“A drunk man will find his way home, but a drunk bird may get lost forever” – Shizuo Kakutani

Random Walks

A Random walk is a path which consists of a series of random steps on a mathematical space. This can be imagined on a gridded plane with vertex being possible destinations. An entity in a 1D gridded plane (Elevator), can move only in one dimension such as the Y-axis. The random walk requires that at each vertex, the entity makes a choice at random on which direction to go, similar to the actions of a drunk. An entity in a 2D gridded plane (Man), can move in 2 dimensions in both X and Y axis, and an entity in a 3D gridded plane (Bird) can move in 3 dimensions, X,Y, and Z.

Kakutani‘s quotes summarizes the complexity of walks as number of dimensions increase. If we consider home to be an arbitrary destination on the grid. A random walk in above 2 dimension has a chance to never arrive at home, but those in below 2 dimensions will always arrive at home.

Product Launch

Prior to product launch, I use three abstractions to determine if the product is ready to launch. I’ve structured these questions into a mental model called the 3Ps because the human brain loves alliteration.

• Problem: What does this product solve? Was this actually a problem or did people like the inefficiencies?
• Persona: Who actually suffered from the problem? How do they spend their time? How can you contact and reach them? How many users are there? Can they use the product you’re offering?
• Price: How much does the product cost? How much are you selling it for? Is the problem worth more or less? Does the user willing to pay to avoid this?

Before launching a product, it’s important to have answers to all of these questions or otherwise you would be building a product which is likely to fail.

Despite the fact that you have answers to the 3Ps, it’s important to understand that the world is too complex for simple models. The answers you have are likely wrong, and all of the frameworks and mental models can’t save you. Instead, it’s important to understand that your assumptions need to be validated using experimentation. You need to test your hypothesis to arrive at a determination if you’re actually correct or if the product is going to be a failure.

Businessmen are drunks

When I think of product launches, I often think of them as random walks to a destination of perfect product market fit. Each axis is one of the 3Ps, and the product is an entity moving along the axis trying to go home to product market fit. Unfortunately, the direction of the entity is controlled by PMs, and since the PMs don’t know where to go, it’s fundamentally at random.

If we’re able to determine where the optimal point is on one of the axis, we can start to move towards the direction with intention. This reduces a 3 dimensional random walk (Drunk Birds) to a 2 dimensional random walk (Drunk Men).

As I’ve launched products in the past, this is the lens I’ve used to evaluate the likely success. Phrasing your product launch as a random walk with 3P as axises allows to map the complex world and start to engineer a product with perfect product market fit.