While we follow the 5 Day Design Sprint closely, we also iterate on the process. Earlier this year, we tried a few new things on prototyping day and, after some thoughtful iteration, we are delighted by something we uncovered — specifically, the evolution of the Stitcher role and the tools they need to succeed.

In the Design Sprint, it’s important that your entire Sprint team actively contribute towards the prototype. Typically, we assign many of the jobs identified in the original Sprint book, such as Maker, Writer, Asset Collector, and Interviewer. But, one role that we have seen evolve the most is the Stitcher, which is the person who typically brought all the assets together in InVision. But lately, we’ve seen this role grow, change, and utilize some handy tools that we’d like to share. Read on to find out what the Stitcher 2.0 looks like!

The Stitcher 2.0

In order for your makers to stay heads down on creating the prototype, we’ve found that it’s critical to have one person responsible for organizing and prioritizing all of the content and feedback.

In this way, our Stitcher is much like the “scrum master” for the prototype. They make sure that tasks are moving along (I describe our Kanban board below) and that all assets are organized in a way that is easy for the makers to pull into the prototype.

The Stitcher 2.0 is much like the “scrum master” for the prototype.

It is especially helpful if the Stitcher has access and is able to make edits to the prototype. This will ease the burden on the makers as the stitcher can drop edits in along the way.

PROTIP: While it may be tempting for the Stitcher to edit the copy as it is coming in, we discourage this and ask that s/he trust the team.

Kanban Boards are Essential

From the beginning, we have used a Kanban board during prototyping so that we have a visual overview of all tasks and who is responsible for each task. Usually, we have used a physical Kanban, made on the whiteboard. The Stitcher uses this tool to make sure everything is moving along and who to ask for an asset.

Kanban: a Japanese manufacturing system in which the supply of components is regulated through the use of an instruction card sent along the production line. From Japanese, Kanban is literally translated as sign board or visual signal.

From the very first time we introduced it, the Kanban was a big hit. It kept everyone engaged and they all loved pitching in and doing their part. As is often the case, this new innovation came with its own baggage. Now that we have numerous people creating and sharing copy, icons, images, video, stats, and data, the makers were getting overwhelmed by never-ending email threads. Not only was it a nightmare to scroll through, but it was also impossible to tell which version was authoritative.

Our Experiment with Google Docs

We experimented for a time with using Google Docs to allow the team to seamlessly collaborate and to have one source of truth for versioning.

Unfortunately, Google Docs proved to have two issues of its own: first, it compresses images, which makes them unusable for prototypes and second, many of our enterprise clients block Google Docs. We needed to find something different for organization.

Mural for the Win

We are now using Mural to organize our prototyping efforts, which works wonderfully. Not only does it support collaborating and sharing the copy (and uncompressed images!), we can easily build a Kanban board with virtual Post-its.

When the team is conformable with Mural we have them all join and drop their work into the workspace. Otherwise, the Stitcher will collect copy and assets via email or other team communication tools. Once in Mural, the Stitcher organizes the assets by screen to seamlessly integrate with the prototype. Typically, the Stitcher will do a few passes with the team to make sure everything is accurate in Mural and before spending the time to update the prototype.

Another fantastic thing about Mural is that is quickly becoming the tool of choice for enterprise UX teams and is an approved application so we don’t run into firewall or other security issues.

PROTIP: Name the cells of your storyboard with letters and numbers for better organization. We label our columns with numbers and our rows with letters. This allows us to refer to cells as A1, B4, C3, P0, etc. for tasks and asset organization to avoid confusion or long, unwieldy names.

The Stitcher & Playbacks

Also in the spirit of including everyone, we have regular readouts with the team during interview days. This helps to gather feedback along the way. The Stitcher also has a role here — he or she also collects feedback so that the maker(s) will have an organized and prioritized list of changes to the prototype.

Thanks for reading about how we’ve evolved the role of the Stitcher in Design Sprints. Please reach out if you have any questions or ideas to share!

The post We Can’t Live Without This Person During Prototyping appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the end of the article for links to others in the series.

Greg Satell believes in the “hair on fire” test. According to this bestselling author, speaker, and innovation adviser, if your customers have their “hair on fire” for your product, there’s a good chance you’ve got something great. If you’re at all like me, this is such a vibrant visual that it’s hard to get out of your mind. My brain starts turning, trying to think of companies and examples that fit this model. (Share your thoughts in the comments!)

