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Design For Ecosystems:

Discovering Potential and Testing
Assumptions
How To Craft Ecosystem Discovery interviews — a Cheatsheet

Simone Cicero · Follow

Published in Stories of Platform Design · 9 min read · Nov 24, 2017

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Time for Interviews: Learn how to perform Ecosystem Discovery Interviews and validate your Ecosystem-Potential-
Platform fit

T hose that have been following our Platform Design Toolkit adventures
will know that, earlier in June, we introduced an extension of the
Toolkit aimed at helping adopters move from understanding the potential in
the ecosystem — figuring out the overall platform vision — to executing
interviews for Ecosystem Discovery, and running the first experiments to test
the Minimum Viable Platform for validation.

To do this we evolved the tradition of Lean Startup and Customer Development,

(validating product & service strategies, with someone making a product
and a customer consuming it as a solution to a problem) into the world of
collaborative value production and ecosystems.

Introducing Lean Ecosystem Development

As an extension of Platform Design Toolkit
stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com

In this new territory — the realm of platforms — you don’t simply provide a Top highlight

solution to a customer’s problem anymore, but a context of interaction to an

ecosystem, where producers and consumers can find each other and self-
organize in relationships, and create the best solutions, interacting directly.

Why to empower an Ecosystem to self-organize instead of

providing a one-size-fits-all solution
The advantages of creating a system that self-organizes, instead of providing
industrialized, and one-size-fits-all, solutions are twofold.

First, self-organizing systems are more efficient than industrial ones

(pipeline businesses) in allowing consumers find personalized solutions.

Let’s ask ourselves: would a hotel company be able to provide the deepness
of choice that you can find on Airbnb in terms of locations (one or more
apartments on every street), flavors and features (design furniture, family
friendly, with a garden, with a dryer, …)?
Is there any chance Apple would have had the capacity to build the millions
of different applications available on the app store, tightly tailored to the
expectations of small niches of customers?

Self-organizing systems allow consumers find

personalized solutions more efficiently

Furthermore, the more we understand that learning in complex systems

happens in interactions and relationships, the more we want to help entities
carry these conversations under our listening radar: for us — as markets, and
organizations shapers — is key to observe, and evolve our strategy to support
the birth of new needs and possibilities in the ecosystem.

As we explained already, the evolution of platforms is a co-creation

between the creators and the ecosystem.

Design For Ecosystems: Continuous Co-Creation

Platforms narratives: a mix of Owners Vision & Participants
Interactions
stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com

The evolution of Airbnb towards experience travel, from just renting a room,
was definitely the result of listening how world travelers were
complementing their stays with premium experience content, often
provided by hosts or hosts’ contacts.

To clarify a bit these points, here’s an already released table recap of the
differences between the industrial organization and the platform
organization: this will hopefully help readers recall why it’s important to go
beyond the customer narrative, when approaching an opportunity to shape
a market with platform thinking.

Differences between Platform (post-industrial) and Industrial Organization

In the rest of this post we’re going to share our suggestions on how to help
adopters move along the first steps of the investigative process following (or
going in parallel with) envisioning: executing what we call the Ecosystem
Discovery interviews, to gain insights on the likeliness of your platform
strategy.

So what to discover with… Lean Ecosystem Discovery

interviews?
Those familiar with lean customer development know that one normally goes
through a first round of interviews, in the early phase of the product
development process, to essentially explore the customer-problem-solution
fit.

Normally these interviews go through two stages:

1. first stage is aimed at discovering that a customer exists and that she’s
already trying to solve a problem, by spending money and investing
energy. These customers are normally called earlyvangelists;

2. second stage is all about validating that our idea of product can help
customers solve the problem better than the solution they’re trying
to use (alternatives).

If that proves true through interviews, we’ve found a preliminary customer-

problem-solution fit, and we normally progress to validate riskiest
assumptions through an MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

But…what’s different in platform strategies?

Platform strategies are a bit more complex than product strategies as they
have the multi-sided nature of complex systems. Due to the fact that you’re
bootstrapping and validating a relational system focused on interactions and
transactions (that’s why we increasingly find ourselves referring to platform
design as…Interaction Centered Design), you need to discover two sides: not
only that the consumer is trying and ready to find solutions, but also that
the producers are trying to produce value, and therefore validate two (or,
likely, more) slightly different contexts.

It’s very important to state once again that the best platform strategies are
targeted to influence (and shape) existing ecosystem’s behaviors. The
optimal context for a platform strategy is indeed a context where:

there’s a bad and fragmented user-experience on the consumer side

of a market (or organization);

there are strong performance pressures existing on the value

producers (or potential producer);

there are barriers to play on both sides: demand (e.g.: with high
price) and supply (e.g.: reduced possibilities to play as a producer,
new producers trying to play).

everybody is trying to achieve a more “niche” oriented experience,

having access to geographic (eg: my city), tribe (eg: design, hipster,
etc…), time (eg: after work), cultural niches (eg: a particular
language).

