innovation

Minimum viable mobile app

I was recently challenged by a product owner on how you can deliver a minimum viable mobile app.  Her concern was that she only gets one shot at launching her app on the app store, customer feedback is gold dust and the last thing she wants is to launch a half baked product that will result in a low customer rating.  Good stuff may come later, but if the first tranche of customers rate the product poorly, the product has already failed.

This is a valid concern, however when you review product feedback that consumers give, it is usually around the experience they have with the product shipped, i.e. issues with what it does, rather that what it does not.  Go to the app store and look for apps with really bad reviews. People complain that an app isn’t usable, is buggy, is hard to use (or is just plain ‘bad’). They don’t complain that it doesn’t have features.

Jason furnell recently blogged about the launch of the REA iPhone app. This was built with close collaboration between designers and developers, launching a Minimum Viable Product Minimum Delightful Product  that after a week was #1 in the Top Free Lifestyle Apps Category.

Getting the basic product right and introducing new features ‘enhancements’ later is preferable to releasing a fully featured product that fails to delight.

Act like a startup

I recently presented at the AOP Forum on secrets of product success.  Twenty minutes to get through sixty two slides was fun; part of me tells me I need to slow down, be more considered and reduce the messages I want to get across.  Another part of me just says meh!

I ended the presentation with the below takeaway slide that is worth replaying here.  I believe that product owners need to start thinking more like entrepreneurs and their seedling product ideas more like start ups.

Think big: Start with a big picture, a vision, where you want to get to. This should be unconstrained thinking, divergent thinking before converging on the specifics.

Start small: Easier said than done, but this is the getting to a minimum viable product.

Fail fast: Get stuff to market quickly, test with your consumers and be ready to fail. If you fail early you fail cheaply. Realise that you have customers, users who are already passionate advocates of your brand. Take them on the journey of development with you. You not assume that everything you need to take to your customers must be polished and perfect. Don’t underestimate the positivity than can be accrued by engaging users in the development process

Grow success: Do not see the end of the project as the end of road. Getting to a first release is only the first step. Successful product owners will be engaged in a virtuous cycle of continuous design and continuous delivery. They can come up with an idea, a new feature and get it in to production in hours, or days rather than months.

Letting go is the hardest thing

Tim Brown from IDEO gave the audience at his TED Talk a simple exercise. He asked the audience to draw a picture of the person sat next to them. He gave them a minute to do so. He then asked them to show their pictures. “Sorry” was the stock reaction as the sketches were revealed. They had an inhibition on showing their work. When it comes to creativity, as we move beyond childhood we take on board inhibitions and feel more uncomfortable sharing our creative efforts unless we perceive them to be ready or any good. Getting a visual designer to share her work in progress is a challenge. We fear what others will think if our “deliverable” is not ready, is not finished or polished. We fear setting expectations, we fear disappointing, we kill our creativity with fear.

So we are uncomfortable at letting others into our personal creative process. Now take this to the organisation, to the enterprise and creative genocide is abound. Like the Head of Digital who had 130 different stakeholders to socialise the Organisation’s new website designs with. Enter the HiPPO. The Highest Paid Person’s Point Of view. And with a few of those on board you get design by committee and design mediocrity. Or the client who refuses to engage with customers or end users in the early stages of the design process in fear of what they might think. A fear of setting expectations, a fear that their competitors might see what they are up to. Killing their creativity with fear.

Letting go is the hardest thing. But it can also pay great rewards.

On 27th October people coming out of arrivals at Heathrow airport were greeted by singers and dancers and general merriment. As an ad campaign for T-Mobile by Saatchi & Saatchi it was inspired, creative but not without risk. All the members of the public filmed had to sign a release form, agreeing to their being used in the ad. What if they didn’t? But they did. Whilst meticulously planned, the success of the ad is in the general public. T-Mobile got over any fear they may have had of the unknown and let go of the product to let the crowd create. It’s an uplifting piece, and successful too; their youTube page has had over 5.5 million views. And to the bottom line? The ad saw a 12% rise in sales the week after airing.