Greg has many memorable things to say about the innovation and business space, so I was happy to interview him over the phone recently; below I’ve pulled out some of the highlights from our conversation.

A little about Greg first: he spent most of his adult life building and managing media businesses in Eastern Europe and spent 15 years living and working in Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and Turkey. He returned to the United States in 2011 and served as SVP — Strategy & Innovation at Moxie Interactive, a division of Publicis Groupe.

Today, through his advising work, he helps leading businesses overcome disruption through impactful programs and powerful tools that he developed through researching the world’s best innovators. He is a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review, Inc., and other publications and recently published his first book, Mapping Innovation. I also recommend checking out the blog he started in 2009, initially to share his experiences in Eastern Europe, where he writes insightful articles with excellent titles like, Here’s Why No One Cares About Your Ideas and The Silicon Valley Myth.

No One Strategy To Innovation

While Greg is happy to define innovation at a high level (“A novel solution to an important problem.”), he feels that one of the biggest pitfalls is trying to put innovation in a box. He shared: “One of the biggest traps I see people falling into is that they treat innovation as a monolith and lock themselves into one particular strategy. Innovation is about solving problems and there are as many ways to innovate as there are problems to solve.”

“Innovation is about solving problems and there are as many ways to innovate as there are problems to solve.” -Greg Satell

In other words, there is no cookie-cutter answer to what is the right method or approach to innovation. “All too often, people pick one strategy and say, ‘This is the way you innovate!’ because that’s where they’ve had success before or that’s how they saw others have success. It works for a while, but eventually they come up against a problem that doesn’t fit and they get stuck. Usually, they end up doubling down on the initial approach and things just get worse.”

According to Greg, the answer for this is employing a variety of approaches to innovation: “most really good innovators do.” He went on: “I don’t think you can choose just one innovation strategy, whether it’s open innovation or lean startup or whatever it is, and say this is the way you innovate.”

“I don’t think you can choose just one innovation strategy, whether it’s open innovation or lean startup…and say this is the way you innovate.” — Greg Satell

When asked to share some of the companies that fit that mold, he said: “You can name the usual suspects: Google, Tesla, etc. But the company that impresses me most is IBM, because it’s been consistently innovating for a century. Even today, when the cloud has just decimated its core business, it is on the forefront of next wave technologies like AI and new computing architectures.”

Don’t Only Design Think

Continuing with the theme of taking multiple avenues to innovation, Greg also talked about design thinking, certainly one of the darlings of the moment. While he believes in it, he doesn’t see it as a foolproof silver bullet: “Design thinking is a great approach that people are really passionate about. It’s had tremendous success and when you look at it, it makes a ton of sense. Start by understanding the needs of the end user and then iterate towards a solution. But then you read Clayton Christensen’s work about disruptive innovation and he shows that’s how good businesses fail. They focus too much on their customers’ needs and fail to see a change in the basis of competition.”

“Design thinking doesn’t hit every problem right.”-Greg Satell

In other words Greg said: “Design thinking doesn’t hit every problem right.” As a design thinker myself, I think it’s an essential thing to remember. We can’t get too attached to one mode of working as the “correct” way of working or getting to novel solutions. There are many ways to get there.

Exploration Not Optimization

I asked Greg to talk about well-intentioned things he’s seen backfire in this space and he talked about the traps of optimization, such as “…trying to standardize innovation practices.” This extends his idea that we can’t just practice one design methodology — things become too rigid.

According to Greg: “One thing that’s absolutely crucial, but that most organizations neglect, is exploration. Far too many firms focus too much on optimization and neglect to explore. GE is a great example right now. They’ve run their business super well, but haven’t really invented anything since the 1970s.”

I love Greg’s straightforward but extremely powerful directive: businesses need to foster exploration. “It’s a very simple equation,” he said, “If you don’t explore you won’t discover and if you don’t discover you won’t invent. And if you don’t invent, you will be disrupted eventually. It’s just a matter of time. Probably the biggest mistake that most companies make in terms of innovation is they do too much “D” and not enough “R.” They they fail to explore.”

“Every single organization I saw that invested in exploration found that it paid off eventually and it paid off big.” -Greg Satell

And since we know that most businesses won’t do anything unless they know that it’s ultimately good for their bottom line, Greg has definitely seen financial reward in this approach: “Every single organization I saw that invested in exploration found that it paid off eventually and it paid off big. The ROI was very attractive even given all the blind alleys and wrong turns.”

