The Right It by Alberto Savoia, published by HarperOne in 2019, is a book about killing bad ideas early and cheaply. Savoia, a former engineering director at Google who has taught at Stanford, argues that the biggest risk for a new product is that nobody wants it, and he offers a set of quick tests he calls pretotyping to find out before you build.
What is The Right It about?
Savoia opens with what he calls the law of market failure: most new products fail in the market, even when teams execute them competently. The reason is that they built the wrong thing. He calls a product people want the Right It and one they do not want the Wrong It, and he argues that you cannot tell them apart by thinking, debating or asking friends. You need data from real behaviour, collected by you, for your idea.
The middle of the book gives a method. First you turn your belief into a precise market hypothesis: a share of a defined group will take a specific action. Then you shrink it to a version you can test in days, in one place, with a small group. Then you run a pretotype, a fake or simulated version of the product: a person secretly doing the work a machine would do, a non-working model you carry around to see whether you use it, a fake button that measures clicks for a feature that does not exist, or a sign-up page for a product not yet built.
The last part shows how to read results and decide. Savoia argues that only evidence involving a cost to the customer counts: money, time, effort or contact details. Compliments and survey answers count for nothing.
What are the main lessons for founders?
- Expect failure as the default. Assume your idea belongs to the large group that fails, and make it prove otherwise.
- Avoid the land of opinions. Opinions from investors, friends and experts feel like evidence but say nothing about what customers will do. Collect your own data.
- Make the hypothesis specific. “Young people want healthier snacks” is untestable. “At least 10% of students at one campus will pre-order a snack box this week” is a test.
- Pretotype before you prototype. A prototype asks whether you can build it. A pretotype asks whether anyone wants it, and it takes days instead of months.
- Demand skin in the game. A pre-payment, a deposit or a booked time slot is worth more than a hundred likes.
Who should read The Right It?
It suits founders with an idea they are excited about and no hard evidence yet, product managers inside companies, and anyone who has spent months building something nobody used. It is quick to read and works well as a team discussion book before a new project.
Skip it if you have already run demand tests with real money. Readers of The Lean Startup and Testing Business Ideas will recognise most of the methods under different names.
How do you put The Right It to work this week?
- Write your idea as one testable hypothesis: what percentage of which group will do what.
- Shrink it to a group you can reach in 7 days, such as one neighbourhood, one community or one mailing list.
- Build the cheapest pretotype that asks for real commitment, run it and compare the result with the number you wrote down.
The free Idea Validator on Fe/male Switch gives you a first read on the idea before you design the pretotype.
Where does The Right It fall short?
The book stretches a small number of ideas across many pages, and some reviewers found it thin for its length. Savoia invents a lot of playful names for familiar concepts, which some readers enjoy and others find distracting. The examples lean towards consumer products and simple tests, with little help for complex business sales, regulated products or ideas where a fake version is not ethical. Fake tests also raise trust issues if customers feel misled. The Mom Test complements it with the conversations that explain why a test failed.