Nothing and nobody is indispensable

The cemeteries are full of people who thought they were indispensable.

If you didn’t turn up to work tomorrow, if you never came back, what would happen? I mean, what would really happen?

The world wouldn’t stop.

Can you hand on heart say it would be the end of your organisation? So you may be the ‘key man dependency’, but is that your ego making you think that? (OK, so I once worked with an organisation who had one of those. Their system was written in some obscure language that only one person knew its inner workings. He spent his weekends base jumping. Our job was to migrate the data to a new system to alleviate this risk).

When was the last time you took a holiday? Been too frightened to because you fear everything will fall to peices when you’ve gone? Get over it. Take a vacation, Nothing will change whilst you are away. You’ll get back and nothing will have changed.

What is indispensable?

OK. Now think bigger. History is full of organisations who thought their products and processes were indispensable. Of the FT30, (the oldest index of share prices started in 1935) only one company (Tate & Lyle)is still there after seventy five years.

What do you think would really happen if your organisation ditched all that process and product baggage it held onto so closely? What would really happen? Are your current ways of working really indispensable?  How about your business model?  Maybe time to do some scenario planning to ask precisely those questions?

<Personal Interlude>  Eight months ago I was a lazy tub of lard. I could barely swim the length of a pool, my bicycle had two flat tyres and I’d be breathless and beaten after running 50m to catch the train. I looked for a goal, something that was outside my comfort zone, my frame of reference. I entered the London triathlon, sprint distance. Completing a triathlon became an unobtainable dream (you have to understand that I went to Loughhborogh University, home to the Jocks, [and a rather good Human Sciences department and Ergonomics course, hence my attendance there], I felt totally alienated from all the sporty types, and triathlon represented the pinnacle of pointless exercise and sport). And slowly started training for it. Running, I hated. My first swimming lesson I discovered the need to breath. Cycling, I discovered the ride to work scheme and bought myself a decent bike. I put myself on a change programme. A programme of gradual change. Baby steps. And a few weeks ago it all came together at the London Triathlon; the swimming, the cycling and the running. A multi-disciplinary effort, a radical change to my being. And I completed it. In a not overly embarrassing time; in fact I can in the top half. but better still, I ended it charged up with how much faster I could have gone, now that I know what it is like. I paced myself too slowly. I’m buzzing on triathlon. </Personal Interlude>

Organisations I see are like the tub of lard I was. Full of inertia, and reasons why they can’t change, why they can’t be triathletes.

Yeah, wouldn’t it be great to be an Apple… But we just don’t have a Steve Jobs.  Reasons why you can’t rather than inspiration, spirit and belief in why you can.

There is nothing in your organisation that is indispensable. There is no reason why you “can’t” other than your own myopia and inertia and inability to dream the future and train and practice to make it happen. All you need to do is get over the inertia and make it happen.

How to promote yourself

A while ago Alec Brownstein was looking for a job in the advertising industry. He bought a bunch of adwords to appear next to the names of executives in companies he wanted to work for, and waited for them to google their names. Cool thinking that got him a job.

something similar happened with ThoughtWorks this week. On the ThoughtWorks facebook page a little ad appeared, “Dear ThoughtWorks, My name is Scott and I want to work with you”.

Dear ThoughtWorks, my name is scott and I want to work with you

Clicking on the link opened a microsite dedicated to why ThoughtWorks should employ Scott Robinson.  ThoughtWorkers soon picked up on this and twitter came alive with #dearscott and then this and this.  He’ll still go through the intense recruitment process, but another great example for using Social Media to promote yourself and get a job.

Customer driven innovation

People talk about innovation but how do you make it happen? How do you engage your customers in the process; how do you rapidly move beyond ideas on the whiteboard to actually implementing them; how do you introduce tests and learn to continuously improve, or provide comfort in failing fast?

Combining agile software development and design thinking, it is possible to go from concept to cash at speed, placing the customer at the heart of the process.

