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That Will Never Work may not be a book for designers at first glance. As I delved deeper into the journey that Marc Randolph went through to found Netflix, I realized that the book is actually full of amazing real-life examples of product thinking and idea testing. It’s a great read for not just aspiring entrepreneurs, but also product designers and managers.
Start with the Right Mindset: All Ideas Are Bad
This speaks to a lot of entrepreneurs or product designers.
As product people, too often we’re obsessed with our brilliant idea and dream about the success that it could bring. We jump straight into implementation and it turns out to be a failure: a product or service without much user engagement.
It shows that we are out of sync with reality. Psychologically, we weren’t willing to believe it could fail. Our ego got in the way.
Instead of thinking that our ideas are brilliant to begin with, Marc suggests that we assume all of our ideas are bad: we don’t know if an idea works or not until we collide it with reality. This also helps us avoid the pitfall of giving up the idea just because other people say it will never work.
This new mindset is so grounding. It is a much more practical approach to creating a new product/service.
Collide With Reality: Idea Testing
As Marc says in an interview, the ability to test ideas is what separates the real entrepreneurs from the dreamers. It's so aligned with one important aspect of lean UX — to build quick and rough prototypes and then test them out.
Before Netflix was born, when Marc had this idea of doing DVD rental by mail, it was 1997, and there wasn’t a single DVD available on the market, so Marc and Reed, who’s the current CEO of Netflix, tested the idea by mailing a CD from a post office instead.