Ideas from Left Field

Another learning from our conversation that is related to exploration is the concept that great ideas often come from unexpected places: “There is some very good research that came out from Brian Uzzi from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. In one paper he analyzed over 17 million scientific papers and what he found was that the most highly cited work almost always came from a team of highly dedicated specialists in a particular field working with somebody in some completely random place — like a bunch of psychologists bringing in a physicist. Usually it’s some random insight that cracks open a good problem.”

“Usually it’s some random insight that cracks open a good problem.” -Greg Satell

Another example of great ideas coming out of “left field” is the story Greg shared about the creation of Innocentive, the company that crowd-sources solutions to major problems. It was started by Alph Bingham and Aaron Schachtout of Eli Lilly who figured out that they had a lot of problems they couldn’t solve: “problems weren’t getting solved by people within the field in which they arose.” Innocentive eventually spun out into its own company and, according to Greg, they’ve found that: “about a third of the problems get solved, usually from people in some adjacent field.”

The “Hair on Fire” Test

Back to the idea I talked about at the start. To Greg,“…to truly change the world, you need to build for the few, not the many. Find a customer that wants or needs your product so badly they almost literally have their hair on fire.”

What’s an example of this? Greg talked about Tesla and how they approached the market with a luxury vehicle instead of a mass-market one: “The Silicon Valley set were customers with their hair on fire. They wanted to be seen as stylish and eco-friendly, so were willing to put up with the inevitable limitations of electric cars. They didn’t have to depend on them for their commute or to pick the kids up at soccer practice. As long as the car was cool enough, they would buy it.”

He went on to explain more about what he means by this evocative concept: “Somebody who wants or needs something so bad that either they already have a budget for it or they’ve scotch taped together or some kind of stopgap solution that doesn’t really work. My rubric’s always been: ‘Do they have the problem, know they have it and are they are actively seeking a solution?” These are three simple questions that we should all put in our back pocket when we are looking at problem areas and solutions.

A Framework for Innovation

In conclusion, if you’re in a spot where you need to innovate in your workplace, I recommend checking our Greg’s book Mapping Innovation,which he wrote to give managers a “strategic playbook for navigating a disruptive age.” It includes a framework or “matrix” for innovation that he describes as “forward looking”: “One of the problems I think with a lot of the innovation frameworks is is they’re descriptive rather than prescriptive. They look at what happened in the past and they try and categorize it, which is often interesting in its own right. But it’s not always very helpful.”

Instead, his framework (seen above and in the book) “… helps you innovate, not rate other innovators. The Matrix is to help you find a strategy to solve your problem not to tell you if you’re better or worse than anybody else.”

Thanks for reading about my conversation with Greg. I hope you enjoyed it and stay tuned for more articles with innovation though leaders.

If you want to read more perspectives from innovation experts, check out my articles about Kellee M. Franklin, Gary Hoover, Peter Nicholson, Kerry Ruppand Jake Knapp.

The post What Are Your “Hair on Fire” Ideas? appeared first on Voltage Control.

A Design Sprint is a focused, five-day process to quickly gather insights on your users, prototype ideas and validate them. I could regale you with countless anecdotes about the benefits of Design Sprints; but there is also some solid data to back it up as well. According to IBM, design thinking research can lead to a 75% reduction in design & delivery time, often reducing an 8 month project to 3 or 4 months. Additionally, they have found that the number of defects goes down by 50% with this type of up-front work. (If you want to know more about Sprint generally, check out my article here.)

While most documented examples of Sprints are for consumer software products, the techniques apply to other products and services. For example, they are a great way to conduct the initial discovery or ideation phase of any project. They are also an effective tool when pivoting or at each gate in a stage gate project. It’s also an effective way gather requirements.

If you’re interested in a Sprint or want to hire an outside facilitator to run yours (it’s always a good idea to bring in fresh eyes so you can focus on outcomes, not process), but are having trouble convincing yourself or others to invest, here are my thoughts on why Design Sprints are a no-brainer investment for any company.

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

— Steve Jobs

Benefit #1: Get User Feedback Before It’s Too Late

Sprints help build products people will actually use. Have you ever worked on a product or project that never went anywhere? Or that your users just didn’t like? What if you could increase your confidence in product-market fit? A Design Sprint can help you do just that.

In a few short days, a Design Sprint will lead your team to the creation of a rapid prototype that you can test with your users and get immediate feedback. Compare this to the time and effort it takes to build a new feature (or entire product!). With a Design Sprint, you never have to worry about getting user feedback too late. Get it quickly and make more informed decisions that will lead to greater success down the line.

