Gloria Steinem’s ‘Turtle Test’ Is a Business Lesson Every Founder Needs to Learn
If you’re wondering why your product isn’t gaining traction, maybe you’re providing solutions nobody needs.
Gloria Steinem in San Francisco, California, in 1977. Photo:
Gloria Steinem, who died this week at age 92, was not only a feminist icon and pioneering journalist. She was also a startup founder, and one of her greatest business lessons, the “turtle test,” came from a college geology field trip.
Her professor had taken the class to the Connecticut River Valley to observe the “meander curves” of an old river. Steinem didn’t pay attention to the lecture (she’d only taken the class to fulfill a requirement). Instead, she hiked up a path and discovered a massive turtle resting in the mud next to a road. Worrying that it might crawl onto the road and get hit by a car, Steinem decided to rescue it. It wasn’t easy, but she managed to pick up the massive creature and carry it all the way back to the river.
Just as she slipped it into the water,
Just as she slipped it into the water, her geology professor appeared behind her and said:
“You know, that turtle has probably spent a month crawling up the dirt path to lay its eggs in the mud on the side of the road—you have just put it back in the river.”
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She felt terrible but never forgot the lesson. It became a core principle for her businesses.
Always ask the turtle
Founders like to move fast and fix things
Founders like to move fast and fix things. When they see a broken workflow, they ship a new feature. When they see a slow checkout, they rebuild a new flow. But Gloria learned not to trust her assumptions about what was happening with customers or the community. She talked to them before building.
After you’ve spent a lot of time studying a problem and working on a solution, it’s easy to feel like an expert and to trust your own thinking on it. The turtle taught Steinem not to fall into that trap. In her book, My Life on the Road, she explains that “anybody who is experiencing a problem is more expert in it than the experts”
Source: www.inc.com
