This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space.

If you remember the early days of the internet, you probably have fond memories of one of Barry O’Reilly’s first employers—Citysearch. Barry was coding HTML for the site in the late 90s: “I always joke that my greatest gift to the technology industry was when I stopped writing code. 20% of the time I’d go home feeling buzzed and energized; the other 80%, I would feel frustrated and angry.” Since then, Barry has found what truly energizes him—working with business leaders and teams to “invent the future, not fear it.”

Barry expanded on his shift from coding to advising and consulting: “As I was working in startups, I found that I loved technology, but I didn’t love the coding as much. I gravitated to product management and figuring out ‘should we build it’ rather than ‘can we build it?’ That sparked my curiosity more and took me down the path of leading product development teams.”

In his current work as a consultant, entrepreneur, and author, Barry has pioneered the intersection of business model innovation, product development, organizational design, and culture transformation. Barry is the author of Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results, and co-author of the international bestseller Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale. He is an internationally sought-after speaker, frequent writer, and contributor to The Economist, Strategy+Business, and MIT Sloan Management Review. Barry hosts the Unlearn Podcast and is faculty at Singularity University, advising and contributing to Singularity’s executive and accelerator programs based in San Francisco, and throughout the globe. He also sits on the advisory boards of Just3Things and AgileCraft, recently acquired by Atlassian.

It starts with alignment

Barry and I began our conversation talking about how important it is for a company’s innovation strategy to be linked to their corporate strategy and objectives. Issues arise when there is a mismatch: when technologists find a technology first and then look for ways to apply it, or when strategists go after solving a business problem, but it’s the wrong direction.

“It’s about building interesting solutions to solve interesting problems. When you have problem and solution definition, there is alignment and clarity on what to focus on — and that leads to better innovation. If anyone is operating in a silo, if there’s no coordination between what both sides are doing, if both aren’t actively exploring their problem spaces, then you’re not going to get interesting innovation happening.” Once you have that alignment, you can move into building your product and testing it with users.

“When you have problem and solution definition, there is alignment and clarity on what to focus on — and that leads to better innovation.”

Information is currency

Barry defines innovation as, “Breakthroughs prompted by new information that impact understanding, mindset, and behavior.” The notion of information is one of the keywords in this definition as Barry believes that “the currency of pure innovation is information.”

“The currency of pure innovation is information.”

Your customer testing provides the signal or feedback that your innovation is working or not. “Through customer testing, you get new information. As you’re going through that cycle, your currency is information based on your experiments. This information gives you a signal to either keep investing, stop investing, or do something else.”

He continued: “If you go through that cycle enough times, eventually you end up with a product that could generate value [other than information.] One value might be revenue. Up until that point, you’re paying for information as to whether you should keep investing. I think people lose sight of that. Revenue is a lagging indicator. Feedback, or performing desired behavior by customers, is a leading indicator.”

“Revenue is a lagging indicator. Feedback from customers is a leading indicator of their intent to buy something later.”

In the beginning stages of a project, your indicators of success are in stories and information: “When you’re doing innovation, you’re investing in information. You’re paying for information; you do experiments to gather information, to test your hypothesis. And then you use that information and to make more investment decisions.”

Throughout this cycle of testing, learning, and iteration, Barry stresses the importance of capturing what’s been learned. He calls this an after-action report or learning review: “We sit down and see what people have discovered as a result of trying a new behavior. What worked, what didn’t, what happened as they expected, what was different? Where is the new information? All of this is about discoveries.”

Barry encourages companies to formally capture and process the feedback they’re getting from customers or users to guide them forward: “What were the effects that you observed when you performed the experiment? What led to the desired outcomes you wanted? What unintended consequences did you discover? That leads you to the final step: what are you going to do differently? What actions are you going to take? How are you going to scale out, scale back, or iterate your next action or behavior?”

ExecCamp

Barry has created a program called ExecCamp to help companies innovate in a way that is slightly different than the typical transformation approach. In a previous job—running transformation for a global HR company— Barry observed that innovation initiatives were happening on the “edge of the organization.”

He explained: “We were having interesting successes and failures building new products or services, but they only drove a tiny bit of innovation in the company. It was innovation on the edge of the organization. It wasn’t changing the system. We had nodes of the company that would innovate, but the company as a whole wasn’t innovating.”

“Instead of leaders telling their teams to start acting differently, leaders are the ones that start acting differently.”

This led him to think about new ways that he could inspire innovation at a systemic level. He decided that he needed to inspire innovation at the leadership level: “If the leadership team is demonstrating and trying new behaviors, it can have a systemic network effect on the whole company. Every one models the behaviors that they see in leadership. I thought that maybe the [typical transformation approach] was wrong. Instead of leaders telling their teams to start acting differently, leaders are the ones that start acting differently.”

Barry explains his vision for ExecCamp. “We create an experience where leaders go outside their comfort zone. They not only build and learn new skills but go through a personal innovation process. They actually transform through that process. They go back to be coaches in their company to help other innovation initiatives succeed.”

Barry now runs these programs regularly: “It’s essentially an immersion experience for leadership teams to learn by doing; to get comfortable with being uncomfortable; to try new behaviors and build new products and services. Also, it’s about unlearning their existing behavior.”

He shared how ExecCamp worked for one company. He convinced eight leaders from the International Airlines Group to leave the business for two months to launch new businesses designed to disrupt the airline industry. While a huge commitment for the leaders, the payback was huge as well: “Great innovations came out of that: they created the first identity management tool for blockchain. They launched a venture capital firm Hangar 51, which is the first venture capital firm in the airline industry; they made all their APIs and assets available to startups to build new products and services. It’s unleashed a whole raft of products. But the biggest impact has been the shift in leadership mindset from going through that program.”

Out of the comfort zone

We talked about how Barry approaches getting execs out of their comfort zone. He always wants to do it in a way that makes them feel safe, even while pushing them. “There’s always a tension between being uncomfortable, but not feeling so stretched that they’re in danger. There are high levels of safety. I always say ‘Think big. Start small. Learn fast.’ You need to think big and be audacious about your aspirations or outcomes. But you start small to get there so you can learn fast. By starting small, you’re safe to fail.”

One way he pushes leaders out of their comfort zone is to have them get closer to their customer’s point of few. For example, he once asked a leadership team from a phone company to go out and sign up for a new phone service in two hours. That shift in point-of-view can be radical for executives: “Those unlearning moments are invaluable if they’re behaving differently. It shifts their perspective and ultimately shift their mindset and encourages them to continue to shift their behavior.”

“You have to start acting differently to experience the world differently.”

This is what Barry describes as “unlearning,” which he wrote a whole book about. “You have to start acting differently to experience the world differently, to get new information to change the way you think about the world, shift your mindset, and then keep changing your behaviors. That’s the power of this whole system of unlearning that I’ve been coaching people with.”

Downstream effects

Today, one of the dangers of innovation that Barry identifies is that we don’t necessarily know how products are going to be used by customers in the future. “People are building products and they’re being used in ways that they hadn’t even thought of or anticipated. The behavior of the system is emergent; and, the behaviors of the system’s users are also emergent. It means people might use your product in ways you hadn’t thought of. A simple example is Facebook. Political entities are leveraging that platform to influence people, but in ways that the people who designed Facebook probably didn’t intend or think about.”

