Today, constant innovation defines our marketplace. Businesses must respond to customer expectations for better digital experiences. How do leading organisations launch successful new products and respond rapidly to external change? How do they move beyond the simple need to innovate to actively practising innovation every day?
Innovation is such a big word that people over complicate it. They put too much emphasis on producing something innovative and become attached to their ideas and outputs. Instead the opposite is required. To be innovative you need to responsive and adaptable. You need to be willing to try an idea, assess, adjust and continue moving forward.
These concepts of learning by doing, failing fast, adapting to change are all core principles behind Agile practices. They are the reason why iterative development exists – and the reason it can be so effective. Agile software development has moved from niche to mainstream, but still provides challenges for design and innovation.
We will show you how proven Agile principles and techniques can enable product innovation. Using lean thinking, fast-feedback cycles, and by taking lots of small bets we will show how to consistently speed new ideas into the market.
Join us for some stories from the trenches of Agile product delivery. Hear about the failures and successes of brave organisations that have dared to do things differently. You’ll see practical principles and techniques you could be using today.
Ben Melbourne & Diana Adorno
3. 43
Uber has taken 10% of
the Australian Taxi
market in 2 years.
getpocketbook.com/blog/the-rise-and-rise-of-uber-in-australia/
DISRUPTION
Image source: http://www.seetherealsydney.com/taxi/
9. 9
I have not failed.
I've just found
10,000 ways that
won't work.
.
Thomas A. Edison
Image source: http://imgkid.com/thomas-edison-old-light-bulb.shtml
Digital disruption has become the new normal.
New innovative technologies and business models are driving change across almost every industry.
Music, movies, retail, transport, hotels,
- these are some of the many industries where new products have changed the rules of the game.
Names such as Amazon, NetFlix, Spotify, Uber, have all become synonymous with disruptive innovation.
And, this often happens in a very short period of time, with little warning.
Let’s take Uber for example…
In just the 2 years it has been around, it has already taken a 10% share of the Australian taxi market.
That’s a massive slice of the pie for a new start-up company.
It has the traditional taxi companies scrambling to respond before they lose even more ground.
Take a second to consider how the Taxi companies are responding.
Are they?
- Improving their service
- Build better apps
- Creating new services
- Going to the courts…
What they should be doing is innovating on their own existing offering.
They should leverage their existing infrastructure and disrupting the disrupter.
Not only would they kill Uber, they would also kill their existing competition.
Now everyone feels a constant need to be innovative. It’s the holy grail that every business person strives for.
As a result, Innovation has become such a big word that people over complicate it.
They put too much emphasis on producing something innovative and they become attached to their ideas.
Instead the opposite is required.
To be innovative you need to responsive and adaptable.
You need to be willing to try an idea, assess, adjust and continue moving forward.
This is where Agile comes in. These are all key foundations of the Agile principals.
Innovation & Agile are a match made in heaven.
Together they can quickly turn your ideas into successful products.
This is how we view Product innovation…
Innovation is not just ideas, it’s ideas turned in to a reality that customers will pay for.
It’s about turning those ideas in a successful products.
More importantly, It’s about creating successful businesses on top of those products.
The clichéd view of innovation is a genius inventor having a big light bulb moment.
It’s possible, but it doesn’t usually happen that way.
Innovations are usually created by a network of ideas, built upon each other – often in unpredictable ways.
They become successful when a company is able to translate a new idea into a product or service that customers are willing to pay for.
Thomas Edison wasn’t the first person to invent a light bulb. He just improved upon other peoples ideas and commercialised it.
He was the first astute businessman to create a longer lasting light bulb and put in place a power grid.
This allowed people to use his light bulbs in their home and pay him money for the service.
And he didn’t do this overnight. He tried and failed many times over, before finding the right components that made his offering that perfect mix of desirable, viable and feasible.
With Agile we find that people often have a skewed perception of what it is and how it works.
They think is all about about speed and cutting out a lot of rigour.
Words like fast and cheap come up.
Other people think it’s all about stand-ups and cards on a wall.
