Structuring your Idea Validation Team
The earliest SkilledUp Life is able to help you is at the idea stage. Just getting a nod from your friends and family is no longer enough.
Thanks to SkilledUp Life, you can easily assemble a team for validating your idea properly before diving head first into developing your product.
4 Stages of building your Idea Validation Team
Given this is the first stage of a life of a tech startup, it's fundamentally important that you lead the team instead of appointing a team leader. However, if time is of the essence and you are juggling many things that the life throws at you, you may recruit a team leader to build and manage the Idea Validation Team
Recruitment
Recruitment and Selection are vital to start building your product team.
Onboarding
Rapid and well prepared Onboarding and Training ensures quality outcomes.
Performance
Performance based on daily reporting culture ensures higher level of productivity.
Offboarding
Timely Offboarding and issuance of Testimonials makes everyone happy.
Team Leader
If you take a top down approach to designing your ideal Idea Validation Team, we recommend you start by recruiting a skilled volunteer to this role.
A Team Leader could help you by:
- Building your Ideal Validation Team and keeping everyone focus.
- Be the co-ordinator between you and the team members.
- Agree the validation timeline and tasks.
- Reporting on the progress of delivering the outcomes agreed.
- Train the team to understand the idea and the approaches that need to be taken to achieve the overall result.
Problem Analyst
Before you can design a solution, you need to understand the problem you plan to solve as deeply as you as part of your idea validation.
A Market Researcher functioning as a Problem Analyst can survey people and/or companies through online surveys, social media and forums.
During these conversations, the Problem Analyst should start to narrow down the target audience, the Ideal Customer Persona (ICP).
Research should lead to identifying how the ICP solves the problem today and any technology products used in the process, i.e. identify competitors.
Competitor Analyst
As the Problem Analyst identify Competitors, the Competitor Analyst should start to research to understand the competition in depth.
During the analysis of competitors, the functions and features provided by the competitors should be logged and segmented.
As the solution is conceptualised, it’s vital to understand how best to position your own future product in the competitive landscape and how you would eventually differentiate and create a competitive advantage.
Product Analyst
Whilst the Problem and Competitor Analysts are gathering data, the Product Analyst should start to conceptualise the product that will solve the problem by producing the Product Roadmap, initial mock ups and the top level specification.
Customer Development Analyst
Customer Development Analyst takes on the research being carried out by Problem, Competitor and Product Analysts and start to identify initial customer groups.
These customer groups are further segmented to identify those who are willing to collaborate closely and might even pre-paid before the product development starts.
To build your Idea Validation Team and execute above tasks well, systems, processes and tools are needed to be in place. If you are an Advanced Plan customer, please get in touch with us to learn more about these.