As we build more complex systems, Barry anticipates that these unexpected, emergent behaviors will continue to challenge us: “It’s important that you build-in mechanisms to understand how people are using your products and services. Are they using it in ways that you intended? If they are using it in unintended ways, is that aligned to the values of the product and service you’re trying to build? I think good product management now means that you need to think about both of those sides of the equation.”

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post Information is Currency appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the other articles here.

Alan Klement is a researcher and entrepreneur who has successfully applied the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) theory in his own business and now works with other companies to do the same.

“I got into JTBD after an experience I had as a product manager. I did everything that I thought a Product Manager was supposed to do. I released a new version of the software product. It took us a year of development and our customers were very happy, but revenue did not go up. I’d spent half a million euros of my boss’s money to improve the product but did not move the revenue needle. So that’s when I realized I needed a different way to think about building products.”

Customers don’t have needs

Alan’s experience as Product Manager highlights a common belief in product development that all one has to do to build a successful product is uncover your customer’s needs and build a solution to meet those needs. But Alan believes this idea takes for granted that customers have needs and that they know what they want. “The concept of a ‘need’ is that of a necessity precondition. A combustion car needs gas to run. A fish needs water to breathe.”

Alan believes that when it comes to product and services consumers don’t really need anything. “We can prove this because people make tradeoffs all the time. Do I need a shower or the ability to clean myself while I stay at a hotel? Well, maybe you’re offering me a free trip to Mt. Everest, and along the way, there’s only one hotel that doesn’t have any bath. In that case, I’d be willing to give up that ‘need.’”

While it may be true that customers know what they want, Alan points out that those desires can also change over time. “There’s this concept in game theory and economics called ‘perfect information.’ In such a system, there’s nothing for anyone to learn, because they know everything. But that isn’t the case with humans. We only know what we’ve experienced or learned in the past, and we use that to project into the future. As we learn and experience new things, our opinions change.”

To illustrate, Alan offers the example of the Blackberry. “Blackberry owners assumed that they needed a keyboard to type with. When they saw the iPhone, they utterly rejected the idea of a digital keyboard. They saw it as a step backward. However, when they actually tried it — and used the rest of the phone — they thought the digital keyboard was just as good. Or even if they thought it wasn’t as good, because the iPhone was great in other ways, they were willing to give up a better keyboard for, say, access to apps.”

“It’s almost a Neanderthal way of thinking about building products. Instead of just going and jumping into what you believe customer needs might be, let’s step back and understand that relationship between demand and supply within a market.”

In the JTBD theory, Alan saw the wisdom in studying why people buy products and what they consider to be competition for the products they use. “Through studying how people think about products you deduce what we call Jobs To Be Done, or the positive change that people are trying to make in their lives as a result of building some product, using some product, or consuming some product.”

As he points out in his article Progress: The Core of Jobs to be Done, Alan views JTBD as a better alternative to the notion of customer needs because it embraces progress. “As you make progress, new desires arise and new constraints arise. When you study progress and think about the desired change that people want, you realize what they want changes. And what’s preventing them from achieving what they want can change. Instead of just this idea of a list of needs, it’s about what inhibits progress.”

In placing a singular focus on the need itself, the customer needs approach misses the context of the customer experience — what they’re going through, why they’re going through it, and what their motivation is.

“…the need is when I have a desire and there’s a constraint blocking me from achieving that desire.”

Instead, effective solutions can focus on the constraints preventing customers from achieving their desires, or as Everett Rogers describes it, the gap that exists when a person’s actuality doesn’t match their desired capability. “If you take customer need within the context of progress, I would say that the need is when I have a desire and there’s a constraint blocking me from achieving that desire. I need something to overcome that constraint and realize that desire.”

FREE DOWNLOAD

Get Our Find Your Alignment

Determine how your idea can be shifted or re-positioned to connect with and support business objectives.

Get It Now

Demand Profile

To visualize JTBD, Alan uses a tool of his own creation called a Demand Profile. When building the Demand Profile, Alan focuses on the desires, constraints, catalysts, and supply in the context of a customer’s experience. “The job that they’re trying to get done, is a combination of desires and a combination of constraints. The catalysts are the things that accelerate the demand by making the desires more important to me or the constraints worse to me. Then, we have the supply items. Those are things that I could consider to hire to help overcome the constraint and realize the desire.”

In creating the Demand Profile, Alan incorporated research from psychologists and economists like Manfred Max Neef who focus on the qualities that motivate people to take actions as the basis for describing the job to be done. He categorizes the JTBD based on Manfred Max Neef’s fundamental human needs matrix.

A theory, not a method

Rather than a silver bullet in innovation, Jobs to be Done is a theory. “It’s about explaining why people are buying products and it helps you define markets. So if you want to get started, start there. Appreciate that it’s a theory. It’s telling you how to think about supply and demand and that it’s an investigation of supply and demand and how that works within a market.”

While the JTBD theory resonates with a lot of innovators, it’s not always easy to apply in practice. “I think it goes back to the classic Western style of management. MBAs are basically cranked out. Everyone’s taught methods. And so they think in terms of everything as methods. And so when they hear Jobs To Be Done, they assume it’s a method. Something you do. It’s actually a theory about markets, demand generation, relationships between supply and demand, and why people are buying things. And that knowledge together is what should inform marketing and sales.”

Multiple strategies for growth in innovation

In addition to a blinding focus on customer needs, Alan believes that innovation can go astray when organizations fail to recognize that there are different strategies for growth in innovation. “There just seems to be this belief that if we improve the usability of our product or if we make the product better, more people will buy it. That’s just some assumption. There’s no theory behind that. There’s not really thought put into whether that is true or not.”

Alan sees three different approaches to innovation. One approach involves making adjustments or adding features to a product to capture customers with specific needs who are interested but forced to look elsewhere. “But you need to have a plan to go out into the market and find out why people are not buying your product, and then change it specifically to capture that group of people.”

Products can also be changed to entice existing customers to buy more of it. “An hour ago, I upgraded my Google G-Suite from the Basic to the Enterprise version. And I did that because I wanted to record my Google Meets. So that’s a way that Google is extracting more revenue from me. They’re offering add-ons or they’re offering me things that an existing consumer will pay more for.”

The third option is to create something entirely new to bring in new customers, sell to your existing customers, or both. “I think that those three different strategies for increasing your revenue all require a different research process and a different design process.”

You can’t measure innovation

According to Alan, innovation isn’t something that can be measured. “It’s a concept. Just like love or friendship. You can’t measure concepts — or anything else that lives in our heads.”

“I don’t understand why you’d want to measure innovation.”

Measurement belongs in the realm of observable phenomena and physical things. “I don’t understand why you’d want to measure innovation. Who cares about that? In a free-market economy, the only thing a private company cares about is revenue. Because without it, it wouldn’t exist. I suppose you could say revenue is a ‘need.’”

“Numbers only tell you the effects of the system, but don’t tell you anything about the system itself.”

The emphasis on measurement in innovation is something Alan believes speaks to a problem with how we approach business management in the West. “Part of the problem with a lot of Western styles of management is they want to look at numbers. And they think numbers tell them things, tell them facts. If there’s no number, then I can’t make a decision on something. But that’s a fault in management because you can make up a number for anything. Numbers only tell you the effects of the system, but don’t tell you anything about the system itself.”

