Curriculum and classroom activities
Here’s a classroom activity I’m itching to try:
Set the teams up to begin customer discovery. Once they’ve done 20 or more interviews, ask the teams to trade. The team exploring “an app to help cat owners find their runaway cats” can take on the customer discovery for the team working on “a home automation device to detect earthquakes”. The instructions can be as simple as “do customer discovery on a different startup,” or more complex: try to learn something that the other team does not already know.
The thinking behind this activity is to challenge students to identify the biases of the other students – and their own biases. Biases are common – everyone has them. Identifying the biases present in how questions are formed helps us to form better questions in customer discovery.