A Two-Step process
As anticipated, we are moving past the customer-problem-solution fit towards
what we call the ecosystem-potential-platform fit (see this post for more
context). To proceed towards the two-steps discovery phase you normally
need two things:

your assumptions regarding the context of the players on the

ecosystem, what are they trying to achieve (the Ecosystem —
Potential fit),

tour assumptions on how your platform experience idea is going to

attract them, by representing a better way for them to achieve what
they’re trying to achieve (the Potential-Platform fit).

It’s worth saying that when you proceed through interviews, it’s really
important to focus on the two phases in two separate moments of the
interview.

When referring to the existing tools in the toolkit, it’s important to clarify
that, in the first phase:

the Ecosystem map — and potentially all the work you’ll do before in
platform opportunity exploration — will help you identify all the
players and understand who you need to talk with (your Ecosystem);

the Entity Portrait will help you identify the participant’s context,
including the potential, the pressure and goals, and the gains
expected (the Potential to interact).

These two artifacts will be the basis for your first step of validation of the
Ecosystem-Potential fit.

In the second phase:

The Platform Experience Canvas and the Entity Portrait will help you
understand better how your platform idea is supposed to “resonate”
with the context (the Potential-Platform fit assumptions), and pull the
participants in.

The context of the peer consumer: focus on convenience

When you craft an interview to validate the peer consumer side of the
platform, you normally want to focus on what we call the convenience gain.
Normally, in ecosystems, the peer consumer plays mainly a consuming role,
and is therefore focused on the “solution” aspect. In the discovery interviews
for the consumers you want therefore to validate the fact that they’re already
trying to spend money (or value) on consuming and how much are they
spending on it.
Note that — as you are trying to empower an existing ecosystem — you also
want to validate that they are already engaging in peer to peer transactions.

As an example, let’s say you’re trying to create a platform strategy to

empower the market related with kits for sewing kid’s clothes (KSKC): this is
a really interesting market, (we’re going to publish a full case study soon),
let’s use it for now just to dig deeper on discovery related aspects.

A couple of Examples of Players in the KSKC market

What you want to validate in this case, on the consumer side, is that
individuals are already buying patterns and kits from other individuals (or
small business entities). This is what we normally call the “trust hypothesis”
and is normally a risky one: as consumers we’re used to buy from brands,
with a few key assurances (safety, liability, etc…), and is therefore always
important, in ecosystem discovery, to validate that buying from peers is an
option that the market is considering already.

The context of peer producers: focus on potential and pressures

On the side of the peer producer the picture gets a bit more complex: the
producer in your ecosystem is normally trying to express a potential (the
assets and capabilities she can leverage on) to achieve goals and respond to
pressures.

If we stick to the market of KSCK we may think of one of the producers as

the, so called, Work At Home Mums (WAHM).

The Ecosystem of KSKC and an Entity Portrait of a WAHM

Beyond the concept— somehow male chauvinist I have to admit, but forgive
me for the sake of understanding — a WAHM is normally a mother that
wants to stay home with her kids but wants to work, and express her
creativity.

In my experience of being a father of 2, I can tell that this is a wide segment.

I’ve been buying all sort of things from WAHMs: washable diapers, harem
pants, hats, soft books,…
Despite she didn’t sell any item, my wife as well has been playing a bit with
sewing for kids: we bought a sewing machine, she’s downloading (and
editing) patterns she can find on the internet, she’s creating new ones, she
made tons of amazing and useful things that — I bet — she could be able to
sell in a breeze, with a proper, and easy access to a platform-ecosystem
strategy.

The Lean Ecosystem Discovery Cheatsheet

At this point, let’s imagine that — beyond the context description you can
find about in the Ecosystem Map and Entity Portrait — you also have a
platform idea you want to test, either developed already thanks to our
methodology in a Platform Experience canvas (read this for context), or in
other ways: how should you approach the craft of a two-steps interview
script?

The file above (you can also download as a PDF) is meant to be a step by step
guide to help you craft interview scripts for Ecosystem Discovery.

You can use this simple cheatsheet, plus your map and entity portraits, to set
up interviews to validate if the market you’re thinking about shaping is ready
for a platform strategy and will be …attracted.

Don’t forget that the interviews need to go through two phases (highlighted
in the cheatsheet above): in case your Platform Experience idea is not ready
yet, you could also play with the first phase only, and use it to consolidate
your awareness of the ecosystems, and of the entities you’re targeting.

Stay tuned for further updates on this case study and don’t forget to let us
know how your interviews are going!

Go out of the building now!

[Read the other installments of the Design For Ecosystem series]

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Written by Simone Cicero Follow

5.9K Followers · Editor for Stories of Platform Design

Building the ecosystemic society. Creator of Platform Design Toolkit. www.boundaryless.io

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