Start with supply and demand

More important than measurement is that innovation programs begin with a strong understanding of the market. “First off, I believe it starts with understanding existing markets — what supply and demand looks like today. What are consumers buying and why are they buying it? Because even if you are trying to advance the market, change the market, you still have to know where you are so you can begin changing it.”

The next step is implementing a process around imagining how things could be in the future. “If I were at a company, I would pull in people who were excited about designing new things for the organization, who had different experiences — people from marketing and sales background or people from a product or engineering, customer support. Bring these people together because they’re going to have different experiences of interacting with consumers and market behaviors that they can bring to the process. That helps you imagine how the system could be in the future.”

The final piece is establishing a process to experiment, learn, and test hypotheses. “Start testing with consumers and see if it gets them excited. See if it gets them wanting to change how they do things now to adopt our view of the future.”

Alan believes forming innovation programs should start with someone in a position of authority who believes there’s a revenue opportunity. “Some ultimate decision maker should pull together a team that can focus on discovering and flushing out this opportunity and thinking about solutions or things that can sell to fit into this opportunity.”

From a tactical perspective, team formation based on the principles of group dynamics involves multiple small, cross-functional groups. “You don’t want to have 20 people in a room. I don’t know how you would manage that. Two people or one person might not be enough to bounce off ideas. So it’s whatever produces a good mix of intimate setting, but also different people with different backgrounds who can comment and challenge ideas.”

Each team develops product ideas separately and then all teams come together to share their ideas. “That way you get the focus and quickness off a small team, while also getting the shared, collective knowledge of a large group of people.”

Once a solution is determined, Alan believes that sharing with the larger organization is most powerful for achieving buy-in when teams share the story of how the solution came to fruition. “This is straightforward research sharing. Here was our objective. We believed that there was a growth opportunity, revenue opportunity in this area. Here’s how we went out and did the research. Here is the data. Here are the concepts that we created based upon those data. We tested those concepts. Here were the results. And therefore, we are choosing concept C because that was the one that people responded most favorably to and expressed a willingness to pay for, more than anything else.”

A flaw in the theory of disruption

The story of the iPhone is a favorite innovation success of Alan’s for its unconventional approach to innovation. “They did everything right by going against, even today, all of the beliefs of how innovation should be done. Again, they didn’t go out and study customer needs.”

Steve Jobs looked at the existing market of smartphones and thought taking up half of the screen real estate with a keyboard ruined the customer experience. “Blackberry owners thought no keyboard, no way. Go back and just read all the pundits. But actually, Apple became the most successful company of all time with the most successful product of all time. And Nokia went bankrupt.”

Alan views the iPhone as a prime example of the flaw in Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruption. “If you go back and look at Clay’s research, he’s doing everything by product category. He said PCs disrupted mainframes. That’s completely wrong. PCs and mainframes never competed. Actually, mainframes are still alive and well today.”

Due to his focus on the product category, Christensen saw the iPhone as a premium smartphone. “But he didn’t recognize, actually, it’s an alternative to a TV, to my laptop, to reading a newspaper, to staring at the wall while I’m at the doctor’s office or the magazines in the doctor’s office. I mean, that’s what it competes with.”

Alan views product categories as more of an indicator or lens through which to view innovation.“Maybe when you think about introducing a new supply option for some demand, you instead consider if this new supply is going to make product categories obsolete.”

Even Clayton Christensen himself seems to have abandoned the notion of innovating within product categories. “Clay wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma. It was a huge success. And then, of course, he’s like, I have to do a follow-up. I discussed a problem. I should probably offer some solution to that problem.”

That solution materialized after he met Rick Pedi and Bob Moesta. When Christensen heard the idea of Jobs to be Done, he thought it might be the answer to The Innovator’s Dilemma. “It was the idea of not focusing on a product category, but focusing on what the product does for the person. Snickers is not a candy bar. It’s not about the chocolate and peanuts. It’s about satisfying my hunger on the go. And he felt that phrasing, that re-contextualization of markets, was what would solve the innovator’s dilemma.”

The story of the iPhone is a perfect example of why Alan doesn’t ascribe to the customer needs approach. “Supply is not created to fit demand. Supply actually creates demand. So don’t think that demand is something out there, that you create something to fit that demand. No, if it’s really something new, you introduce something into the market, and that creates demand for it. Because there has to be something out there. In order for me to want something, it has to exist.”

Simulated shopping

Alan’s advice for studying the market when a product is entirely new uses an approach he calls simulated shopping through which he tries to uncover if people will want a new product and, more importantly, if they’ll be willing to pay for it.

“In an interview with someone, we try to recreate how they would shop. One way that we do it is we create fake Amazon pages for the product that doesn’t exist yet. Then we show this to the person in an interview or through Zoom and watch them browsing.” Talking through their decision making process and learning what product the interviewee would ultimately buy is a low-risk approach to finding a revenue opportunity for a new market solution that can help predict whether or not it will sell before the costly work of building the solution occurs.

For more information on Jobs to be Done and how other entrepreneurs have applied it to create successful products, check out Alan’s book When Coffee and Kale Compete.

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post Consumers Don’t ‘Need’ Anything appeared first on Voltage Control.

Product design, also known as industrial design, got its start in the 1900s. As production ramped up with new inventions like cars and household appliances, brands realized the importance of design and its connection to customer loyalty.

Flash forward, industrial design is all around us, so it’s easy to forget that it is a relatively new practice. Today, companies have many options when they want help and expertise in product design. Hiring a product design agency is a great way to start building things customers truly love.

What should you know before choosing the best design agency for your needs? We’ve got the answers right here. Keep reading so you can make the best decision for your business.

What is a Product Designer?

Wikipedia defines product design as the method “to create a new product to be sold by a business to its customers.” Product design is all about finding customer pain points and figuring out ways to solve them. Product designers look for opportunities to make products that fill a need other products don’t.

After they’ve targeted the exact pain points their design will address, they figure out how to make the best product for the purpose. Then, they create the product, and test and refine it until it’s ready to hit the market.

Product designers are in charge of much more than just appearance or packaging. They direct the entire innovation process from start to finish. The best designers focus on the end user, not the product itself. It’s easy to design a product that sounds great, but never sells. But it’s far more useful to design a product with a specific audience in mind, so you know it serves an authentic need.

How to Choose a Product Design Agency

The top agencies use design thinking, which means focusing on the end user first. Good designers need to marry people’s needs with creative innovation to create products that users can’t live without.

Look for an agency that’s creative — you want outside-the-box thinkers. But make sure that creativity comes with business know-how, too. Understanding basic marketing and what makes a business succeed are important qualities in an agency as well.

Great designers also harness the power of modern technology. While the right solution isn’t always the most “techy,” designers should know about cutting-edge industry technology and how to put it to work.

How Product Design Companies Work

What does a typical day at a product design agency look like? It varies depending on what stage of the design process they’re in. Here are the typical phases of work that designers step through to create marketable products.

1. Research

The design phase starts with research. At this point, your product design agency will dive deep into understanding potential users of their product. They’ll look at the competitors to see what their products are lacking.

The better a design agency understands the audience, the better they can design for that audience. This phase may take the longest, because it’s the most important.

Start our Design Thinking Foundations course today!

Learn and practice Design Thinking to help your team solve problems and seize opportunities.

