Venture Design may refer to
- instances when a venture, a startup, is funded, launched, and uses lean startup methods without a clear idea about product market fit. In other words, someone has funded a venture, an investigation, into a problem space. Venture capitalists invest in early startups.
- a process, a research methodology, that follows the principles of lean Design
- an ideology; an epistemology.
Key Terms: customer discovery; design thinking; human-centric design; informal research method
Alexander Cowan visualizes Venture Design as a rhetorical, recursive process that consists of six major activities:
- Personas
Persona is a rhetorical construct.
In Custom Discovery, a persona is a characterization of a user who represents a class or type of user. For instance, when considering how to characterize how people adopt to technology, Everett Rogers (2003) theorized there were five major personas: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards. Presumably, personas represent a cohort of. user communities.
Personas are developed by interviewing customers. As you interview new people to test new ideas, you will most likely begin to see patterns in the data. These patterns are revealed as shared narratives, shared perspectives, about the problem space. By listening to customers, you can learn about what they need, what causes them sufficient pain to warrant purchasing some sort of solution. - A Problem Scenario & Alternatives
In rhetorical theory, the problem scenario is the rhetorical situation. It is the exigency for the innovation. In Alex Cowan’s Venture Design, customer discovery begins with the customer’s perspective of the problem. Here, customers are depicted as Personas. - Value Propositions & Assumptions
Define your business theses. Substantiate your claims: Provide evidence in support of prototypes. Complete your BMC. - Customer Discovery & Experiments
- User Stories & Prototypes. Engage in Customer Discovery to build things users need. Develop MVPS (minimum viable products) and prototypes.
- Product & Promotion
Resources
Wang, Y. (2019, December 12). Venture Design 101: A brief introduction to Venture Design. Medium. https://blog.orium.com/venture-design-101-2c9b1c729577 Cowan, A. (n.d.). Venture Design process. https://www.alexandercowan.com/venture-design/References