Hannu Pikkarainen (Helsingin Energia) and Mari Piirainen (Futurice) discuss how a century old energy company embraced a Lean Startup approach to designing new services for its customers. We presentation covers the good and the bad about applying service design methods and Lean Startup thinking in practice – what worked and what did not.

1. ADAPTING LEAN STARTUP
THINKING TO SERVICE DESIGN
+

2. 400,000
ELECTRICITY
CUSTOMERS
FULLFILLS 90% OF
THE HEATING
DEMAND IN THE
CAPITAL AREA WITH
DISTRICT HEATING
3RD LARGEST
SUPPLIER OF
DISTRICT COOLING
IN EUROPE
NEW BUSINESS

3. AUG OCT NOV DEC JAN APR
FEB
SERVICE / UI DEVELOPMENT
USER
VALIDATION
BUSINESS
MODELING
AND SERVICE
REFINEMENT
INITIAL
CONCEPTING

4. INITIAL CONCEPTING: SERVICE VISION

5. BUSINESS MODEL WORKSHOPS
ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THE BUSINESS HYPOTHESIS TO BE TESTED

6. WAR
ROOM

7. CUSTOMER VALIDATION: FIND A PROBLEM
WORTH SOLVING
Mock ads

8. • Product Process
• Marketing and Sales Process
• Partnership Process
• Order/Delivery Process
• Billing Process
• Customer Service Process
• …
1
10
100
1000
10000
SUPPORT PROCESSES AND INFRASTRUCTURE

9. DAILY
DAILY
DAILY
2 WEEKS
PRODUCT
BACKLOG
SPRINT
BACKLOG
WORKING SOFTWARE
PRODUCT
VISION
SERVICE AND UI DEVELOPMENT

10. LAUNCH

11. • Visualizing your vision at the beginning is helpful but don’t spend too much
time on it.
• Team building takes time, but you can accomplish a lot by working in the
same room.
• Focus on your best idea. Work on one idea at a time.
• Work hard to keep the customer, product and organization perspectives
aligned when you are working on the business model.
• Have tools to simulate the business case when you are mapping it out.
• Get out of the building quicker.
• It’s not easy being scientific and systematic about learning. Make sure you
have some way of tracking that you are getting closer to a sustainable
business with each build-measure-learn iteration.
WHAT WE LEARNED

12. http://fi.okfn.org/energy-hackathon-2013/
15 May 2013
Energy Hackathon 2013
Invites researchers, designers, coders, journalists and open knowledge
activists to spend a day together to develop new ideas and prototypes
of applications that utilize energy data.