Get Started

2. Target

Through the research process, the agency decides which pain points to target. Pain points are particular problems experienced by the audience. For example, one pain point consumers used to have was lacking time to go grocery shopping. Some brands addressed that pain point by launching grocery delivery services. Before moving into design, your agency should be able to articulate the specific customer challenges this product will answer.

3. Design

The “design” part is actually just one step of a product designer’s job. After the pain points have been identified, it’s time to design a product that will solve them. This process is creative, and different people or agencies may use all kinds of different methods here. Typically, designers brainstorm, sketch, and wire-frame here to envision a new end-to-end experience for the product.

4. Prototype

When the design agency has landed on the right direction for the new product, they’ll start by building a prototype. Prototypes can be as simple as a sketch that illustrates a product feature; they can also be as real as a clickable prototype that users can actually interact with. There are many great software platforms available today for prototyping, like InVision and Framer. The prototype is essential, because it allows you to get feedback with real users before building the final product.

5. Test

The prototype gets tested with users who match the target audience for the product. In these tests, the design agency can learn about any flaws the product has or improvements that could be made. You can get actionable insights about your product from just a handful of solid user interviews.

6. Refinement

The product gets revamped to address issues that came up during testing. This can involve heavy re-design or just a few tweaks.

7. Launch & Analysis

Now, it’s time to release the product to the world. The aim is for a launch that is efficient and bug-free. After launch, the top product design companies move into analysis mode. Once the product is in the hands of the public, they can’t just sit back and relax. They want to analyze the success of the product. If it didn’t effectively meet users’ needs, this is a time to figure out what went wrong. If the product did work well, the agency can use that information to make the next iteration even better.

Ready to Hire a Product Design Agency?

If you want to create products that people can’t live without, you need a great product design agency on your side. Don’t have the product design know-how and tools in house? Innovation workshops with Voltage Control can help. Learn more about our innovation workshops and other services here.

The post Hiring a Product Design Agency: What You Need to Know appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the other articles here.

Laura Klein once worked with someone who “missed” the internet. During our conversation, she shared this humorous anecdote from her first job. In the mid-1990s, she worked at a think tank that was doing future-casting: “One of the younger UX designers went to the [head of the company] and said, ‘I really think we should be looking at this internet thing.’ And he replied, ‘No, I don’t really think it’s going anywhere.’ I was in a think tank about the future of technology where the guy in charge managed to miss the internet.”

Laura herself hasn’t missed much in her career. In fact, she’s worn many hats. She’s worked as an engineer, user experience designer, and product manager for companies of all sizes. She’s also written two books — Build Better Products and UX for Lean Startups. Currently, she’s the VP, Product at Business Talent Group and Principal at Users Know, which helps startups learn more about their users and potential customers.

Avoid Innovation Theater

In my interviews with innovation experts, I often start by digging into what they see as wrong-headed or misguided in today’s organizational innovation programs. Laura talked about the importance of being open to new ideas, as well fostering existing ones. “[Innovation programs] tend to be very focused on creating ‘Big Ideas’ and making huge changes. But, the most important thing is learning not to shoot down the good ideas and new projects already coming from within the organization.”

“The most important thing is learning not to shoot down the good ideas and new projects already coming from within the organization.”

Innovation must extend beyond the idea stage. Furthermore, the innovation groups responsible for generating these ideas may not be helping when they simply pass along their ideas to other teams to execute. “What that team probably needed wasn’t more great product ideas. They needed more talking to users and understanding their actual needs so that they could come up with good solutions on their own.”

Similarly, Laura warned against companies focusing too much on what she called “innovation theater” — sticky notes, open workspaces, whiteboards — the sometimes clichéd trappings of a creative work. “[Companies] put in things that feel like what they think innovation should look like, but none of the hard follow through.”

“[Companies] put in things that feel like what they think innovation should look like, but none of the hard follow through.”

This concept of follow-through was an important thread throughout our conversation. She talked about how there are few “overnight successes” in innovation or the startup world. For those who appear like they had a meteoric rise, she says: “I guarantee that they had 73 bad ideas that they tried before they came across this huge overnight success, with a few exceptions. Even the ones that did stick to the initial great idea, they tried a bunch of other stuff along the way that didn’t last for very long.”

What Needs to Change

For new and innovative ways of working to stick inside an organization, Laura talked about the need for coaching and organizational change, in addition to education. She’s seen what happens when companies solely focus on the education piece: “You get everybody together for forced training and you spend a bunch of money on workshops. Then everybody goes back to their desks and forgets all about it because there’s no organizational change that helps them implement what they learned and there’s no follow-up coaching. All of their incentives remain the same, so they have no reason to do anything differently.”

“Then everybody goes back to their desks and forgets all about it because there’s no organizational change that helps them implement what they learned and there’s no follow-up coaching.”

She talked more about how funding can also stand in the way of corporate innovation: “Big company structure isn’t necessarily the right one to take a little tiny idea and nurture and grow it. All the things in the company are setup to not pay attention to any of that, right? Funding is based on ‘How much money is it going to make me in the next quarter?’ Suddenly they have to do something that’s not going to make any money for six months, a year, or ever. They don’t know how to do that.”

Beyond budgets, there are other significant organizational changes that she recommends to support new ways of working: “You have to change a tremendous number of things, like your HR department, your procurement department, how you rate your employees, and how you fund projects. You have to change all of that for some of these things to work.”

Not Just the Fun Stuff

Let’s return to the concept of follow-through and the importance of execution. “Sometimes you’ll see labs come up with a prototype and…the problem is that they give it to the organization and expect somebody else to ‘raise’ their product and understand why to do it.”

She cautioned against scenarios where innovation teams do the “fun stuff” (i.e. idea generation and prototyping) and then pass off the hard work to the rest of the organization: “Who wants to build somebody else’s idea? Even if they do, what if it doesn’t work out? Who’s fault was that? Was it a bad idea or was it bad implementation?”

“You need to have the people who start it keep building it until it’s actually a product and it’s a thing with its own market and resources.”

Nothing should be pitched over the “wall” to another part of the company. Ideally, there shouldn’t be a chasm between the innovation group and the people that execute. According to Laura: “You need to have the people who start it keep building it until it’s actually a product and it’s a thing with its own market and resources.”

Measuring Value

We also discussed how companies can and should measure innovation. Laura’s answer illustrates her dedicated focus on the end user. “I think that everything should be measured by the value it produces for people — both within the organization and for the users of whatever that organization produces.”

“I think that everything should be measured by the value it produces for people.”

She went on to say: “Ideally, we would also be thinking about the impact on the world at large and the rest of society because we should care about those things, because we all have to live in it. But, those things are often harder to quantify.”

The Potential of Machine Learning

We closed our conversation by talking about what Laura is most excited about right now and she brought up machine learning: “I think it has a ton of useful possible applications, but there’s also a tremendous potential to screw it up. It is both exciting and terrifying. I think it has a lot of potential to help people make better decisions. I think it’s terrifying because it also has the potential to help people make really awful decisions…”

She explained some of her concerns: “There are a lot of ethical questions around how we train data models, how we give the right information to people to make good decisions, and how could we automate away some of the really boring, awful parts of people’s lives, but not just give them worse things to do.”

But in the end, Laura has healthy skepticism about any “hot” topics like machine learning based in her time in the industry: “I’ve seen virtual reality be the next big thing three times so nothing’s that exciting to me right now.”

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post No Overnight Success in Innovation appeared first on Voltage Control.