For UX Designers a big misconception is there is no time for research, which isn’t true. You just need to work differently.
These all miss the point.
Agile is about a mindset and approach to the way you work.
It is all about planning to adapt, rather than sticking to a plan.
It actually requires more discipline to work this way, but it come with benefits.
The card walls and stand-ups are just the tools used to embrace the Agile principals:
Setting and working towards a vision
Working Iteratively
Cross-Functional teams
Data driven decision making
Embracing learning
Adapting to change
This is how Innovation and Agile work perfectly together.
Being innovative requires trying to lots of ideas and learning from them.
It is not a once off activity, it is a continuous, ongoing process.
Agile enables this continuous, iterative cycle, allowing to you adapt as you learn.
Together the two become a powerful approach to not just avoid being disrupted, but be the disrupter.
So how do we get there?
How do we take those principles and turn them into action?
Here’s some of the practical steps you can take.
Take everyone along for the ride.
A cross-functional team is key.
Tackle problems collaboratively.
Get everyone working together to solve them.
You need to look at the problem from different perspectives.
These different lenses are essential.
Successful products have that perfect balance of Desirability, Viability & Feasibility.
That is the sweet spot where innovation happens.
When one side is ignored that you miss out:
- Where Business & Technology dominate (like in big enterprises), often the user experience suffers.
- When Business & Design is the focus (like in advertising), solutions might not be feasible or efficient
- With Design & Technology is the focus (as in startups), ideas often don’t make money.
It’s all about finding a balance.
It’s important to understand what mode you are in - whether you are in discovery or execution mode.
The double-diamond is model created the British Design Council.
It provides a high-level framework for understanding what we are trying do.
- This process starts with a Trigger - a problem or an idea.
- Discovery is all about understanding and defining the problem.
- Execution is about exploring and building the solution.
- Both involve Divergent & Convergent thinking.
- It’s not linear. It’s iterative.
- People tend to skip Discovery
- It’s doesn’t have to be long.
They key is being deliberate about what mode you are in.
Discovery is important.
First there is a trigger.
Identify the issues and opportunities for customers?
Where are the potential opportunities that a product could solve. Getting to that vision (in the middle)
Doesn’t need to be a long process. It is light-weight, but rich.
Again the divergent and convergent thinking.
We need to be deliberate with the direction to do in first
The inspiration for need for new products, new thinking, comes from a clearly identified product, and some from a problem.
The taxi problem. There is a threat, how do we respond. We would have to some discovery to come up with ideas of how to respond.
Uber coming into the industry is forcing the Taxi industry to innovate. To respond.
We saw this with Google coming into the real estate market. Real estate.com had to respond. In turn, this made their
The first stage is discovery and the second is build
With a mult—skilled team, we can put put our technqiues on steriods. So where every possible, get more out of any activity.
both amplify the effectiveness of our techniques
And
When in Discovery mode, start by seeking to understand the problem you are trying to solve.
Explore the problem space.
Define what the problem is and who it affects.
This will usually challenge your assumptions about their needs.
It will often reframe your understanding of the problem and shift your focus.
When doing this don’t try to solve all the problems at one time.
Identify what is the first challenge to tackle and start there.
Prioritise.
You don’t need to understand absolutely every aspect of the problem space.
You need enough understanding to frame the problem and get started.
When you’re in discovery mode it is important to use rich emersion techniques.
Go out and talk to your customers.
Go observe them in their own context.
See what they say or do. Observe the problems they face.
I will show you a short video of an innovation lab that we run for Woolworths
We ran this in one of Woolworths small format stores.
This is an example of:
- a multidisciplinary team
- working in discovery mode
- using rich research techniques
- to understand a problem
I will show you a short video of an innovation lab that we run for Woolworths
We ran this in one of Woolworths small format stores.
This is an example of:
- a multidisciplinary team
- working in discovery mode
- using rich research techniques
- to understand a problem
The team setup in store.
They went to where the customer are.
They immersed themselves in the problem space.
That is what allowed them to work this way.
The way they prototyped and tested was critical.
By pairing designers and developers together they were able to build interactive prototypes.