This presentation that I have recently given at an Ovum symposium and the Shaw Innovation Mashup introduces some of these ideas and practical ways of making customer-driven innovation happen.

Buck the trend

“Mary Queen of Shops”.  Mary Portas gets rave reviews, helping small, struggling retailers find their feet again.  She is very successful and her formula makes for good TV.  I’ve only seen the one programme, a couple of weeks ago where she was invited to help a bakery in Raynes Park; a place I know well having gone to school just round the corner.  The owner, Angela, was stuck in the past, selling white bread and iced cakes from the seventies.  It seemed she beleived that Mary would revamp the interior design of her shop not overhaul her whole product set.  The editing didn’t help her, she came accross as a rude and throroughly unpleasent woman.  If her business goes up the wall, serves her right.

Yet reading reviews in the run up to the programme made me reflect on this judgement.  What was being proscribed was formulaic and too be expected.  Focus upon specialty breads go for the chattering middle class market, bring Borough Market and its bread stalls to the Raynes Park suburban semis.  The reviews reveal that actually the bakery is well thought of in the community.

Maher bakery is simply one of the great family establishments in South West London. It’s run by the delightful Angela,who is an example to all of us. Long may it be serve and entertain its happy customers for another 36 years!!…….

There is a market for something other than what the current trend dictates.  There is clearly a demand for the experience that the Maher bakery offers.  Speciality breads are the easy answer, not necessarily the right answer.

The fact that it is old fashioned, the egg and bacon baps are the best in SW anywhere and the friendly atmosphere are exactly the reasons why it is so popular and always busy on Saturday mornings…says we who have been coming for more than 15 years.

It reminds me of the working with retail banks in the dot com era, predictions of the death of branch banking and the closure of the high street banks.  My colleagues poured scorn on me when I tried to defend the branch bank (something I had direct experience of, having spent time working in them); other than the poor and elderly (who  were not profitable to the bank), why maintain a costly, dated branch network?  Times change and branch banking is becoming fashionable again.   Nat West have just launched a new campaign with 14 committments to “becoming Britains most helpful bank”.  Commitment Number one is to “open more branches on Saturdays and extend the opening hours in [their] busiest branches” and they aim to “support the communities in which [they] live and work”.  That is what high street banks used to do.  Until someone like Mary Queen of Shops persuaded them to get on board the new cargo cult.  And now the new banking innovation is to throw all that cargo cult thinking away and take inspiration from the past.

Sometimes innovation is bucking the trend.  Like the Raynes Park bakery that does what it has always done; do it well, and continuously exceed your customer expectations.

Follow fast

I’ll pick on a random industry. Let’s say you are an airline. Part of your digital strategy includes a refresh to your website (maybe you were inspired by this presentation I did a while ago on digital for airlines!). You’ve built a business case and secured funding for the project.  First things first, you get a design agency in and set them to work.

Some sort of competitor analysis is performed that proabably includes features and functions that “we like”, (for example ‘the tactile sliders in kayak.com. We like!  And an iPhone-like coverflow, got to have one of those…)

The information architect takes these ideas away and starts building wireframes and the creative team produce designs that bring these wires to life.  The team come up with lots of new, innovative ideas.  This is after all a ‘refresh’, and ‘innovation’ was probably one of the words in the brief.  The creative is fresh and ‘of the moment’, the IA has developed some new interaction models that are unique and compelling.  The business is sold on a new, innovative way of interacting with their customers, something that no one else does and will blow all their competitors away.

I’ve been bouncing ideas around with Luke Barrett (and because he doesn’t blog, I’ll write them down for him) around this approach; specifically the value of innovation against ‘follow fast’.

Luke reminded me of a project we worked on together many years ago. Before we started designing webpages we did usability testing. We did usability testing of the competitors, and of sites that were getting a lot of press as ‘innovative’.  This was at a time that boo.com had just started and the client were talking about how cool an avatar would be on their site, just like boo. We put people in front of boo.com and watched them suffer. Clearly the avatar was an idea good on paper, terrible on execution.  So we killed it.  Not on our site.