When creating new ideas, most organizations tackle them in the same old ways. Here’s how it usually goes down:

• A team of experts and leaders gather for a brainstorm session.
• Loaded with political and social dynamics, the team manages to reach consensus and a green light from higher up.
• Off go the designers on a journey to return with a brilliant rendition of what everyone had in their minds.
• Review and revise until you can toss the engineering team a file titled: “great_idea_final_final_final_version17.pdf”
• You know the drill: Scope creep, blown budgets, communication breakdowns, dysfunctional team dynamics.

In the end, you’ve built a mutated version of the original idea, riddled with compromises and bloated with features. And we still have yet to learn if the idea works.

In last week’s, all-day Design Sprint Bootcamp in Austin, TX, Jake Knapp led us through each step of the process he details in his book, Sprint. He compared the conventional ways most groups approach new ideas to the process provided by Design Sprints. The comparisons made the painfully obvious distinction as to why Design Sprints are key to creating innovative products.

“Even if you’re wrong the first time, the sprint process will help you light up your future path.” — Jake Knapp, author of Sprint

Here are a few juxtapositions that I took away from Jake’s event:

Conventional: Group Brainstorm

Typically, members of a team gather in a room, with sleeves rolled up, pens and pads in hand, with wide eyes, full of energy and the best of intentions. Ideas are born and prematurely tossed out of their nests with the hopes they’ll fly. Usually, the ones that do survive are because the loudest or highest ranking person favored them.

Design Sprint: Work Together, Alone

In Design Sprints, we work together, alone. Each person in a Design Sprint works toward the same task in silence, jotting down thoughts and sketching thumbnails of their vision. This method allows each person to capture enough detail in their solutions. They show the idea instead of only talking about it, leaving little room for misinterpretations when presented.

Conventional: Endless Discussions

The social dynamics of group discussions can kill the momentum of a team’s progress and drain them of their creative energy. And often the best ideas don’t have a chance of making the final cut.

Design Sprint: Fast & Decisive

Through structured conversations you reach decisions quickly — scrap it or keep it. In Design Sprints there is one decider on the team. Activities like silent voting are conducted where the decider sees which idea the group is leaning towards. The decider considers this insight to make a final call on which idea to proceed with.

Conventional: Build an MVP

If you ask 10 members of a product team to define an MVP, you’ll get 10 different answers. MVPs often start small and lean, with enough punch to enter the market. They rarely turn out that way. Many grow so much in complexity that by the time it’s launched into the market, it’s an expensive, unproven idea, loaded with features that could have been added in phases 2, 3 or 4.

Design Sprint: Fake it ’til you make it

Build a fake version, a facade of the idea. It won’t matter if the inner-workings are absent: the code, the real data. If it looks, feels, sounds or smells like the real thing, you have enough to test with real users.

With a Design Sprint prototype, users get immersed in the story and forget that it’s fake. Remember old Western films? The saloons and sheriff’s office were wooden boards propped up vertically with painted on windows and doors. Audiences were focused on the story, the shoot out at high noon, not architectural integrity. Prototypes are enough to acquire candid and useful feedback.

Conventional: Wait for perfect data,

Companies will deploy research agencies to explore what the market wants. Over the course of weeks or months, barrels of data roll in and are distilled into neatly designed graphs and pie charts. Often the data is unclear and you’re scratching your head, wondering how to make sense of it.

Design Sprint: Quick ‘n dirty

Get the critical, impactful insight, now — The stuff that will quickly tell you where to adjust your idea and its chances of surviving in the market.

On the the last day of a Design Sprints is Test Day, where you take your prototype and test it with five real customers. It might seem like a small group to test, but check out the Nielsen Norman Group on why you only need to test with five users.

You get 80% of findings in the first five interviews.

The 1 on 1 interviews shed valuable insight into how your idea will fit in the market. You’ll have more info on the “why.” Plus, the whole team learns by observing the interviews being conducted. Using this scorecard, we capture data such as:

• Did the user understand the overall concept?
• Did the user find the shopping cart?
• Did the user watch the video? (You know… the one that cost $1.2M to produce?)

Closing

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” –Albert Einstein

We already know one approach to executing on ideas. We know its risks and downfalls. Yet, companies that crave innovation continue to do things the same old way. A new way to innovate is here. Design Sprints are a faster and better way to launch ideas and build better products.

Jake’s event last week recharged my excitement for innovation by leading Design Sprints. It rejuvenated my mission to help businesses build better products and services that are not just profitable, but turn customers into raving fans.

The post 4 Things Jake Knapp Taught Me About Innovation appeared first on Voltage Control.

Douglas is a rare individual. Gifted in artistic, communicative & progressive ways, he is a leader who helps others lead.

I was privileged to have Douglas facilitate Service Direct’s first ever official Design Sprint. As as the “Decider”, I was challenged and encouraged by Douglas to interact, organize, converse, and question with my team in all new ways.

Within the demanding and rewarding environment of the Sprint, we were forced to make decisions and gain rapid consensus to move onto next steps and push our expectations through to the humble but oh so crucial moments of Actual User / Prototype testing.

So, what did our sprint actually look like?

Day 1 & 2

Prototype Scoping & Individual ideas. We had to resolve several seemingly conflicting original opinions from members of our team. As the Decider, I had elaborate in my mind and struggled with the smaller problems or pieces that others had brought to the table. However, after a lot of conversation and guidance from Douglas — I began to see the trees amongst the forest.

We ended up integrating several of the excellent smaller ideas into my more extensive plan. I felt like we were able to pull the team together around this more massive solution— even though it was going to be tough to test. Day 2 was when we began to wonder if what we were doing was going to be testable with folks who had never seen or heard of our service before.

Day 3 & 4

Choosing the actual walls of our prototype & building it. As the boundaries of what we were prototyping started to emerge, it became clear that we were going to have to setup our testers by either showing or telling them our ‘sales pitch’. We realized that we were going to have a problem getting our testers to complete a form on a webpage — and a complicated form at that — without at least prepping them solidly on what was happening.

Douglas presented an option to use our current webpages & flow combined with the same basic process for a competitor and much more well-known company. It turned out to be a great idea. We decided to start our testers on a Search Results page with a prominent search term already input and a couple of relevant results for our testers to choose from.

Day 5

Testing! Make or break, Friday arrived and we were ready to see what folks thought of our prototype. I was nervous about getting real value from the process. I felt like we had chosen a big hairy problem to test and our ‘prototype’ was pretty long. Douglas just looked at me, smiled and shrugged. He knew the secret — that no matter what our ideas were about this, the Testers were going to open us up to insights that we had not considered yet.

He was right. Even though some of our Testers didn’t have time to get through the whole prototype, we learned huge lessons. We learned about our positioning, about specific words, about how images that we thought were clear made our Testers feel entirely different. We learned how difficult Pricing is and how hard it is to make people feel comfortable when they are in an unfamiliar space.

Overall, we learned the critical truth that I think the Design Sprint Process is all about. No matter what you think or how much time you’ve put into your work.

It flat out doesn’t matter until your Customers put their hands on it and you see how they actually interact and feel in real life.

Douglas was crucial helping us advance through my grandiose expectations and our team’s all important and yet divergent ideas to arrive at actual prototypes, real takeaways and even better — a fantastic understanding of new ways we can create, debate, develop and test new ideas.