This gave them a rich understanding of the customer needs.
To do this they chose lightweight, throw-away tools.
It wasn’t about production quality. It was about rich learning.
This allowed them to come up with ideas and build them quickly.
They collected insights as they went.
They learnt things like how people choose food to buy for meals.
They learnt that the customers were less concerned about efficiency (scanning into the basket), and more about inspiration of what to make or eat.
This reframed the problem and shifted their focus.
As they went, the whole team discussed the insights and generated more ideas.
They observed how well the first prototype worked and used those insights to fuel another iteration.
They then repeated the process.
Because they were there in context, they were able to quickly repeat the cycle.
What is the moral of this story?
Nobody likes building shelfware.
Find out what customers really want before you build it.
Once you understand the problem that your are facing,
you can switch to execution mode start looking for ways to solve it.
Don’t try to lock in the details right from the outset.
Start by creating a vision.
Give the team a flag on the hill to work towards.
Then let them explore different ways to get there.
When doing this, generate as many as you can.
Don’t just fixate on the first idea you come up with.
It’s often not the best nor the most profitable one.
Keep your options open and look for as many ideas as you can.
This is where we use divergent and convergent thinking.
It involves ‘going wide’ and exploring lots of ideas.
Then converging down to one or two refined ideas.
This is core part of the creative process.
What is different in an Agile world, is the act of doing it continually.
Ideation is not just a once off, upfront activity.
Every time you learn something new, use it as an opportunity to inspire newer, better ideas.
The next case study I’m going to share the Mobile Bank App we worked with Suncorp to build.
To start the project we ran a series of Collaborative Design workshops.
These involve getting everyone in a room together, sketching their ideas, collaborating, and creating a shared vision.
Design is a team sport. It’s important to get everyone involved.
Designers, developers, business owners, stakeholders, executives.
Everyone has something to contribute to the process.
As I said before, it’s important to take everybody along for the ride.
Time lapse video of the 2 days of workshops
Whole Project Team: Dev Team, Stakeholders, Product Owner, Marketing, Security, Contact Centre
Everyone in a room sketching ideas about what the app should/could be.
This created vision of the app, which everyone has contributed to and had bought in to.
Once you have generated some exciting ideas, it’s time to go out and put them to the test.
There are lots of different ways to test ideas.
Think about whether you want to use light-weight guerrilla research or formal usability testing.
Approaches like the Woolworths Innovation Lab are another great option.
How you test is less important than what you test.
One of the problems that comes with generating some many is knowing where to start.
The answer to focus on reducing the uncertainty and risk around your product.
There are many different layers and levels that make up a successful product, some more obvious than others.
People often jump straight to testing the more obvious UI levels like the appearance or interaction.
When creating a new innovative product, it’s important to test the proposition and concept first.
You need to start by answering the question of do people value my proposition?
Are people willing to pay money for my concept? If so, how much?
Can I make a profitable business out of it?
Answering these questions will help avoid building something people don’t want.
A simple way to prioritise ideas is to quantify the value and risk of each one.
Create a range of measures to evaluate an idea against.
Think about the different impacts an idea would have, such a customer value, technical feasibility and profitability.
By identifying the most risky parts of your vision you can focus on testing them first.
There was a lot of risk/uncertainly around the login options came up with for the Suncorp Bank App.
In the Collaborative Design workshops we came up with 4 different options, PIN, Combo dial, Token & Android Swipe pattern.
We all thought they were cool ideas that would make an awesome, personalised experience for customers.
The challenge was that technically they would be complex to build.
And by themselves they weren’t going to generate any revenue.
We knew this because we had developers and business people in the room.
This was a big risk for us. Before we invested a lot of time building them, we wanted to confirm that customers wanted them.
Within a week of the workshops, we mocked them up in Balsamiq and put them in front of a handful of users.
Some loved them, some hated them. Ultimately most people would just use the PIN.
The meant we killed off all these ideas and went with a PIN.
This feedback cycle helped kill unwanted ideas before we invested any time in them.
It also gave us some valuable insights in to customers mindsets around security inspired a whole new round of ideas.
