Value Creation - In a World with No Technology Or Data...

By Tristan Kromer · Aug 31, 2015

My good friend and longtime Lean Startup Circle organizer and volunteer Spike Morelli (who has great office hours) gave me a wonderful book and card for my birthday. In addition to a really nice note, he asked a question on the card related to value creation: In a world with no technology or data, what would better and worse look like? Insert answer here: It’s a simple question, once I decided that Spike isn’t actually geeky enough to make me translate the binary into a number into order to interpret it. I read it as:

In a world with no technology, what would “better” and “worse” look like?

Of course, I realized after a bit that he could have also meant “data” instead of “technology” but that doesn’t change my answer at all.

Same Ol’ Same Ol’

My answer is simple. The same. Better and worse would look identical with no technology. Here is better: family and friends That’s me and the love of my life (who also drew this) having a wonderful time being together. This is worse:

Technology is not a Goal

Stephen Colbert mocks the Vessyl If we, as product managers or even just as human beings, take technology as its own end we wind up with things like the Vessyl, whose ridiculousness is best pointed out by Stephen Colbert. Most of the great technology products that we use day to day don’t create brand new behaviors or experiences, they just enhance them. They make them simpler. We wrote SMSes before Twitter and postcards before that. We checked out our classmates on a real paper facebook before Facebook. We read newspapers and played 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall to entertain ourselves on trains before Clash of Clans. If the goal of our product is to make people push a button over and over, it’s just cruft.

Life without Data

Qualitative vs. Quantitative Without data, what would better and worse look like (value creation)? Again…the same. Life is quality, not quantity. However much we might measure time on page and bounce rate, the data is a proxy for the quality of enjoyment. The data by itself is nothing. Quantitative data does not trump qualitative and the false competition is silly. We need to love, fight, scream, and yelp. We need to experience. Just because we’ve tricked someone into click buy now doesn’t mean our product is awesome. There have always been con artists and digital con artists are no better. We have to build, not to build, but to build for something. To build for someone. Otherwise we’re not creating value. We’re just stealing attention.

Lessons Learned

Written by

Tristan Kromer

Tristan Kromer is an innovation coach and the founder of Kromatic. He helps enterprise companies build innovation ecosystems and works with startups and intrapreneurs worldwide to create better products for real people. Author, speaker, and passionate advocate for lean startup and innovation accounting methods.

𝕏 @TriKro LinkedIn Website

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AI can improve ideation, validation, and support decision-making in the future. However, current implementations of AI within innovation teams can cause laziness and mediocrity. We are at risk of outsourcing our key differentiators as humans: creativity and empathy. If we let our mental muscles atrophy, our team and our AI models will overlook unconventional strategies that drive disruptive innovation. We will efficiently reinforce the status quo and stifle bold, forward-thinking decisions. Innovators should look to the future and integrate AI into innovation processes as a partner, but not at the expense of building our own skills. We should try out synthetic personas, but only in conjunction with our own validation interviews. We must learn how to spot and compensate for AI biases just as we should our own. We are spending billions of dollars to train the latest AI models. How much are you spending on training your team? For now, innovators still have an edge - but only if they invest in themselves as equal partners.

Jan 14, 2025