We have substantially changed for the better after our Design Sprint and I will always have deep gratitude, remembering this week as one of the crucial growing points along our company’s history.

The post Service Direct’s Virgin Sprint Challenges and Realities appeared first on Voltage Control.

After several months of planning and organization Jake Knapp arrived in the lobby of the Omni, and after a few hugs, we began organizing the room. We hosted the event in Capital Factory’s 1st floor Voltron space. Capital Factory was a great partner and a stellar event space. When we arrived, Voltron was set up in theatre style seating, and we wanted to assemble the workshop into teams, so we began to move the tables and chairs to create 4–5 person pods. Each group got an easel board post-it in place of a whiteboard.

Once the room was set up, and we were ready to let folks in the door there was quite a line wrapping through the lobby of the hotel. Luckily John and Anna are pros, and they got folks through quickly.

After checking in and receiving their supplies attendees got their books signed by Jake. This was also an opportunity for everyone get a tiny bit of one-on-one with Jake, whose fun and engaging personality is infectious for all.

Intros

Jake kicked off the workshop with some brief intros. First, he thanked our food sponsors: Herbs & Harmony, Rutamaya coffee, and Clean Cause beverages. Then he gave big thanks to Voltage Control and asked me to make a few brief announcements. I let everyone know about a special discount for Respondent.io, the Austin Design Sprint Meetup, and an upcoming talk by Phil Gilbert of IBM Design. Finally, he introduced Dee Scarano, from AJ&Smart who came with Jake to assist him.

Origin Story

After intros, Jake began a story about the origin of Design Sprints, which not only takes us back to Google when he was working on Hangouts but way back to Microsoft when he was on the team building Encarta.

Jake shared with us the familiar story of the Encarta team not involving marketing until the very end of the project. When marketing released the Encarta box the main feature, which they spent all their time on, was in the smallest print on the box. Apparently, there was a disconnect. Something needed to change.

With the desire to design the perfect week, Jake was inspired by the way you think about your job when you first start a new role. Your calendar is free, and your options are endless. He asked himself, what if we could treat the first week of any project as if it were the first week on the job?

He also asked himself why he, as a designer, had an unfair advantage due to his ability to draw/design. Could there be a way to test risky ideas from folks that didn’t know how to draw, thus allowing everyone to participate in the crafting of the future?

Most people assume that speed is the critical ingredient to a Sprint as we are making huge leaps forward in merely five days. Jake points out that gathering everyone together for five consecutive days of intense work is more important to him that the speed.

“Fast is important — but five days is more about being deep together and keep context and get big results.”

In almost every endeavor in life, school, sports, music, dance, and drama, we practice and rehearse. However, in the workplace, we don’t always have this practice mode. We are continuously at the main event. Practice lets you take a risk in private, and failure doesn’t cost you that much. Design Sprints are practice for product releases.

I often talk about the benefits of using design sprints inside of a build and learn loop. MVP is a smart way to built products, however, even with today’s fancy tools, the MVP can take a long time. Inserting design sprints into the build-test loop helps shorten the overall cycle of learning.

Facilitator Tips

Jake sprinkled lots of great facilitation tips throughout the workshop. He even used these facilitation hacks on the audience during the workshop; then he would stop and point out what he just did. One example of this is when he sets expectations, even when they may seem obvious. He made sure to remind us that we were here to learn the method and not to get too hung up on solving the problem because it is a fun problem after all.

“Today will be frustrating- you will get into this fake activity, and I’ll rip you out, you’ll never get enough time to finish” — Jake Knapp

Other facilitation tips

• Ask for permission to facilitate to set expectations from the start.
• Say pause not stop; “I think we should pause this for a sec.”
• When conversations get out of hand, use Note & Vote or defer to the decider.
• Telling the team “This is going to be hard,” makes it seem easier.
• Repeat an instruction twice —The first one is throw away to get attention.

High Fives!

Who doesn’t love a high five? As Jake transitioned from the history lesson to the “activity” portion of the workshop, he asked for a volunteer to demonstrate the execution of a perfect high five. As you may already know, you watch the elbow. Jake pointed out that Design Sprints are like watching the elbow. They help you stay focused on the import thing, not necessarily the obvious thing.

Magic Penny

Magic Penny is the name of the fake company that each group would use as the foundation for each of the Design Sprint exercises. This fictitious app connects to your bank account and automatically decides how much money it should transfer to your saving account. No more worrying about overdrafts or having to remember to move money into savings manually.

No Device Rule

The no device rule is an essential part of a successful Sprint. Don’t be tempted to allow the more senior folks to bulldoze through this provision. They are the ones that will benefit the most from this rule. Even when you have the best of intentions, and are only taking notes, it sends a confusing signal to the team. If someone needs to take a call or send some emails, politely ask them to step out of the room.

Note: Power gloves are exempt from the no device rule and always allowed.

GOAL

The first step on Day one is setting a goal. Setting the goal helps us frame where we are headed and keeps us focused on our overall business objective. Since Jake is using a predetermined example for this workshop, he has constructed it in a “cooking show” style. He has already decided the goal for us and after a brief bit of discussion presents it to us.

Questions

After selecting a goal, we start to get pessimistic and ask ourselves, what will stop us from reaching our goal? Throughout the workshop, Jake shares the latest tweaks and updates to the process that aren’t in the book. One such tweak is to write the pessimistic questions as Yes/No questions. Then on day-5 when we are interviewing the testers we can use the questions as a rubric to score each tester.

HMW

After getting pessimistic, it’s time to interview our expert(s) and write our “How Might We” (HMW) statements on sticky notes. Dee Scarano, Product Designer and Sprint Master @ AJ&Smart, was our expert and Jake interviewed her in front of the entire workshop. During the interview, we all wrote HMW cards. Writing the HMW statements keeps our minds from straying and helps us stay focused on active listening. The speaker feels more comfortable when interviewers are taking notes on what they say.

Finally, we sort the HMW stickies into affinity groups. Sorting helps to organize the HMW for easier voting and will identify duplicates in the process. It also forces everyone to read all the HMWs.

Map

After presenting an example map to us, Jake demonstrated how to draw maps. Starting with a list of users on the left and the end goal on the right, begin drawing out the journey that each user takes as they approach the goal. Another technique not provided in the book is to break up the map up into 3 sections: Discover, Learn, Start. After creating the map, we returned to cooking show tactics as Jake tells us which moment to circle for our target.

“I’ve never been happy with the map; it never feels right; it never matters. If you are doing it, you are doing it right.”

Maps don’t have to be perfect, you just have to get through it and learn. The map is going to be messy. The important thing is to do it. The process will uncover what you need to discover. Once your map is complete, you’ll select a target. Your goal is to locate the place you can exploit; you are looking to find the weakness in the Death Star. Teams usually focus on the hard stuff; they want to figure out the heart of it. The best target is somewhere to the left of the hard stuff; facilitators can pull the focus back to the left.

Lunch

Vegan chef Taylor Green, of Herbs and Harmony, delivered a delicious culinary treat for us. Serving health foods low in sugar and high in protein will ensure that you have the brain fuel to do critical thinking and the energy to sustain you through the day without crashing.

Demos

Lightning demos are used to share analogous inspiration to get our creative juices flowing. We write down our favorite examples alongside the sprint questions and our favorite HMWs to help inspire our solution sketches.

