“Click” (Book Review)
Do you ever wonder how to make sure that your product is differentiated enough? Thinking about what makes it unique or better than market alternatives? Then you should read “Click” by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky (who you might know from the highly successful “Sprint” book about the Design Sprint). Click introduces the “Foundation Sprint” — a structured approach designed to help you develop a founding hypothesis. The Foundation Sprint consists of two days: basics and differentiation on Day 1, and approach on Day 2.
Day 1 — Basics
You start the Foundation Sprint with the ‘basics’:
- Identifying who your customer is
- Identifying the problem you want to help them solve
- Identifying your team’s unique advantages
- Identifying your strongest competition
To help you work through these fundamental questions with your team, Knapp and Zeratsky introduce the “Note-and-Vote” technique. Instead of doing a big group brainstorm, people can use Note-and-Vote to find good ideas and make decisions throughout the Foundation Sprint. Here’s how it works:
- Question — Ask the team a question. For example: “Who are our customers?”
- Silent work — Give everyone about five minutes to think in silence and write as many answers as they can, each on a separate sticky note. Keep these proposals anonymous (don’t put your name on the sticky notes).
- Silent share — Put the sticky notes up where everyone can see. There may be duplicates — that’s fine.
To figure out what your differentiation is, you need to zoom in on how you can take advantage of your team’s advantages rather than just mimicking your competitor’s solutions. These advantages come in three flavours: capability, motivation and insight. Capability is what you can do that few can match. Motivation is the specific reason you’re going after this problem. Insight is a deep understanding of the problem and of customers.
Next, you need to “get real about the competition” and establish how you will differentiate from your most important competitors. Whether you’ve got lots of competitors or just a few, you should pay special attention to the strongest, toughest and biggest alternative. Knapp and Zeratsky describe this competitor as the eight-hundred-pound gorilla that wants to solve your customers’ problem. Once you’ve identified the gorilla, you can identify the top 3 alternatives.
You can then work out as a team the specific areas where your product will differentiate. Is it on speed? Quality? Ease of use? Reliability? The book argues that the most successful companies don’t just differentiate a little — they create radical separation from the competition. Knapp and Zeratsky helpfully list the most common differentiators:
Slow — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — –Fast
Difficult — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — Easy
Expensive — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — Free
Unfocused — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — Focused
Complicated — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — Simple
Siloed– — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — –Integrated
Manual– — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — –Automated
Not so smart — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — Smart
Whichever differentiators you pick, you can then turn these into practical principles to reinforce differentiation.
Day 2 — Approach
On the second day of the Foundation Sprint, you choose an approach to your project. By the end of the day you’ll have an approach and a backup plan. To get to this outcome, you’ll need options — starting with known options, ideas that you and your team already have.
You then look for alternative approaches in case your original ideas fail. The book suggests writing a one-page summary for each of your approaches. Each summary has the title of the approach, a one-sentence summary of why it’s a good idea (reference the customer problem you’re solving and your differentiation) and a quick doodle showing how it might look.
I like the concept of “magic lenses” — these are a visual representation of competing opinions. You can use a magic lens to plot and compare ideas against different perspectives. You could, for example, give everyone on your team different lenses to apply to potential solutions:
- Customer lens: a product visionary who imagines the dream solution for customers
- Pragmatic lens: a pragmatic engineer who wants to build the product ASAP
- Growth lens: a marketing wizard on a mission to make the business grow
- Money lens: a finance expert intent on maximising profit
The point that strategy is just a hypothesis really resonated with me. We need to run experiments, establish confidence and then build a product that clicks. On day 2 of the Foundation Sprint you come up with a foundation hypothesis, which you then need to prove:
If we help [customer]
solve [problem]
with [approach]
they will choose it over [competitors]
because our solution is [differentiation]
The Foundation Sprint concludes with this foundation hypothesis, which you can then test through small experiments (‘tiny loops’) before you build a solution. When Knapp and Zeratsky talk about tiny loops, they refer to running a series of Design Sprints. You can test multiple solutions at once before committing to a single solution.
Main learning point: “Click” offers a practical two-day framework for establishing your product’s foundation before you start building, forcing you to think deeply about differentiation and customer problems rather than jumping straight into solutions. Most importantly, it treats your strategy as a hypothesis that needs testing through small experiments rather than assumptions.
Related links for further learning:
