Lean Product Development

There’s been a revolution. A move away from big design up front and isolated specialist teams throwing specs over the wall to each other. Applying the principles of Lean Startup. Lean UX can transform the way you bring user experiences to life.

We need to change the way our products are built because even the smartest teams can’t predict market and user behaviour. Lean UX enables you to build cheaper, faster, and most importantly better experiences.

Organisations are jumping onto the testing band wagon in large numbers. Many have come to the realisation that theres more to testing than just swapping images, content and text. Customer journeys, check-out flows, pricing and product offerings can be tested to enhance the customer experience and improve KPIs.

What does bad UX look like?

Heres some quotes by thought leaders. If your organisation sounds similar to this – chances are you are not practicising lean UX

Ha Phan:

“your collaboration sessions with the team dont include business goals and strategies.”

{Solve user problems but consider where we are headed as a business and whether the activity fits in.}

“you are not defining KPIs and integrating analytics into each release.”

{We need to validate our new releases with real data. We need at least one number to know whether we’re failing or succeeding.}

“you implement every single step in the design process, instead of picking and choosing from the design toolbox.”

{Lean UX is a set of principles and tools – apply as needed. Don’t tick every box in a project management cycle.}

“you’re creating long design specs for the vision of the entire product.”

{Users dont interact with specs and wireframes – the quicker we get to the end product, the better. Let’s not get bogged down by deliverables. Let’s create the lightest thing we can in order to communicate how to apply the thinking to the end design.}

Jeff Gothelf:

“you are not managing towards outcomes”

{We need to consider the bottom line. We are building products, but also a business. Asking whether what we’re doing will make money is important? If it will make money, how?}

“you don’t have a willingness and the freedom or support to experiment.”
[As with Agile we need senior management buy in for our Lean UX methodology.]

Melissa Hui:

“Your development team is not seeing what they’re building until they have to build it.”

[Your development team should be fully involved in the design process. Collaboration is key.]

Assumption based decision making

The trap that many fall into with user is experience is we (Build) where we thought (Think) we improved the experience of our users. We measure (Measure) the performance but from the data we get back (Check) we were not able to learn. The reason? The designs incorporate too many single problems into one.

Deliverables vs user experiences

User experience design has traditionally been a deliverables based industry. Site maps, flow diagrams, wireframes, taxonomies, mockups and the all important spec was the defacto standard. This laundry list represented the value that UX brought to a company.

The deliverable centric process has put UX designers in the deliverables business. Teams measured and compensated for the depth and breadth of “deliverables” instead of focussing on creating winning experiences.

Lean UX to the rescue

Inspired by the Lean and Agile development theories, Lean UX is the practice of focussing on the actual experience being designed with less emphasis on documentation driven deliverables.

Our documents are either discarded or stripped down to the bar minimum. Provide the minimum amount of information necessary to get started on implementation. Long design cycles are replaced with very short, iterative cycles. Feedback comes from all members of the implementation team early and often. Collaboration with our entire team becomes critical to the success of the product.

Get to your customers fast with prototyping

Lean UX is where prototyping shines. With your initial sketches focus the prototype on critical components of the experience. Pick a core user flow or two and prototype only those screens. The fidelity of the prototype is irrelevant.

Now get that prototype in front of everyone who matters internally, and validate whether you are meeting the needs of the business.

Once validated, demo your updated prototype to the team. Explain the flows, the user motivations and why you designed it the way you did. The prototype has now become your documentation. It is “The Spec.” Very little (if anything) more is needed. Regardless, you’re there to answer any questions that come up. The strength of Lean UX here is that, with the design validated, the designer is now freed to move on to the next core component of the experience, instead of spending six weeks creating a design-requirements document and pixel-perfect specs.

Get real user feedback

A step often missed – get the prototype in front of customers! Get them in front of your prototypes on a weekly basis until you are happy you have a winning design. With 5 testers you should have a robust enough focus group.

Lean UX is evolution not a revolution. UX designers need to evolve and stay relevant as the practice evolves. Lean UX gets designers out of the deliverables business and back into the experience design business. This is where we excel and do our best work. Let’s become experts at delivering great results through these experiences and forgo the hefty spec documents.

It won’t be an easy road. Culture and tradition will push back, yet the ultimate return on this investment will be more rewarding work and more successful businesses.

Always be testing

In conclusion heres the bigger picture reality – software allows organisations to disrupt existing markets because its so flexible. This creates dynamic and competitive environments but imposes high risks to businesses. The biggest risk – the product is of little or no value to customers – the effort to develop it was wasted.

To reduce such risks, you adopt an experiment driven development approach where you validate your product ideas before spending resources on fully developing them. Experiments allow you to test assumptions about what customers really want and react if the assumptions are wrong.

With Lean UX we can execute continuous experimentation on all aspects of our products and customer experiences enables us to constantly shape experiences based on real customer behavioral data. To take advantage of every business opportunity, you need to always be testing.

A startup can be broken down into three parts

1) a human institution designed to
2) create a new product/service under conditions of
3) extreme uncertainty.

Contrary to popular belief a successful start-up is not a consequence of an oxbridge education or being in the right place at the right time. Success can be engineered by following a winning process.

The biggest mistake startups make is they create products founded on assumptions. We start building a product assuming people want it. We spend time trying to build the perfect product – once complete – we offer it to customers. Then we find out that customers don’t actually want the product.

The products failure it is likely because we never spoke to prospective customers and determined whether or not the product was valuable. When customers communicate through indifference – the startup fails.

The Lean Startup provides a scientific approach to building startups. Get your product in customers hands faster. It is a principled approach to new product development.

Define success

Success in product development is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve a users problem.

For a new product you are affecting by the “Audacity of Zero”. When you have zero revenue and zero customers – you are still on your way. Everyone is fascinated by the idea of overnight success at this stage. You see zero is always a more comfortable place to be than a very small number of users – that may or may not like your new idea.

Don’t expect to scale fast – we need to be in learning mode at ground zero. As Charles Eames said “Never delegate understanding”.

Value comes before growth. The value a product provides is the only reason someone uses it.

Your value hypothesis

Why will people will want your new product? A value hypothesis tests if a product is valuable to potential customers.

a) Do consumers recognize they have a need you are trying to address?
b) Will they pay money for it?
c) Will they buy it from you?
d) Can you build it?

Your growth hypothesis

A growth hypothesis is an assumption on how users find your product. Whats your best guess for gaining customers and sales? Only focus on growth after you’ve nailed value. Never grow a product without value or you will destroy your brand.

Build Measure Feedback

The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere.

Start-ups should focus on management, process, and discipline – opposite to the conventional idea that start-ups should have a ‘just-do-it’ maxim.

We need to develop Build-Measure-Feedback loops. Our company should develop an MVP to test market hypotheses.

An MVP (minimum viable product) is a product that lacks some feature because it is developed quickly with minimum resource expended. With an MVP, your start-up can see customers reaction to the product. Test the riskiest assumption first.

Validating learning is critical

A startup is not a smaller version of a bigger company. Equally your startup does not exist not produce stuff, make money, or serve customers. We are learning how to build a sustainable business. Importantly this learning can be validated scientifically, by running experiments that allow us to test each element of our vision

Why you need validated learning?

Validated learning has powerful advantages over a traditional product release methods

-Time
The development process can be shortened significantly. Using validated learning, you can avoid developing unwanted features.

-Cost
A shorter development process means the cost of building version one of your product can be significantly lower.

-Better products
The process puts the focus on meaningful and actionable metrics, which leads to creating a better, more customer-oriented product.

-Agility
Validated learning facilitates agility. The foundation of the minimum viable product means you can develop more of flexibility to adapt to customer demands.

The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere.

Business models still matter

Beyond making stuff people want, another key lesson from the lean startup movement is that business models matter. This means testing our business model in the market before we scale. Our product prototypes can be used to test our assumptions about the costs of production, price points and potential routes to market.

The enterprise product development lifecycle

In todays fast changing world, larger businesses often discover that they aren’t good at changing. Change is essential to success — you need to keep up with customers, beat out competitors and dive into new markets.

Businesses must change how they change — they must enhance and rebalance their transformation capabilities to cope with uncertain environments.

Part of the problem is that big companies have historically changed in one ‘big bang’. This approach worked in the past, but required a future that is understood with certainty. This certainty does not exist in the digital world.

Mature companies that continue to waste their peoples talents with meaningless tasks are bound to lose those talents and will only be left with individuals that are too comfortable produce anything new or original.

Thomson Reuters embraces innovation

In 2013, Thomson Reuters made an announcement: “Our 100-year-old media corporation was no longer going to rely on growth through acquisition”. The Thomson Reuters Catalyst Fund funds 30 projects every year and supports them with lean startup coaching and best practices.

A panel comprised of the CEO and 5 senior managers come together once a month to listen to pitches and evaluate ideas presented. The benefit is: The employees get an audience with the CEO and an opportunity to raise their profile internally. The company gets to tap into its talent and turn the ideas generated into revenue opportunities.

So what are Thomson Reuters building? New products and new business lines. One example; take data available in one business unit and using it for another. Take the health care analytics data from Thomson Reuters IP and science business and use it to help investors in Thomson Reuters financial business. Historically the two business lines within the company were collecting the same data — and wasting time.

The company is moving from growth fueled by acquisitions to growth built on innovation.

 

The best companies now recognise that customers are their biggest asset. With no customers to buy our product. We have no business at all. People who have a positive customer experience are more likely to spend more with our brand, pay a premium for our service, and recommend our brand based on the experience we deliver.

People who change to another brand are more likely to do so because of poor service, and they are equally likely to broadcast this.

Fragmented understanding of customers is common in organizations where KPIs are assigned and measured per department. Many companies do not piece together the entire experience from the user’s standpoint. A shared vision is a critical aim of journey mapping – without it, agreement on how to improve customer experience will never happen.

Customer journey vs customer lifecycle

Customer journeys are created from a users perspective – a lifecycle focuses on the brand perspective.

A lifecycle is made of labels that describe a specific state: Unaware, Prospect, Customer, Advocate

Journeys are broken down into phases of activity across touch points; Discovering, Researching, Comparing, Consumption etc.

Customer journey actions

There are multiple touchpoints between your customers and your business. Each action and activity can be summarised into the following classic types:

Awareness
Discover
Purchase
Use of product of service
Bonding with product

Customer journey map

With your customer touchpoints and activities completed a table can be created that maps your customers journey with their activities. eg Thinking of purchasing a phone.

Customer journey narrative

To help diagnose issues with our products we can map out the journeys users take to perform certain actions in a narrative form. Eg signing up for a gym for the first time.

Fixing the gaps

Once negative experiences have been identified – create an action plan to fix them. For each gap define the ‘current state’ and identify a target ‘future state’. If customers checkout process is now 6 steps, set a target that is considered an improvement.

An action plan should demonstrate the customer journey from current state to future state. If you want to reduce checkout to 4 steps, what actions are needed to achieve this future state? For each pain point you can create a simple 3-column table to document the transition.

You need to know who your product is built for. It cant be for everyone. Capture your audiences attention by clearly communicating what your product does now. Forget the long term vision.

“Marketing is about values. It’s a complicated and noisy world, and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us.” – Steve Jobs

Only 20% of brands worldwide are seen to meaningfully and positively impact lives. Many organisations are waking up to the fact that articulating their values and mission is not to be dismissed. Communicating how your brand brings its core values to life is critical for your companies reputation, employee productivity and ultimately profit.