Crazy 8s

Crazy 8s is a rapid-fire idea generation exercise. It is called crazy due to the speed and not because you are expected to come up with crazy ideas. The speed forces you to stop second-guessing yourself and allow your subconscious to pour onto the paper.

Solution Sketches

Solution sketches are intended to be done in quiet. It is vital that we sketch alone together. While the group setting and no device rule keeps us focused on the task at hand, the individual work allows us to explore our own thoughts.

“Your talking. It’s a secret. Don’t give it away.”

Art Museum

Each team found a blank wall space and taped up their sketches on the wall. Team members walked the line of sketches and read through each one. They then placed dot stickers on the parts that they liked the most. These dot stickers created a heat map to indicate ideas that were the most popular. Dot voting should be done in silence, during the session I laughed out loud as Jake said: “You’re talking, you’re doing it wrong.”

Speed Critique

Using the heat map as a guide the facilitator walks through each sketch describing the ideas that got the most votes. A helper is recording these ideas using a headline for each to capture the big idea. These headlines are written using the larger dry-erase marker on post-it notes and placed above the sketch.

Winning Sketches

After completing the voting process and the deciders cast their binding vote, Jake asked each team to bring their winning sketch to the front and lay them on the stage.

Sketch Review

Jake went through each winning sketch one by one and read out the highlights. It’s impressive to watch him rapid-fire analyze the sketches, cracking jokes as he goes. It’s heaps of fun. You can even see him cracking himself up.

Prototyping

Instead of jumping straight into building an MVP we produce a realistic facade and test it with five carefully recruited real-world customer. Our goal is to create a “movie set”; something that is convincing enough that testers will believe it is the real thing.

Research

Finally, Jake presented the research portion of the design sprint which involves interviewing five users to get their reactions to the prototype. This video is an excellent overview of the “5 act interview format”. Anybody can run these interviews. It takes practice to become totally natural. However, if you study the material beforehand, the ideas and techniques will be fresh enough in your brain that you can pull it off.

The 5 act interview format:

1. Friendly welcome
2. Context questions
3. Introduction to the prototype
4. Tasks
5. Quick debrief

Q & A

At the end of a long day, Jake finally takes a seat and opens the floor to the audience to ask questions. He also invited Dee and me to grab a mike and help answer questions.

I haven’t gotten survey results back yet, but everyone I’ve spoken to had an absolute blast at the workshop. I know I did! I hope I’m able to bring Jake back to Austin, or perhaps to another city in Texas. If you are interested, email me at douglas@voltagecontrol.co.

Voltage Control specializes in Design Sprints, and we facilitate Sprints in Austin, Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas. Please email Douglas at douglas@voltagecontrol.co if you are interested in having us facilitate your Sprint, coach your team on how to run an effective Sprint, or are curious to learn more about how a Sprint might help your company or product.

If you are in or near Austin, visit us at the Austin Design Sprint meetup. Each month we have a guest speaker share their experience participating in a Design Sprint. If you would like to be a future speaker, please email me.

The post Austin Workshop w/ Jake Knapp appeared first on Voltage Control.

In addition to facilitating Design Sprints for larger enterprises, I mentor and coach smaller companies, including non-technical founders just getting started. These early-stage entrepreneurs often come to me hoping that I can help them determine which vendor to select to build their MVP. This is the point where I begin telling them about Design Sprints and rapid prototyping.

While a full blown 5-day Design Sprint is not always appropriate for an early stage venture, rapid prototyping and testing with real users is essential to controlling costs. Most startups these days are aware of lean startup techniques and are focused on customer discovery techniques. Once they have confidence they genuinely understand the problem space and have validated their hypothesis on the customer pain, I see them quickly jumping to build their MVP before they’ve done any solution validation. Rapid prototyping is a quick and reliable way to perform this critical solution validation.

When considering Design Sprint for an early stage company, think about the number of potential participants and the amount of upfront research that you have completed. If there are only two employees, advisors, or other stakeholders working on the project, a full 5-Day Design Sprint isn’t necessary. Likewise, If there are enough potential attendees but there has been lots of upfront research, and a possible solution is already in the sites, a shortened process may be more appropriate.

If a full Design Sprint is not appropriate or someone is only ready to test the waters, I advise beginning with a simple three-step process. Spend as much time on each step as you feel comfortable and feel free to take breaks between steps as needed.:

Step 1 — Decide & Storyboard

Review your solution in detail and build a storyboard.

Step 2 — Prototype

Build your prototype

Step 3 — Test

Test with five users

StealthCo

In late August I got a call from a local Austin entrepreneur who was the co-founder of a successful Austin startup and is currently in stealth mode with his original co-founder. He was calling to ask me for advice on hiring engineers. They had just finished a deep dive into customer discovery and were excited to put their learnings to the test as an MVP. Rather than helping them recruit engineers, I quickly jumped into explaining the Design Sprint process to them. He hung up the phone and bought the book. When he and his co-founder came to the Austin Design Sprint Meetup 10 days later, they had already gone through a rapid-fire version of a Sprint to understand the process better.

After having tested the waters a bit, it was clear to them that they needed some guidance. My presentation shed some light on some areas where they could improve. They saw the value in having me facilitate and were on a budget, so they asked if I would be willing to coach them each morning and check-in at the end of the day. I’ve known them for awhile, and I love their dedication and passion. I was curious to learn more about applying Design Sprints in this context, so I agreed.

At this point, StealthCo was only four people. They came to me curious about the minimum number of people for a Design Sprint and worried that their CEO wouldn’t have time to participate. After chatting through it with them, we decided to add three external experts and that it was critical for the CEO to attend. In fact, he initially planned to join part-time, and after day one decided to attend the full Sprint. Luckily, one of their external experts is a UX researcher, so they had a skilled interviewer to conduct the interviews on Friday.

“We are always looking for ways to save time and get into the heads of our customers. When Douglas told me about Design Sprints, I immediately dove in. Our first Sprint opened our eyes to a new audience’s needs and allowed us to save resources by trashing a project early. Design Sprints have become an important methodology in our product development process.” — Co-Founder, StealthCo

I met with the two co-founders and their facilitator each morning for 30 minutes before the other attendees arrived to discuss expectation and process for the day. I stayed for another 30 minutes to make sure things were off to a good start. At the end of each day, they called me to debrief me and ask me questions about how they might course correct. While a little bumpy, they made it through the process with actionable insights. Now, they are running this process all on their own to drive their solution validation process.

Servable

Servable is software that helps businesses flexibly manage and pay teams of independent contractors. I met co-founders Shelby and Zach after an introduction from Justin Halloran, a local angel investor. We meet weekly, and I advise them on everything from big-picture issues like product strategy down to technical seo recruiting, their tech stack, and even nitty gritty problems that are stumping their engineers.

About a month ago we were chatting about Jobs-To-Be-Done and other product management techniques, and of course, Design Sprints came up. Having gotten them excited about Design Sprints, I encouraged them to attend a Design Sprint essentials workshop I was hosting during Startup Week. They attended the workshop, and were ready to run a Design Sprint.

They decided to focus on their event vendors using the rapid prototyping tools from day 4 and day 5 of the Sprint process. They already had an idea of how they wanted to solve the problem and were hoping to learn more about how customers and prospects responded to this potential solution. I referred them to Eli Wood, the founder of Reagent Design, an Austin based Design firm. Eli worked with them over a weekend to adopt some Design Sprint exercises to produce a prototype and quickly put it to the test.