We observed what worked and what didn’t on a multitude of sites with real users. Then, like magpies, we took what was good and worked. Nothing particularly innovative, (let other people do that), we took the best of what existed and delivered on that.

So back to our airline. How about a different approach where they start by usability testing their competitors. Ask participants to book tickets on competitor websites. Understand what interaction elements work, what don’t.

Those kayak sliders, cool for geeks (maybe), but how about the target audience that flies and buys online with you?  It may not be cutting edge design, but Does a drop down work better?

The coverflow may be cool on your iPhone, but how successful is it for people seeking a holiday?  A static list has worked for websites till now (and it wasn’t so long ago that horizontal scrolling was the Great Taboo), just because Apple do something that looks cool for a particular purpose on their products, doesn’t mean you have to follow by scrapping your navigation.

There are no prizies for (design) innovation (other than for some award that the design agency may covet). The only metric that counts is conversion rates and the ability of the website to deliver the business case. Leave others to do the crazy innovation stuff, let others go through the dip when they launch new features, make sure you have got the platform and expertise right and be ready to follow fast.

Dinosaur thinking

When Autotrader developed their cool and innovative iPhone app, they presumedly never paused to think what the DVLA would think.

Let’s say you are waiting at the traffic lights and you see a car you like and you think to yourself ‘I’d like one of those’ With the Autrotrader app all you need do was take a photo of the reg plate.  From that, details of the make and model would appear and similar cars for sale close to you your current proximity would be displayed.  Sadly, this functionality has been canned.  Autotrader say:

The DVLA has requested that Auto Trader remove the image recognition element of the iPhone application. Although the app in no way infringes data privacy regulations, the ‘snap’ function conflicts with the DVLA’s code of ethics, as it allows consumers to capture images of vehicle license plates.

This is the same government agency with ethics that enables it to sell drivers details.  That’s an aside.  Perhaps the DVLA’s  is more concerned with avoiding the trouble they got over Castrol using number plate recognition for interactive advertising.

With localisation being championed as one of the hottest topics of 2010 combined with the ubiquitous use of camera phones, it is clear that technology and the opportunities that it brings are moving at a faster pace than the ‘public opinion’ (read Daily Mail Opinion) that the DVLC is clearly running scared of.
So what?

So when you are envisioning and playing innovation games, have a session where you play devils advocate and tease out what angry from Tunbridge wells would think.  Kill your idea as many ways as you can.  Can you identify risks you’d otherwise missed (such as DVLA’s dinosaur thinking), or does it uncover new ideas or alternative ways of doing things (to bring out a cheesy quote from Benjamin Franklin “out of adversity comes opportunity”).  There is of course always another alternative,  to leave the innovation to others, for others to face the wrath of Government quangos and follow fast.  But that is a blog post for another time.

This much I know

The Observer magazine has a feature titled “This much I know“. It takes an interview with a celebrity who “share the lessons life has taught them” and distills it down into a number of key statements. There is probably some milage in this as an innovation game to play when you are looking for ideas and insights, hopes and fears from a newly formed team.

Ask team members to write statements “this much I know” on post-it notes with Sharpies (because you can’t write many words like that) and see what you get.

For structure you may consider using different coloured post-its to represent PEST themes: Political, Social, Environmental and Technical, or how about CRIT:

  • C: Competitive landscape
  • R: Return on investment
  • I: Internal politics
  • T: Technology.

So for example…

This much I know

Acme.com recently redesigned their website. The  forums and twitter were full of positive comments (C)
People will pay for content. It’s just got to be priced right, relevant and timely to them and easy to pay  (R)
Getting things done here is a nightmare. The process to get approval for any new project is designed to be hard (I)
We’ve got problems with our CMS. Our license is due to expire and the vendor is trying to get us to upgrade. We don’t know what to do (T)

Getting these ideas on the wall will help participants articulate their thoughts and provide a framework for understanding the current reality and mining for new ideas and opportunities.

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