5 Takeaways from Praxis Academy
Learning to think Redemptively in Product Development
Last week, Leah and I had an incredible opportunity to attend Praxis Academy — a week-long program designed to support believers navigating various points of the entrepreneurial journey. That ranges from career inflection/decision points, to launching new ventures, to building ecosystems that support local entrepreneurs, and all from a Christian worldview. Praxis’ aim is to support founders, funders, and investors that are motivated by their faith to address “the major issues of our time”. They’re passionate about helping Christian founders and builders to see their work with a “redemptive” imagination.
The academy, and especially the Venture track, was an incredible balance of challenging biblical thinking, practical training in redemptive entrepreneurship, and in-depth conversations with mentors to provide direct, specific feedback and advice to help entrepreneurs grow.
I’ve still got a lot to learn in this journey, but here are 5 of my biggest takeaways from our time at Praxis and how they’re already shaping some of our work as product builders:
Focus on answering questions for your current phase/stage, not future ones.
Integrating Lean Startup & Human Centered Design Frameworks.
1. Product Development is Discipleship.
“Product development is active discipleship of your users and customers. It’s about helping build habits, practices, and mindsets for a group of people you don’t know. It’s loving your neighbor well.” — Jessica Munro
This was one of the most powerful statements of the week. Leah and I have both been in Christian product development for a few years now, and we’ve always believed this sentiment to be true but have never been able to explain it this clearly.
Product Development is all about facilitating behavior change for the user. Asana has key features to help you make sense of your to-do list, meaning you can do more things. Excel has key features to help you manage and work with lots of data so that you can get to better insights, faster. Even Substack (this writing platform) has key features to make the process of website management, styling, and distribution simpler so that I can focus on writing and publishing more and better content. Each of these features or capabilities empower the user to do something more. And that “doing something more/better/faster” is the behavior change products are generally after.
What’s amazing is, as redemptive entrepreneurs and product builders (believers in Jesus who have been marked and shaped by the gospel and who work as unto the Lord [Colossians 3:23-24]), we have an opportunity to aim for something far deeper than just behavior change — we can aim for heart change.
Through Jessica’s lens of product development, it becomes clear that as product builders, we are stewarding an interaction with people that changes them — ideally for the better, though that’s not always the case. This process of "helping users build habits, practices and mindsets” is an opportunity to influence them.
Will we steward these opportunities well, to serve our users with love and grace?
Or will we use it as a moment for manipulation and exploitation, even if it is unintentional, or as a means to a good end?
How might we look at the products we build as opportunities for blessing?
These are just a few of the questions that I’m continuing to process, especially in the products we’re building. Even as a digital missions product, we have to consider and attempt to root out any parts where we may be unintentionally exploiting in our activities or what we build. But if we steward this opportunity well, the products we build have an immense opportunity to serve many others with the love of Jesus — and especially to scale that love of Jesus towards others to an even larger community than a small team like ours could reach individually.
“Our invitation as redemptive entrepreneurs is to frame a new imagination for people! We want to change (renew) their minds to think and act in the way of the Kingdom.” — Ben Bohannon, Sseko Co-founder and Praxis Academy Venture Track leader.
The Takeaway:
How might we, with a redemptive imagination, build products that meet people’s needs/wants and point them towards the blessing of the way of Jesus?
2. Focus on answering questions for your current phase/stage, not future ones.
The journey of building a startup is FULL of questions. “What if we…”, “how could we…”, “should I…” — it seems like the questions are endless. We’ve experienced this extensively ourselves as we figure out how to build a unique digital missions organization. Honestly, its been downright exhausting — though we know it’s important.
But is it though? How do we know if the questions we’re asking are actually important to prioritize getting an answer to right now? Or can it wait? Trying to discern which questions to prioritize answering seem to be one of the most difficult parts of getting started with a startup.
One of the mentors (thank you Jessica Kim!) helped us recognize that while these questions are all important, not all of them are important for the current phase of your startup.
Jessica outlined 5 key phases she sees to the startup lifecycle:
Who — learn everything you can about who you’re serving
Assumptions — capture and validate all of your assumptions through testing
Engagement — bring your idea into the world and see if anyone will engage with it.
Business Model — find a business model for the product that is sustainable.
Scale — figure out how to scale the business model from a few people to thousands or more.
A startup’s goal at each stage is to ONLY focus on the questions/work that will get them to the next stage. According to Jessica, many founders never reach scale because they get distracted trying to answer questions that are better suited for future stages.
Take for example, “What should be on my website?” When is the right time to answer this question? Is it important to have a website on day 10 of your startup? Or can it wait until day 100?
We wrestled with this question ourselves for some time. Early on, we felt like it was important to be seen as a legitimate ministry, not just a side-project. But what can we say early on that will help us seem legitimate? And what does legitimacy look like? We collaborated with a few friends in our network to design what the v1 of Lightworks’ website would look & feel like. But at some point, we started to recognize that we really didn’t know who the website was for, other than to build our own self-confidence. So we decided to put building our website on pause, and our efforts on broader communication shifted to this substack instead.
