Tim’s Perspective
The product is the means.
Customer value is the goal.
After 14 years of testing business ideas in the market, one observation in Niels Lunde’s new book felt remarkably familiar.
I recently read Niels Lunde’s new book, Think Like a CEO. His observation about companies confusing the means with the goal stayed with me. Organisations become deeply invested in what they build. Teams form, budgets are allocated and expectations grow. The further an initiative travels, the harder it becomes to question its original assumptions.
At some point, ‘What does the customer actually need?’ quietly becomes ‘How do we make our product succeed?’ One starts with the customer. The other starts with us.
01 / TIM’S PERSPECTIVE
Building it right is not the same as building the right thing
The issue is rarely that companies do not care about their customers. Customer focus is easily displaced by the momentum of products, projects and internal conviction. This is also where my own journey with pretotyping began.
Alberto Savoia developed pretotyping around a simple distinction: before investing heavily in building something right, gather evidence that you are building the right thing. A product can be beautifully designed and technically excellent, yet still fail because the market does not care enough.
Instead of debating internally for months, make the critical assumptions explicit, expose them to the market and observe what real people actually do. The objective is not certainty. It is better evidence before the commitment becomes large and expensive.
I trained personally with Alberto, and this thinking became the foundation for Pree.to. Initially, I saw pretotyping primarily as a method for testing business ideas. Fourteen years later, I see something larger. Used repeatedly, it can change how teams think and make decisions.
From Tim’s 2016 book. The orange 80% groups failed, disappointed and cancelled products. Source credited in the book: Nielsen.
TIM VANG / 2016
The thinking behind the practice.
In 2016, I published From Holy Grail to structured fail, with a foreword by Alberto Savoia. The book explored how pretotyping could help businesses test ideas, challenge assumptions and learn before committing significant resources.
Looking back, it also laid the groundwork for what I now call Failure Advantage: making it less expensive to discover what does not work, and using that learning to develop something stronger.
Today, my perspective extends beyond testing individual ideas to how repeated practice can shape the way teams work and make decisions.
02 / TIM’S PERSPECTIVE
Customer-centric. Market-led. Evidence-based.
Through our work with small companies and large organisations, I have come to see three connected behaviours that this practice can develop.
- Customer-centric.
- Start with the customer and the value to be created, not the product the organisation wants to build.
- Market-led.
- Give the market a voice while it can still influence the initiative. Customer behaviour informs the direction; it does not replace leadership judgement.
- Evidence-based.
- Make assumptions explicit and use observed behaviour to inform the next decision. Experience still matters, and uncertainty remains visible.
Teams develop these behaviours by applying them to real business initiatives. Customer focus tells us where to look. Market response brings the outside world into the process. Evidence helps us decide what to do next.
03 / TIM’S PERSPECTIVE
Act your way into a new way of thinking
There is a saying we have used for years at Pree.to: it is hard to think your way into a new way of acting. You have to act your way into a new way of thinking.
Take a real initiative. Identify what needs to be true for it to succeed. Test the critical assumptions with the market. Observe the response and use it to decide what happens next: invest, change, learn more or stop.
Repeating that practice, with leaders willing to act on the evidence, can help people ask different questions earlier and become less attached to a particular solution.
Being proven wrong also changes character. An assumption can fail without the initiative failing with it. Discovering that early may be exactly what helps the team strengthen the initiative. It is not the mistake itself that creates value, but what we learn and put into action.
04 / TIM’S PERSPECTIVE
From a method to a way of working
Start with the business initiatives your team is already working on.
At Pree.to, the team brings its business knowledge and the initiative. We bring market-validation expertise and AI-assisted execution. Together, we identify critical assumptions, expose them to real market behaviour and turn the response into evidence for the next decision. The customer retains ownership of that decision.
For the leader deciding where to invest, this means a clearer basis for the next commitment. For the team, it means learning what to strengthen or change. Repeated across initiatives, the practice can build habits and capabilities that support a customer-centric, market-led and evidence-based culture.
05 / TIM’S PERSPECTIVE
Customer value is still the goal
The product matters. Quality, technology and execution matter. But they remain the means. The goal is the value we create for the customer.
After 14 years of market testing, I find that encouraging. Customer centricity does not have to remain an ambition printed on a wall. It can become part of how the organisation works, one real initiative and one decision at a time.
Change the way you work, and let what you learn change the way you think.
TIM VANG / TALKS
Bring this perspective into your organisation
In my talks, I draw on 14 years of market-testing experience to show how leaders and teams can turn customer focus into everyday practice and use market evidence to guide decisions.
A talk can help you:
- Kick-start your work with Pree.to.
- Inspire new thinking and ways of working in your team.
- Challenge established thinking and start a conversation about cultural change at a company-wide event.
Where we have worked together, I connect the talk to your own initiatives, learning and decisions.
I also explore Failure Advantage. Every business gets things wrong. Testing assumptions early can make those discoveries less costly and reveal stronger propositions, different customers or better ways forward. Acting on that learning can strengthen the initiative, the team and the next idea.
Make being wrong less expensive. Make what you learn more valuable.
Opens an email to Pree.to about a talk with Tim.