Tell me about your vision.
Well, at present, my vision is I'm pretty happy with it.
I'm pretty happy doing what I'm doing,
but I am in the midst of a second career.
As a faculty at UVA Darden,
I wrote a book while I was running my last company.
My vision at that point was very directional.
I think I was just curious about how I could help with practice.
I wrote the book, I realized,
I don't know if anybody is actually doing any of these things.
I started doing talks,
and then I realized I still didn't know if it was really helping anybody or not.
That's how I ended up in teaching at UVA.
Well, in general, yes,
it's not entirely proprietary.
It's like agile or product management or something.
It is a general notion,
but if you Google it, it'll probably come up with some of my stuff.
That is my main shtick.
I would say that in terms of vision,
it was certainly a matter of going at that vision,
but I arrived at a hypothesis-driven development
by the same way that what it proposes.
I kept working on how to
present the material in a way that was actionable to practitioners,
and not just intellectually.
I don't think anything I teach is particularly hard to understand,
but like most business things,
it's hard to really make the time and have the habits to practice those things.
What I noticed was that the element of testability of like,
you're going to do this and then here's what you
should do to see whether it actually worked or it didn't.
When you start doing it,
you should be ready for the idea that it might not work.
Because that's what I learned in my own career was,
I would never make any claim about the startups that I've started myself,
or that I've invested in,
that I somehow knew what would happen.
But what I would say is we were very tenacious and we were ready to be wrong,
was the other key thing.
Just blind tenacity,
it can get you nowhere except just exhausted.
We were ready to be wrong, change course,
and that's really how I arrived at hypothesis-driven development.
I realized that that was actually the step.
Wait a second, you said practitioners.
You were chiropractors, aren't you?
No, just practitioners of product management.
Yeah. I could use a chiropractor.
My back is killing me.
These are mostly people that are working on
digital products in some capacity, founders,
or in the white-collar work world today, just about everybody.
So they're generally doing-
So practitioners in general, people who are practicing the art of something.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah. I was like, hey, personify your-
You don't have a past working with practitioners like chiropractors, do you?
No. I heard myself surfing once,
and I went through a practitioner and he fixed me up pretty well, I have to say.
My dad is even older than I am and I'm pretty ancient and he's an MD.
He's pretty suspicious about chiropractors, but I-
The reason why I'm asking is you look a little bit like
an Alex that I met several years ago
working with a company called Blueprint to Practice Automation.
So now I'm realizing, okay,
maybe I do have two different Alex's here,
but you also have similar mannerisms with how you present.
That's a good thing. So I'll bring you back on point with this.
So app-based, you mentioned in your form too,
that you're working on some systems to help app-based entrepreneurs or
business owners with driving their results forward.
Tell me about that. What does that look like?
Well, Jackson, most of the time it looks like a disaster and you've got to be ready for that.
Even companies that have very mature products that are operating at massive scale,
you just venture a wild guess.
Google introduces a new variation on a feature.
Guess what percentage of the time they're
successful relative to the prevailing alternative what they have today.
I would say 4 percent.
Yeah, that's right. It's about 5 percent.
Most people think it's much higher.
So if you think about that and you're starting from scratch,
you've got to be ready. Your job as a product manager,
a product person in digital particularly,
is not to be right all the time,
but it is to minimize waste.
Like a lot of things, business is pretty easy to understand,
but very hard to do.
Actually, one of my favorite vignettes about what does it mean to do
hypothesis-driven development is this idea of a job board for pets by my friend,
and sometimes collaborators.
What's a vignette?
Vignette just like a little story, an example basically.
The idea is, I come to you and I say,
Jackson, I have an idea.
There's lots of job boards for people to get a job,
but what about a job board for pets?
This idea is bananas.
Nobody's probably really going to want this.
A good question to ask relative to a practice like
hypothesis-driven development is how do we eliminate,
how do we give this idea a fair shake,
but eliminate it with a minimum of waste?