After realizing we didn’t know who our website was for, we felt defeated. We had just spent all this time on something that honestly should have waited, but we didn’t realize that at the time. Thankfully, all the work we did is far from wasted and will accelerate our work when the time is right to build out our website. But it would have saved us a great deal of time and energy if we had learned this lesson sooner.
Jessica’s point is dead-on. Knowing where your startup is along the startup lifecycle is critical (regardless of the stage model you use, whether Jessica’s or the one in lesson-learned #4 below). It empowers you to focus your energies by helping you recognize the difference between a priority and a distraction. That way, you can have laser-focus on what will make actual demonstrable impact towards achieving your mission.
It feels like we’ve learned this lesson the hard way this past year, but we’ve never been able to articulate the idea so succinctly and with confidence. Working through the idea with Jessica was deeply clarifying for us, and it seems to be a lesson all new startup founders have to learn. I’m grateful for how the Lord used Jessica to help us gain a renewed focus on the things that will really drive our mission forward!
The Takeaway:
What questions are you trying to answer right now that you don’t actually need answers to yet?
What work do you need to focus on to take you to the next stage?
3. Get Proximal to the Problem.
Many founders really only have a vague idea of the problem they’re trying to solve when they get started. That’s okay, because part of the founder’s job is to move from general ideas to identifying what could actually address the problem well.
Think of it as starting out at a bird’s eye view. You’re 10,000 feet in the air, and everything below you looks really blurry. How do you get to clarity? At Praxis, they described this journey as moving from the bird’s-eye view to the worm’s eye view—a sharp, on-the-ground look into the lives of the people you’re serving and the problems they face.
In human centered design and design thinking, this is often described as “gathering empathy”. Empathy is a great word for this process — it requires gaining a deep understanding of the contexts, emotions, and state of mind of your target user. It’s recognizing that “I am not my customer”, and that I need to learn from them directly.
We had known prior to Praxis that hearing from potential users was critical to ensuring that we build the right thing for users.
But there’s a big difference between listening to your users and getting proximate to them.
This week left us deeply challenged in our understanding of what it means to “listen well” to our users. We’ve done user interviews. We’ve done trial-runs with real people and interviewed them for feedback. But the idea of “GET PROXIMAL” hit different this week.
Getting Proximal is about taking the “worm’s eye” view and walking side-by-side with your users, entering into someone else’s environment and context, to live with them for a while and to understand them deeply.
But that level of empathy also takes a lot of time and effort. Is it worth it? What would this level of investment give us that simpler methods couldn’t?
The reality is that the more time you spend in proximity with the people you serve, the clearer their problems will begin to emerge. And so will potential solutions.
Getting proximal is to leave your place of comfort, to “get out of the building”, and to walk with and understand your users. Then, our job as redemptive entrepreneurs is to sacrifice time, money, and energy on their behalf so that we can build something that can truly meet their needs.
That sounds a bit like what Jesus did for us, doesn’t it? [Philippians 2:5-11]
It’s the incredible opportunity, sacrifice, and blessing that redemptive entrepreneurship affords us — to get to know a community deeply, to love them deeply, to sacrifice for them willingly, so that we all can be blessed.
The Takeaway:
What does it look like for your team to not only “listen well” to your users, but to get close in proximity to them?
As you begin to build empathy through proximity, consider: what are you willing to sacrifice so that they and you are blessed?
4. Integrating Lean Startup & Human Centered Design Frameworks.
While this wasn’t a primary component of the curriculum at the event, several of our conversations with the mentors and other founders helped us make sense of a conversation we’ve been having for months. How do we reconcile and integrate the two similar-but-different product-building-worldviews of Human Centered Design (HCD - Leah’s background) and Lean Startup (Wes’ background)?
This question has been one of the most challenging on our journey to becoming co-founders, especially as we aim to build a product-based venture together. HCD generally focuses more on deeply understanding the user to determine what product to build, but it doesn’t have to lead to a highly scalable startup. Lean Startup generally focuses more on learning just enough about the user’s needs to determine what could create a highly scalable startup. The differences are subtle but important, and both leverage similar toolsets.
By the time we attended Praxis Academy, we had come to some level of a shared model that seemed to work okay. But our conversation with Jessica Kim on her “Phases and Stages” concept (see lesson-learned #2) gave us new language, framing, and ideas that helped us finally bring these two worldviews on product building into unison.
The “Value Proposition Design” book served as the basis for this integrated view. This has been the best resource we’ve found to date (and still is) to capture our shared thinking on how to build great products. The map above is one of my favorite images in the book as it gives a 10,000 foot view of the process it takes to build a business or nonprofit, or at least to move from the “discovery” stage of the startup to the “execution” phase.
The problem is, we often felt like there was something lacking in the framework, though we couldn’t exactly put our finger on it. Thankfully, Jessica’s framework helped clarify the map and fill in some of the gaps for us.
