Harry Potter owes its first publishing to an 8-year-old.

Nigel Newton, CEO of Bloomsbury Publishing, received the manuscript for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. He didn't read it himself.

Instead, he brought it home and gave it to his 8-year-old daughter, Alice.

She read the chapters Bloomsbury had at that point, up to Diagon Alley. Then came downstairs glowing.

"Dad, this is so much better than anything else."

(The story, as Newton told it to ABC in 2017)

Then she nagged him for months to see what happened next.

It seems so obvious to talk about it after the fact, but testing something out is the best way to gauge how it will land in the market. Picking a children's book? Give it to a child to read and see what they think.

JK Rowling's original pitch for Harry Potter was rejected 12 times.

Prototype and Test

Don't ask a customer what they think, but actually watch them use your product. This is amazingly easy to talk about, and amazingly hard to do. The arrogance that we know what is good or not good is a vice for all product makers.

Validate your ideas. Watch a customer use some simple version of them. This is one way a sprint brings tremendous insight and generates excitement to help you and your team continue forward.

In the past year, my partner and I have helped other companies sprint to validate many ideas, as well as used sprints to validate several of our own ideas. Check out our guide to pitching sprints to get better at convincing others you work with to use sprints.

When people ask me about sprints, I tell them the most important principle is having the humility to learn. That's why you should prototype and test. Watching 5 people use a prototype will teach you more in a few hours than months of building something will ever uncover. It just takes 5, a number that comes from Jakob Nielsen.

Conjecture happens when you say “I think this could work” or “That doesn’t sound like something young readers would like”. Assumptions about what could or might happen are easy to make and often wrong.

Actuals happen when you run an almost-real experiment, like giving the first 50 pages to a young reader. Then observe. Don’t just ask if someone liked it or if they’d pay money for it. Watch what happens.

How can you go from conjecture to actuals in your life?