A version of my Rapid Product Design in the Wild talk at Agile Iceland 2014. http://www.agileisland.is
How do you know you're developing the right product? This talk will help you think creatively about how to do customer development using Agile and Lean User Experience methods. I share what we learnt about using rapid, iterative prototyping techniques to develop a minimum viable product at a software conference.
In August 2012 we attended Kscope, a conference for Oracle developers. Instead of doing the usual product demonstrations, we turned our stand into a live lab and took Agile development processes out of the office and in front of our customers. Our stand included an area for customer research, a Kanban board and information radiators in the form of a whiteboard, blank wall and a large digital screen. Over 3 days we ran 9 sprints and conducted 25 customer interviews, using a paper prototype to get feedback. We collected invaluable information about our customers' development environments, how they work with their teams, their processes, tasks and pain points. By the end of the conference my colleague had developed an interactive HTML/CSS prototype which potential customers could evaluate. The team went through several rapid build-measure-learn cycles to improve our product concept and validate the market need.
Opening up our development process at a trade show provided visitors to the stand with an opportunity to experience Agile and Lean methods first-hand.
Developer Data Modeling Mistakes: From Postgres to NoSQL
Rapid Product Design in the Wild - Agile Iceland
1. Rapid product design in the wild!
Agile Iceland 2014!
Michele Ide-Smith | @micheleidesmith
2. Red Gate makes tooling for .NET, SQL and
Oracle databases @micheleidesmith
3. “To
make
excellent
products
that
truly
understand
our
users’
contexts,
we
must
look
further,
and
inves:gate
context
first-‐hand” Cennydd Bowles! @micheleidesmith
7. “By the time the product is ! “Marketing that itself !
ready, it will already have! improves peoples lives.”!
established customers.”! ! Bob Gilbreath!
Eric Ries @micheleidesmith
8. “We wanted to make sure we were getting customer
feedback as we worked so that we were never working on
anything that wasn’t valued by the customer.”!
Nordstrom Innovation Lab @micheleidesmith
9. “if you’ve struggled to figure out how UX design can
work in an Agile environment, Lean UX can help.”
Jeff Gothelf, author of Lean UX
@micheleidesmith
10. !
• Continuous discovery!
• Shared understanding!
• GOOB (Get Out Of the Building)!
• Externalising your work
@micheleidesmith
Lean UX principles we followed
11. Hypothesis: Oracle Developers & DBAs need a
better way to source control their database schemas !
>70% interest – develop a tool a.s.a.p.!
@micheleidesmith
16. Paper prototyping
Lo-fi prototypes Easy to are get quick feedback and and easy quick to to change
change
before you commit to code! @micheleidesmith
17. Feedback went directly into the HTML/CSS
prototype, using Twitter Bootstrap @micheleidesmith
18. Helped build personas People returned to see the feeanddb aa taclkki ng point!
throughout the conference @micheleidesmith
19. The Empathy Map helped us understand
customer needs @micheleidesmith
20. We fixed pain points and learned about
customer needs continuously @micheleidesmith
21. Sketching out processes and environments
identified real-world scenarios and pain points
@micheleidesmith
22. It’s was all about communication…
@micheleidesmith
28. “Source Control for Oracle is a huge time saver… It
doesn't remove the need to version control, but it takes
the tedious steps out of the picture. I am blown away! “!
Lewis Cunningham, Oracle ACE Director
@micheleidesmith
29. Testing the prototype
“The live lab was a wonderful idea. I enjoyed
participating in it and can't wait to see the finished
product. Let me know if you need a beta tester.”!
Christoph Ruepprich, Oracle Developer @micheleidesmith
34. But I noticed a few things weren’t
going so well…
@micheleidesmith
35. www. s l i d e s h a r e . n e t / b i l l w s c o t t /
antipatterns-that-stifle-lean-ux-teams
35
Hat tip to @billwscott
Beware Lean UX anti-patterns!
@micheleidesmith
36. Too many cooks. Keep the team small to
ensure collaboration and team focus. @micheleidesmith
36
38. Going dark. Sometimes you need to work alone.
But not at the expense of team collaboration. @micheleidesmith
38
39. !
• Continuous discovery!
• Shared understanding!
• GOOB (Get Out Of the Building)!
• Externalising your work
@micheleidesmith
Lean UX principles we followed