What does success look like?

Preparing to test your Idea

In the last course you came up with an idea for how to solve a problem. In this course you’ll be testing and iterating your idea. This experimentation is the best way to test out and refine ideas before attempting to develop them at scale. In this way, you are able to prove both the technical and business model feasibility of your idea while minimizing resources and time (the most important resource).

Key Success Factors

To test your idea you need to determine what success looks like. Your measurement of success or key success factors allow you and others to see how well your idea may perform. Key success factors will depend on the challenge you’ve identified and the idea you have from the previous course. For instance a key success factor for an idea about how to get more people at GSU to recycle could be the total number of people who recycle or how often people recycle. Seeing an increase in these numbers after implementing the recycling idea would point to the idea being successful. If the numbers go down, stay the same, or maybe go up but only slightly then it’s probably a sign that you need to revisit your idea.

Example: How Netflix Determines Product Success

Activity: Think about what success looks like for your idea. Before you begin testing, answer the questions in the Pre-Test section of the workbook.

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