Benefit #2: Visibility & Alignment

One of the many things I love about leading Design Sprints is seeing diverse, multitalented teams come together to take on their challenge; it often breaks down boundaries between different parts of an organization. This starts on the first day of the Sprint, when the team digs into the user insights and research together. By unpacking all of this information as a collective, the entire team suddenly has visibility into the same data points. These insights are incredibly important to aligning the team on a common goal.

Alignment is also encouraged by the small and focused team that works on a Sprint. In my Sprints, I typically try to limit the direct participants to seven. (However, there ways that we work to involve more of the team when necessary.) Team alignment is so important for speeding up development and design post-Sprint, as well as improving communication. Everyone will understand the same business goals from the start. An added bonus to all of this is that your team will leave your Design Sprint more bonded and connected by a highly meaningful and impactful experience.

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Benefit #3: Foster a Culture of Innovation

Many companies today are looking for the innovation silver bullet and how to provide the structure and tools that will allow their teams to discover the next big thing. Design Sprints are a great tool to insert into your innovation program. They are well suited because they are lightweight and deliver infectious outcomes.

Many clients already know they should be rapid prototyping but due to a variety of reasons they aren’t currently doing it. Often, it is because they are victims of the status quo and simply stuck in their old ways of doing things. They fear the level of effort it may required to adopt these new rituals. When management invests in a Design Sprint, it sends a clear signal to the team that they have agency to take on these type of innovative methodologies in their work.

There’s another aspect to how Design Sprints can foster innovation. They’re an excellent way to identify members of your team who are engaged and forward thinking and maybe even ready to take on a new challenge or leadership role. And, having gone through the Design Sprint experience, these people will be equipped to lead one themselves and/or bring these tools to their own work.

Benefit #4: Less Risk, Speed & Momentum

Think about a recent decision where you lost time and money because you went down a path that wasn’t quite right. With the help of a Design Sprint, you’ll encounter these scenarios less often. If the price tags of the potential failures or the potential successes are high, it might be worth experimenting with a Sprint. (To find out more about this, check out this article.) Through the process, some of your hypotheses will be validated, others won’t. You’ll know if you need to pivot and in which (correct) direction.

All of this means you can save yourself months of design, engineering and development costs. You’ll be able to get your product, idea or feature to market faster because you’ll be focused on the right thing.

A related benefit is that you’ll come out of your sprint with a ton of momentum surrounding your project. You’ll have a clear North Star and team excitement around the idea. You’ll even end the Design Sprint week with a concrete prototype that will serve as a visual spec for your development team. Having this prototype will help you communicate your ideas and will be another way that you’ll be able to move faster as an organization because of your Sprint.

Benefit #5: Focus

The amount of work that can be accomplished by a small team in a five day Sprint is incredible. You’ll be amazed at how productive your team can be when they have the structure of the Sprint to guide them. I truly believe what happens in a week-long sprint is easily equal to 3 or 6 months of work.

A lot of this has to do with focus, with lack of distractions. Your team is usually pulled in so many directions on an average workday. But in a Sprint, we can be (and should be), focused solely on the task at hand. At the beginning of a Sprint week, I usually tell everyone to turn their phones off and put their computers away. This mindfulness to the challenge, to our co-workers, and to coming up with a new solution, is one of the keys to encouraging new thinking.

Final Thoughts

Design Sprints can appear overwhelming, both in financial cost and opportunity cost. But what’s the real cost of continuing to do things the way you’ve always done them? Ask yourself some of these questions: What’s the cost if your project is less successful than it could be? Or if you don’t have product-market fit? Or if you build the wrong thing? Considering that Design Sprints radically reduce risk, remove orthodoxies, reduce time to market, and accelerate innovation, I believe you can’t afford not to do it.

Want to find out more about planning a Design Sprint? Read Design Sprint Resources & Planning Tools next.

The post Why a Design Sprint is Always Worth the Time & Money appeared first on Voltage Control.

I recently had the pleasure of facilitating a workshop in Angers, France. Angers is a sister city of Austin dating back to 2010. Not only is Angers a sister city, Austin has 19 other sister cities. Austin Angers Creative, AAC, is a group whose mission is to support awareness and growth of Angers artists in and beyond Austin and continue to strengthen creative collaboration between Austin and Angers. ACC promotes the development of Angers and Austin music, film, food & wine and tech industries by leveraging the existing “foodie” cultures to expose mission and events to a broader audience and through collaboration with the city governments to develop long-term structures and support systems.

