Criteria for getting into the Walk stage

• Problem, customers and stakeholders:* Good initial understanding of a sizable/large, important problem, mapping of customers and stakeholders, and their unmet needs
• Competition: Good initial understanding of existing models/competing solutions, why these solutions don’t address the problem well
• Solution: Have an initial hypothesis of a solution based on your work done so far
• Key assumptions & plan to validate: List the riskiest assumptions for your product and business, and identify how you plan to test those assumptions
• Evidence of customer demand: You have talked to customers, observed customers, or interacted with customers. Here’s our guide to customer discovery and how to run and learn from experiments. For example, you could:
  • Customer problem interviews: tell us why you talked to the people you did as well as what insights you gained
  • Observe customers: some teams have shadowed potential customers to assess their needs
  • Other interactions: writing a blog, creating a social media following, making a podcast
  • Tell us other ways you’ve interacted with customers to assess their needs
  • You should avoid:
    • Surveys: surveys are unlikely to tell you anything you don’t already know. You’re not looking to learn that 80% of people do X at this point.
    • General market sizing data: while sometimes helpful to include, knowing that X number of people get in car accidents per year does not make an argument around demand for your solution.

<aside> 👉 IMPORTANT: Effective customer discovery is key to developing ideas that people actually want. Please make sure that you've read our guide to learning about customers BEFORE you apply to the Innovation Pathway.

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