“Using this augmented Design Sprint process and getting user feedback in 3 days was a game changer for us. Observing users in this way feels like a jump to the future and has fundamentally changed the way we prioritize our roadmap.” — Zach Fragapane, Head of Product, Servable

On the first day, Eli and his partner Jeff came over to the Servable offices, and they built a user journey map with a focus on a small business owner who manages teams of independent contractors. From there, they hand sketched wireframes starting with the first customer touch all the way through activation for a total of 25 frames. In the afternoon, they selected the three most critical frames and created solution sketches for them. Overnight, Eli and Jeff created high fidelity mockups. On the second day, they reviewed mocks, made improvements, and then stitched them into a prototype.

If you are an early stage startup and looking to more quickly validate your solutions and generate new ideas rapidly, consider adopting some or all of the Design Sprint exercises. While a 5-day Design Sprint is ideal in many cases, you may find value in using the prototyping exercises in a more ad-hoc manner until you graduate to needing the more extended process.

The post Design Sprints for Early Stage Companies appeared first on Voltage Control.

I first learned about the Google SPRINT framework in early 2017 from Matt Randall, the founder of Twyla. Google Ventures (GV) funded Twyla’s series A and GV worked directly with Twyla’s management team to implement the framework to find solutions for some of their most critical challenges. The results were impressive, and I immediately decided I wanted to apply the framework at my company Boundless.

I quickly realized that it could be challenging to do it for the first time without any experience or guidance from GV. Fortunately, Matt introduced me to his CTO at Twyla, Douglas Ferguson, who had been responsible for running several of their SPRINTs. Douglas was just breaking out on his own to start a consulting practice Voltage Control focused on helping companies apply the framework, so the timing was perfect. We scheduled our first SPRINT in July of 2017.

In short, the process requires 7 people with a wide array of skill sets to be locked in a room for 5 full days to find an answer to an important challenge. Douglas helped me identify the right combination of people internally and I asked six people on our team to clear their schedule for a week. They all asked “What problem are we trying to solve?”, and my answer was: “I don’t exactly know yet. That’s what the first day is all about”. Here’s an overview of the the very structured schedule for a SPRINT:

Day 1 — Map out how you conduct business today. Interview experts in your industry and identify one critical area of pain or opportunity.

Day 2 — Team members individually (no group think allowed!) identify potential solutions to the problem, and everyone votes on the best solutions.

Day 3 — Create a detailed solution sketch for the selected solution.

Day 4 — Build a prototype of the selected solution (yes you can do it in one day!)

Day 5 — Test the solution with real customers and record their feedback.

Douglas helped us prep for the week (it’s important to have all the right tools and supplies in place), and we kicked off the week with a lot of excitement. The morning of Day 1 made it clear that we has several potential areas we could focus on, and after talking to several industry experts that first afternoon, one area emerged as the clear leader.

One surprising side benefit to the process was that the expert interviews lead to several other insights that we did not have time to cover in the SPRINT, but that were still really beneficial to our business. One insight helped us improve our sales process to enterprise accounts, which lead to us kicking off a separate strategic initiative after the week was over.

The issue we decided to focus on was around buyer self-service, and how we could use our data insights and intelligent search to make smart suggestions and help buyers do more things on their own.

The entire team were pumped up about the concept. During Day 2 we came up with a bunch of great ideas on how to help buyers find the perfect product for what they were trying to accomplish. We selected one, and during Day 3 we sketched out a compelling vision of how an intelligent platform could help simplify life for our buyers. Day 4 was a frenetic race to the finish line trying to create a compelling prototype in just one day. In parallel to the prototype building we recruited actual customers from different companies, and were able to find a nice selection of folks with buyer responsibilities in different size companies and industries.

So by the end of Day 4 we had created a clickable mock-up of a new exciting solution. To give our test customers a fair frame of reference we decided to test the new prototype compared to our existing platform. To make it an apples-to-apples comparison, we created a clickable prototype our our current platform too, so that one would not feel more robust and complete than the other.

Finally it was time to share our vision with actual buyers! We were excited, feeling confident that buyers would love our new ideas. I was doing the customer interviews, and the whole team were watching from another room, video taping the whole thing, including screen capture of the interaction with our prototypes.

The first interview went okay. The buyer liked the look-and-feel of the new solution, but did not quite engage with the new functionality the way we had hoped. We hoped it was an anomaly. The rest of them would probably love it. They did not. The next buyer really did not like what we had created. She said she would never use it. She would not trust the recommendations the system made. She wanted to search on her own, and not answer a bunch of questions. Buyer 3 felt the same way. We started to feel deflated. Then buyer 4 and 5 had similar opinions. Nobody really liked what we created.

There was a sinking feeling in the team room. We had just spent a week of our valuable time creating something that our customers universally did not like.

We had planned a happy hour on Friday to celebrate the completion of the SPRINT, but nobody felt like celebrating. We were tired, spent, disappointed. Time to go home for the weekend.

However, over that weekend, I started to realize that another consistent theme had emerged: all the buyers actually liked our existing solution. So while we didn’t get the answer we were expecting and hoping for, we got a potentially even better one: the solution that we already have actually does a really good job addressing the buyers real needs.

It’s okay if customers don’t like what you created. Don’t take it as a failure. Celebrate the negative feedback as much as the positive

As we debriefed with Douglas and the entire team that following Monday, we realized that we actually had (at least) three big wins coming out of the week:

1. We realized that we should not build what we prototyped. If we had not done the SPRINT we may have prioritized this development effort, and spent a ton of time and money building something that nobody wanted.
2. Our existing solution is good. Buyers like it. It provides what they need. We identified several smaller usability issues that we can address quickly to make it even better.
3. We got a bunch of other insights from both the experts on Monday and the Customers on Friday. Several of them have resulted in smaller platform changes or process improvements already, and we are going to use these type of customer interviews consistently going forward.

We also learned a few valuable lessons to apply in the next SPRINT.

1. When you select customers for the interview, try to find customers as similar to each other as possible. You will get statistically significant results with only 5 customers (with 87% accuracy), but only if the customers you talk to are similar in nature. We deliberately selected different types of customers with different needs, thinking that would provide more diversity, and thus ended up with too few data points for each customer type. Focus on your most important customer segment for your SPRINT. You can always test on other segments later.
2. It’s okay if customers don’t like what you created. Don’t take it as a failure. Celebrate the negative feedback as much as the positive. Now you can move on to building something they really like!

When all was said and done, the SPRINT was a very valuable exercise. I recommend it to any company. I also recommend bringing in an expert like Douglas to help. He helped make sure that we stayed on track, that we didn’t get stuck, or went down into rat holes and lose momentum.

If you have questions about the process, please don’t hesitate to contact me or Douglas.

The post Surprising insights from our first SPRINT: the value of negative feedback appeared first on Voltage Control.

At Twyla I had the opportunity to facilitate Design Sprints with the masters at Google Ventures. This experience was transformational for me and the Twyla team so I’ve created a meetup to share this experience with the Austin product community.

If you are planning to have a design sprint, have conducted one in the past, or are just simply intrigued by the process, join us at the next Design Sprint Austin meetup!

Please reach out directly to me, if you are interested in sharing your experiences with the group.

The post Hello World appeared first on Voltage Control.