The most expensive way to test it is actually to build out the job board,
and treat it like we traditionally treat things in business,
make a plan, create the thing.
That's the most wasteful way you could possibly test it.
The least wasteful way would just be to go interview some pet owners,
and ask them non-leading questions like,
what are the top five things that are hard or annoying about having a pet?
You're never going to hear,
I wish it was more fully employed,
I wish it could earn its keep.
You can eliminate the idea very reasonably on that basis.
Then the next most wasteful way,
least in the middle,
but less wasteful than building the whole thing out,
but somewhat more wasteful than just going out and making sure you understand who the possible buyer.
I want to say real quick, these are huge points.
Mike, these are so important for your visionaries out there.
There's a huge difference between having a vision and having a pipe dream.
Most people have a pipe dream because they don't understand this type of infrastructure, I'll call it.
It's people like Alex who are able to help you then figure out
what you need to know in order to bring said vision to life.
That's a key factor here is visionaries,
it's one thing to envision it,
it's another then to strive to bring it to life.
It's important to find people who have this type of understanding.
One of the things that I love that you said was asking non-leading questions.
For those of you experts out there who are about to log off and say,
oh, this is about the basics,
the things that only beginners don't know,
no, all of you experts are screwing this up too.
Most people do not know the difference between a leading question and a non-leading question.
Let's break that down, Alex.
What is a non-leading question and how do we help visionaries and entrepreneurs
learn to ask them without thinking that they're,
hey, Alex, do you work with chiropractors?
There's a leading question for you.
How do you teach people to ask non-leading questions?
Well, mostly by practice,
but I think you've got to know who you're talking to,
and then you've got to fall in love with
the thing that your vision is going to do for your buyer,
user, whoever you're having a relationship with.
Rather than like I want them to buy into my pipe dream,
my particular take on this.
For example, a non-leading question for the pet owners,
the one I asked, what's it like having a pet?
What are the top five things you wish wrote?
A leading question is, hey,
I've been working so hard for the last month on this job board for pets,
and I'm super excited about it. What do you think?
Would you like to use a job board for your pet?
Now I don't want to hurt your feelings.
Right now, I don't want to make you feel bad,
so I'm going to change my answer to fit your narrative
because you're emotionally vulnerable and people don't like conflict.
It's a very, very good example.
Alex, if today we were to talk about one of your talent,
superpowers, gifts, or insights that can be of greatest use to the visionary listening in,
what would that topic be?
I would make sure that as you start your vision,
you're fundamentally interested in who you're doing this thing for
and what's on their A-list and what's going on with them.
I really think that as long as that's the thing that's your north star,
then you'll be fine.
You might have to change course,
your original view of what the right solution is for them might need to change,
but they're out there.
If this thing really exists and you know who these people are,
if you keep at it long enough,
you can produce something valuable as long as you're ready to be wrong,
as long as you're ready to adjust course based on what you learn from these people.
I absolutely love that.
I hope you come back to talk to us again in depth about these realities.
My friends, my favorite quote,
my favorite non-biblical quote is,
people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.
What Alex is talking about is one of the keys to learning how to care
until we are able to listen to people and understand what it is that they're going through,
what it is they're looking for.
Oftentimes, back to one of my other favorite quotes,
when you start selling a hammer,
everything starts to look like a nail.
There's too many of us business owners out there offering and providing nails as pillows,
or hammers as pillows and trying to get people to buy
things without taking the sacred responsibility,
or the opportunity to just listen to people and figure out what is it that they want,
what is it they need. Odds are what you're doing is some rendition of that,
but the feedback that you can get from the consumers can help you scale
and really build your solutions out for all those people who you are meant and designed to serve.
Alex, this is awesome.
If you want to, I'd love to have you back. Is that cool?
Thanks for having me. I'd love to come back.
Great. Awesome. We'll see you guys all in the next episode of Vision Pro's Live. Take care.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pro's Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
Thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.