Start with a niche

Building something for everyone at the start is incredibly difficult. It’s better to focus on a niche and form a critical mass of users, rather than trying to appeal to everyone. Facebook started just for Harvard students, then all universities, then universities in other countries – finally ending up with everyone in all countries! – well almost everyone.

Why empathy matters

Empathy is our capacity to relate to each other on a fundamental level: to understand other people’s feelings and to take the perspective of the other person.

The most profound challenge in product development is to understand the needs of users. Without this, our chances of creating a successful product are slim.

There are numerous techniques to help uncover user needs—eg direct observation, interviews, focus groups and surveys – none of them are useful if we do not empathise with the people that will use our product. We need to get in touch with their feelings and thoughts.

What we don’t want to become is a feature factory – churning out MVP after MVP, without ever knowing why some features or products stick and others don’t.

Meet your users face to face

Meeting real users regularly should be part of every product persons job. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Often we are shielded from the users by other departments.

Without meeting the beneficiaries of our product, we cannot understand their feelings and needs. Worst case; we have assumptions of what users might need based on hearsay and half-knowledge -not on personal experience and insight.

Discovery & framing

Discovery and framing is critical to help define the MVP. You may have a product idea in mind, but dont jump right into defining the product requirements and building the product – before having validated your ideas.

Create an MVP which is small enough to validate your product value proposition. The D&F process is to ensure that you are building the RIGHT product before wasting time building it. Lean Startup practice encourages iterative “Build, Validate, Learn” cycles.

Discovery strategy

As Thomas Berger said “The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge”.

During the discovery process we need to ask questions to give us clarity on what we are building for our MVP. Here are examples of questions you should be asking.

–Messaging

What key messages need to be communicated? What’s the one thing that we want people to think / feel / do?

-Audience

Who are we trying to communicate to? Who are your primary/secondary/tertiary audiences? Why? Is that different from your desired audience? What are their demographics? Why would they come to visit? When do they come? Why would they come back?

-User journeys

Who are the users of the feature? What are their different needs? What do we want them to do? What are the current barriers? How can we increase customer satisfaction? How can we generate loyalty? How can we drive conversion?

-Functionality

What types of functionality beyond static content pages is required? Why is it needed? How will this functionality achieve our business objectives?

-Usability

What are the requirements for us to do user testing? What devices are we supporting? What browsers are we supporting? What platforms are we building for?

-Creative

Look & feel – What creative have we seen that we like? Are there existing solutions from competitors that we like that would provide creative insight into a desired look and feel? Is there an emotional end-state we’d like to have our audience walk away with?

Have a clear process

You need to have a repeatable process that you organisation can buy into and is repeatable. A nice acronym is PESP…

Problem Definition

Exploring

Solutioning

Prototyping

1) Problem definition

Whats the goal here? Why are we doing this? Are there unmet consumer needs? What are the goals for this new feature? What are the KPI’s? These questions are tough to answer if we don’t really know our users. We need empathy with our audience first.

2) Exploring

So you have all of your opportunities laid out? Now hold a session where explore possible ideas and solutions that are related to those opportunities. You are coming up with a variety of ways your new feature could resolve user pain points.

Sketch out variations on a whiteboard and take photos for future reference.

3) Solutioning

From the solutions identified, decide which one best solves the problem. There will likely be multiple solutions for a problem; the purpose of this exercise is to determine which is best.

4) Prototyping

The protyping phase is where you create a visualization of your app. Build an interactive and clickable sample of the product experience to demonstrate how it will work ideally using a mocking tool such as Balsamiq – avoid writing code if possible!

Once you have a working prototype created, validate the product by conducting user testing. Ask colleagues to test first – then real users. Collect feedback on your prototype – how people interact with it, the issues they are running into and what they say about the experience. Take the feedback back to the team and inspect and adapt your solution.