Customer Centred Business Decisions in the Enterprise

Editor's Notes

1. Large organisations these days want to act like startups. They see the benefits Agile and Lean are bringing to process. I’m pretty sure they don’t mean to seek seed funding from angel investors or get into growth-hacking. What this is all about is
2. How might we bring Lean methodologies to the enterprise? So we can move faster, cut red tape, reduce wastage and make better decisions.
3. There are 8 things I want to talk to you today that organisations can start doing to get leaner: Multidisciplinary teams Creating transparency Using the double diamond Calling out, and mapping assumptions Develop a hypothesis-driven operating rhythm Using canvases as a way to prioritise And how this all fits together in a dual-track approach
4. In order to truely creative value, for both the business and customers, you need your product or service to be Desirable to customers, have business Viability (ROI) and technical Feasibility. This is the D, V and F. Without these three things coming together there will be no success. You can only do this efficiently if you have representation from a multidisciplinary team of Design, Biz and Tech. Depending on the size of your project, or how risky your concept might be, support roles may include (but not limited to) a business analyst, data analyst, project manager and/or a developer.
5. Large organisations can be wasteful due to too much happening at the same time. If there's no transparency then you have anarchy. You get teams working on very similar initiatives solving the same problems. Use your online tools, make sure you leverage the power of showcases and retrospectives and most importantly, put your work on the walls for all to see and ask questions. Walls need to include framing (what your project is all about, the problems you are solving and who’s working on it), up-to-date hypotheses (what we think and what we’re in the process of validating) and up-to-date concepts, supporting data etc. All helps.
6. The Double Diamond is all about minimising risk and increasing confidence in a solution. The first diamond is about identifying real customer needs, problems or pain points, turning those into opportunities and focusing on customer outcomes over releasing features we think customers might want. The second diamond is about exploring solutions to these needs, problems or pain points in a way that resonates with customers and focusing in on the most effective. Large orgs have a distinct advantage here. They have more resources, more time and more budget. In addition to this they have other people that can be executing while exploration is going on.
7. When it comes to validating our work we don’t simply test what we think a great solution might be. We identify our biggest assumptions, that if proven incorrect could kill our project, then build tests that validate or invalidate these assumptions.
8. Don't just mock up what you think will be a fantastic solution and put it in front of customers Articulate your hypotheses, work out what test you can run to prove or disprove it. The sort of test you do could vary greatly depending on what you’re trying to validate. Customer interviews, surveys, value proposition testing, looking at analytics is just a short list of the many options you have.
9. Here’s Paolo Malabuyo from Netflix showing a few different types of tests you can do, and where they sit on the qual/quant and do/say scales. It’s also good to confirm your hypotheses with both qualitative and quantitative measures where possible.
10. A good operating rhythm is essential. And the focus should be on learning, and what experiments you’re running to validate your hypotheses. Here’s a typical op-rhythm I like to use. It’s based around hypothesising, preparing artefacts and executing tests, then synthesising results, articulate learnings and defining our next steps.
11. Using a canvas helps with your due dilligence. This is the Lean Canvas. We use a similar canvas but it’s not exactly the same. You’d be surprised how often you come across an idea – a great idea, and you think it has incredible potential, then you attempt to define the canvas and it becomes really obvious really quickly that there are plenty of gaps in your idea. Gaps you need to fill before you go too far down the path of developing it. The most important thing is to ensure you have good coverage across D V and F so you're making good business decisions based on validated customer desirability. Traditionally management has looked after the 1st diamond in a top-down approach. The double diamond, and design thinking has given us some rigour around this process. All the canvases can then come together in the same physical space to get prioritised alongside each other, with all the info an executive should need to make those decisions on the canvas.
12. We use a model similar to Marty Cagan’s dual track product development process. We have a strategic design team looking at the first diamond, and sometimes the fist half of the second diamond. Designers on the Agile Trains (in the product execution track) are involved in workshops, ideation sessions, showcases for the discover track. The flaw to this approach is when it comes time to hand work over from one track to another. Things are always going to get lost in translation. We’re experimenting with rotations so people get a chance to explore, then follow their own work through to execution to minimise the amount of handover required.