There’s a couple key changes we’d make to the lean startup process to make it far more compatible with the human centered design process:
Instead of starting by mapping your assumptions on the value proposition and business model canvases, start by getting proximal to your users (see lesson-learned #3). It’s a critical first step to gain context about potentially who your founder hunch could serve [shown as the “Who/Hunch” step in the map above]. Until you’ve at least gained some context for who it is that you aim to serve, the assumptions you map & test in the following steps could be the equivalent of throwing darts while blindfolded.
There is one step that is always understated but critical to the process of identifying what value proposition could meet the needs of your users: Empathy. Not only is it critical to get proximal to your users at the start of the venture building process, it’s also critical to continue hearing from those users through every phase of the journey. But when and how do you hear from your users? At each round of testing and learning from your users. In the map above, we added the HCD Empathy step to the build-measure-learn loop. Again, this idea isn’t foreign to Lean Startup, but we think it needs to be brought to the foreground of each product testing/building cycle.
If you’re a mission-driven company, the validation you need after problem-solution fit isn’t just a willingness to pay, you also have to validate if the impact you’re aiming for is being accomplished. We added this step as a 4th layer of the “validation funnel” in the map above.
These are seemingly small adjustments, but they unlocked a significant amount of clarity for us, as well as helped us recognize some pitfalls we’ve fallen in to the past year. We now recognize that though we got to the “interest validation” stage, we have a lot of work to do in understanding who our solution would best serve. That means we’re going to be spending some significant time putting learning #3 into practice.
The Takeaway:
What phase / stage are you at in the startup building lifecycle?
Are you running intentional, designed tests with clear goals, outcomes, and learnings? Or are you throwing darts to see what might stick?
What are the smallest tests or prototypes you can craft to unlock the validation you need to move to the next stage?
5. Think “Redemptively”.
To be honest, it wasn’t Praxis’ content that drew us to their Academy program. Our primary goal for the conference was to get to know other Christian founders and to connect with a believing network of startup mentors. But little did we know, we would gain all that AND a renewed perspective on how to walk in the way of Jesus as a startup founder too.
While I won’t try to recreate the amazing (and very pretty) explanation their team has already built at www.praxislabs.org/redemptive-entrepreneurship, Praxis’ model for what they describe as “Redemptive Entrepreneurship” was a pivotal takeaway from our time there. The part that struck a chord most for this stage of our venture was the “3 Ways to Work”. These are represented by the three concentric circles in the middle of the frame.
The first way we can work is “exploitative”. The world has come to expect businesses and corporations (and at times nonprofits) to be exploitative engines to extract value from their customers and employees. This is incredibly sad, but the norm in business — effectively an “I win, you lose” and “take-all-you-can-get” mindset.
The second and way we can work is “ethical”. This is essentially the rejection of the exploitative way of working. Even some of the best secular organizations, by God’s common grace, can strive to operate in an ethical way. It’s when we work by “doing things the right way” — practically, ethically, or otherwise. This represents a “do things rightly” and “I win, you win” mindset.
The third way of working and most representative of the Way of Jesus is the “Redemptive” way. If the ethical way is the exploitative way rejected, the redemptive way is the ethical way perfected. This is what Praxis describes as “creative restoration through sacrifice—to bless others, renew culture, and give of ourselves.” Just like Jesus sacrificed of himself to bring about a collective good and better world (the gospel), so we too can sacrifice so that others can be blessed. This represents a “Love and serve” mindset, seeking “I sacrifice, we win” scenarios.
Each day, I have a choice in how I work. On good days, I aim to at least always operate ethically in each of my decisions. As Christians especially, the ethical way is the minimum we should strive for. But as opportunities arise, the redemptive way is an incredible testimony to a watching world of the gospel on display. When we sacrifice for the blessing and benefit of others around us, we are able to put the gospel on display for the world to experience, enabling us to have a witness that loves in both word and in deed.
The Takeaway:
How might God be calling you to sacrifice so that we all or others win?
What does it look like to maintain an ethical approach to work at all times?
Are there any areas in our organizations, products, or in our own lives that are exploitative and need gospel-driven repentance?
Praxis’ impact on our work
This experience came at a pivotal moment for us as a ministry. After three large rounds of product research and testing, releasing a prototype, gathering user feedback, and more, we found ourselves at an inflection point. Where do we go from here?
I praise God for the clarifying and uplifitng work He did through Praxis in our venture and in our lives. It’s as if the Lord has unlocked a significant mental log-jam that was keeping us from seeing what we have needed to do differently to get this ball rolling uphill. I’m so excited and blessed by all that we learned during this experience, and I’m looking forward to continuing to stay connected to the community.
Now, it’s time to take these lessons we’ve learned and start building differently. I can’t wait to see what the Lord will do next.
I hope these “lessons learned” from Praxis are a blessing to you as well! Leave a comment below on what stood out to you most or your own thoughts on how we can build products in the way of Jesus.
Plus - Keep an eye out for a new “Captain’s Log” post soon outlining just how we’re specifically applying these and many other lessons at Lightworks.
Thank you for the write -up Wes! As a fellow participant in the Venture track this has served as an invaluable reminder of a few of the many things I am trying to hang onto and apply in my work. I am thankful to walk this journey with you and Leah!