This just emphasises how important it is to put your ideas in front of customers and see what they think.
The earlier you kill those cherished ideas, such as combo dials, the better.
To be innovative you need to test your ideas, as quickly as you can.
Lo-fi prototyping tools are great for this, such as paper or Balsamiq.
Something to consider when choosing your tools is that,
the more refined the design, the superficial the feedback.
A rough sketch means users don’t get distracted by colours or fonts, instead it makes them think about product proposition itself.
Sometimes to test an idea properly, it really needs to be interactive.
One of the benefits of working in collaborative, multidisciplinary team, is the ability to go straight from a whiteboard to code.
Sometimes it’s just as easy to to build something in code as it is to fake it in a clickable PDF.
This is one the benefits of Designers & Developers working closely together.
Going back to the Woolworths example, this is what allowed the team to work in the way they did.
The example shown here is the transfer flow from the Suncorp App…
The ultimate way to test an idea is to release it in to the wild.
Sometimes that’s the only way to really see how a product will go.
It’s the idea behind the Minimum Viable Product from Eric Ries’ Lean Startup.
MVP’s seem simple in theory, but they aren’t always easy in reality.
What most people don’t really understand about this, is that you need to be ruthless.
Every extra feature you include in your MVP, means more time before you get it in to the hands of customers.
Us designers tend to visualise the perfect end-state of a mature product.
A bigger design challenge is trying to find the simplest product that still meets customers needs.
Coming back to our Suncorp Bank App example, we were particularly ruthless about our MVP.
Despite having lots of great ideas, we launched we the simplest possible banking app we could as soon as we could.
Being a Banking App, this did take us a year to do, but it was still the the same principle.
In the end we actually got it wrong. We left out the Account Details feature, which we thought we could get away without.
Customers quickly let us know they didn’t agree.
Because we were actively looking for feedback and ready to respond to it, we add the Account details feature in to the app 4 weeks after the initial release.
The point is that we released as early as possible and then responded to feedback.
The key here is to take lots small bets. ‘Don’t bet everything on black.’
With the Woolworths example we tried out ideas quickly by using a cross-functional team.
For the Suncorp Banking app, we can released something, got it a bit wrong, but recovered. The smaller the change, the easier it is to recover from it.
Here is another example - Fireballs in the Sky
In this case we released the product after 6 weeks then progressively improved it.
Fireballs is a research project run by Curtin University.
They track meteors as they enter the atmosphere, then go out in to the desert and pick them up.
It is part of the desert fireballs network
This is a network of cameras out in central Australia, pointed at the sky that captures the meteors.
Using the sightings data they can triangulate the location where they land.
Every few months they head out to the desert to collect the rocks.
This is quite difficult, the desert is a big place.
So the more eyes on the sky, the better
Curtin University wanted to run a citizen science project.
They wanted to engage the public to help spot meteors.
So we built and app for them.
We took inspiration from something similar built by NASA.
It works by people pointing their phone in the direction and marking the meteor.
The small team released the first version after 6 weeks.
The team was a mix of skills – designers, devs, mathematicians,
Everyone contributed to the design and development,
trying out different ways of solving each problem as it came up.
On the first release, it didn’t work very well.
The location capture was quite difficult to use and get right.
We had people calling in to ask for help to use it.
Which is not what you want for an app. But it was a good start.
It proved that people were very keen to use it.
So the team did a second release.
This time, we did some serious maths and put a star map behind the screen.
As you move, the stars are shown. It’s augmented reality.
This makes it easier to get the location right.
Last count:
- 824 sightings so far
- 21 events
- Over 6000 downloads of the app, including NASA
By trying something simple they proved its value and then invested effort into improving it.
This was an example where working together collaboratively in a cross-functional agile team, meant that we were able to release early and adapt.
The learning part of this doesn’t happen by accident.
You need to setup and prepare to look for it.
The building, measuring and learning is something that is essential to being innovative.
And this was what agile teams do well.
This is what I want to leave you with…
Ideas are cheap, action is gold.
What’s stopping you from doing something and being the disruptor?
