team was bad, but because it was the wrong idea. Savoia calls the right idea "The Right It".
His main point: make sure you are building The Right It before you build it right. Most teams do it the other way around, they polish something for months that nobody wanted from the begining.
Pretotyping instead of prototyping
A prototype asks "can we build it?". A pretotype asks "should we build it at all?". You fake the product, or a part of it, and see if people actually use it or pay for it.
Savoia describes a whole set of techniques for this. A few of them:
- ▸Mechanical Turk, a human does secretly what the software would do later.
- ▸Fake Door, a button or a landing page for a product that does not exist yet. You count who clicks.
- ▸Pinocchio, a non-working model you use as if it was real, to see if you would actually use it.
- ▸One-Night Stand, you offer the service once, for a short time, before you invest in the real thing.
Your own data, not other peoples data
A big part of the book is about data. Market reports, studies, what worked for some other company, all of that is other peoples data. It tells you very little about your idea.
What counts is your own data. Real reactions from real people to your pretotype. And best is data where people have skin in the game, so they give you money, time or at least their email address, not just a "sounds nice".
The XYZ hypothesis
To make an idea testable, Savoia turns it into a sentence: "At least X% of Y will Z." For example: at least 10% of the club treasurers we reach will sign up for the payment reminder in the first week.
With that you have a clear number, a clear target group and a clear action. And after the test you can not tell yourself a nice story anymore, the number was reached or not.
How it connects to the course
Lesson 6 of the course is exactly this. Smoke test, prototype, concierge, and the motion-specific tests like the Reddit thread, the tiny Google Ads test or asking for a letter of intent. All of these are pretotypes. And the rule "test fast, kill fast, no drama" is pure Savoia.