Method category: Generative product research

How to Use This in GLIDR

Picnic in the Graveyard involves learning more about similar products that failed in the past and interviewing both users and, if possible, founders to learn what did and didn't work for them.

In GLIDR, Picnic in the Graveyard is a valuable product Research technique that will help you generate many ideas about potential wins and pitfalls in your own product. First, create Research and connect ideas about your product. Then, in the Run phase, add one piece of Evidence - Interview for each user or creator you speak to. You can use Tags to keep track of which product you are discussing, or if you are interviewing a lot of people, make separate Research for each product. Finally, in the Analyze phase, figure out which potential risks you want to avoid (features that failed for competitors in the past) or changes/additions you want to make. 

Learn more about each of those aspects of GLIDR:

Article excerpted from The Real Startup Book
​

This technique involves exploring "near miss" failures similar to your product idea, in order to generate ideas about what to test and how to build a business model that could work this time.

Sean Murphy described it best: "Do research on what’s been tried and failed. Many near misses have two out of three values in a feature set combination correct (some just have too many features and it’s less a matter of changing features than deleting a few). If you are going to introduce something that’s “been tried before” be clear in your own mind what’s different about it and why it will make a difference to your customer."

The goal of this technique is to identify a unique way to angle a product, so that you avoid a previously committed error. You will be introducing the idea at a later time, which will be to your benefit; however, it's likely that previous failures will have useful feedback for you.

With this technique, you are aiming to construct a fuller picture of what's been tried in the past, in order to identify potential landmines. This helps navigate a similar space, but with the benefit of the previous founders' experience. It may help generate ideas on the product side, e.g., in terms of feature set. It may also help generate ideas about targeting to a different market segment, or any of the 10 other pivots in Eric Reis' The Lean Startup.

This is a wonderful technique to generate a lot of ideas in an area you are already operating in. Particularly at the beginning of a startup journey, this technique can help zoom in on what to avoid and exactly what to test, to verify for yourself if a particular assumption is still true/false.

Overconfidence: could prevent you from using the technique

Dismissing it too quickly: On the other side, exploring the reasons why others failed can make you doubt an idea too much if you can't find a unique angle to test the idea.