AAC invited me to Angers for the screening of Correspondance as part of the Premiers Plans film festival. As I researched more about Angers, I came to realize that they have an impressive tech and startup scene, supported by the national and local governments. Angers is a part of La French Tech as Angers IOT French Tech, and many of the startups are focused on IOT. In fact, there is a for-profit IOT commercialization hub called, Cite De L’objet Connecte Angers, that supports young ventures bridge the gap between prototyping and mass production.

After speaking with Bruno from AAC about running a workshop in Angers, he introduced me to the great folks at ALDEV. ALDEV is Angers Loire Métropole’s economic development agency. ALDEV was extremely helpful especially Yoann Digue. Even though my trip came quickly on the coattails of CES, Yoann expertly organized a workshop at WeForge and brought in folks from Cite De L’objet Connecte Anger, Angers French Tech, and The Village by CA.

Ganaelle Guiter, head of international relations at the Angers mayor’s office, prepared a comprehensive itinerary for me include a day of tech meetings before my workshop. I met with ALDEV in the morning at a lovely restaurant called L’ail des ours. The team brought me up to speed on all the initiates, and it was great to hear about operation fox and the village and thank Yoann for all his hard work.

After breakfast, I met with Angers French Tech cooperative director Yannick Bourdin at Café Étienne. Yannick was a pleasure to chat with and had come with many questions about my innovation workshops and Austin’s entrepreneur community. I enjoyed hearing about Anger French Tech and their focus on IOT. They are still making some formative decisions on governess and are planning a move into the old post office. Very exciting!

After coffee, we headed to We Forge, the venue hosting my workshop. We Forge is a company that offers concrete solutions for the development of entrepreneurship and local initiatives, supporting young companies from implementation of their solutions all the way to commercial successTheir mission is to create work conditions and solutions that are propitious to the hatching of successful projects: offices, companionship, networking, and investment funds. We Forge was extremely hospitable and even offered me a desk anytime I’m in Angers. 

The workshop format is a familiar one, I’ve given this workshop many times. It is a condensed version of the 1-day train the trainer session. I’m hosting the same format during in Austin for the Austin Design Sprint Community Workshop Series on February 22nd at Capital Factory in Mobility X.

I rapidly led the attendees through all five stages of the Design Sprint process, teaching how the various steps fit together and why and how they work. I shared tips and tricks for facilitating a Design Sprint and for incorporating these techniques into everyday meetings.

The workshop format was activity-based. Attendees put pen to paper, worked with others, and gained experience with all the sprint activities. I ended with Q&A, allowing participants to learn from my experience running many Design Sprints with some of the world’s most exciting startups.

After the workshop, Yoann had arranged for an aperitif so that we could all meet and converse a bit more. I had the opportunity to talk at length with Laurent Aguenier, technical director for Cite De L’objet Connecte Angers. The “Connected Object City” supports start-ups, SMEs, ETIs and large groups at all stages of their IoT projects, from idea to industrialization. They are helping to ensure a future of IOT In Angers

I also spent some time chatting with Elodie Douaglin. director of digital innovation mission, coordinator of the Operation Fox Accelerator. Operation Fox is a program for early-stage ventures that includes funding and consists of a 5-week program. Each cohort consists of about ten startups.

Once the “foxes” graduate from operation fox, they are eligible to participate in Le Village. Le Village supports later stage startups and is at the heart of Angers entrepreneurship. Angers startups, SMEs and large groups are united in a dynamic of open-innovation and exchange. Partners include We Forge & Crédit Agricole Anjou Maine.

I traveled back to Paris on my way home to Austin and was hosted at Station F by Aymeric Penven, of ShakeUp Factory and visited Le Laptop for a nice chat with Pauline Thomas. Le laptop has 2 locations in Paris. One on Rue Geoffroy L’Angevin and is a creative space set up for workshops and events, while the other is on rue Arthur Rozier and is a co-working, gallery, and smaller collaborative space. Pauline and I met at the rue Arthur Rozier location and had a great chat ranging from workshop techniques to content marketing. Stay tuned for more about Le Laptop and Pauline, they are hosting Jake Knapp in Paris this summer and are starting a collective on medium to which I plan to contribute.

If you are in or near Austin, come 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.

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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.

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