Lean Product Development

What is Songkick?

Songkick is a concert discovery service that helps you track artists and buy tickets for live music events.

Michelle You is Co-Founder of Songkick. At the Future of Web Apps Conference Michelle outlines Songkick’s process.

Time is your enemy

In a startup, youre under constant time pressure. You don’t have time to waste building the wrong thing but youre not Steve Jobs so how do you know what to build? The answer; Product Discovery.

Speed of learning

You need to learn about your users as fast as possible. Speed and quantity of learning is everything.

Product leadership trio

At Songkick the product discovery process is lead by the combination of the Product Manager, Design Lead and Tech Lead. The business needs, user needs and the technical engineering aspects of the product discovery process are discussed by the trio for an hour after the daily standup – the agenda – how do we move the product discovery process forward?

Songkick’s Product Discovery Layers

Songkick breaks down their product discovery process into layers. They always follow the process from bottom to top. Theres no point testing the colour of buttons if you don’t understand the customers problem you are trying to solve!

Get cheap and fast feedback

Quantitative and qualitative feedback methods are part of Songkick’s Toolkit. – What people are doing with your product?

a) Analytics

Data can give you answers to this question. Eg. Whats your conversion rate at this step? Where are people dropping off?

b) Real time behaviour feedback

Crazy Egg is used to work out hot spots and how far people are scrolling down a page

c) A/B tests

Split testing will prove which version of a page will perform better

d) In app feedback tools

Qualaroo for surveys and Olark – which can pop up while users are on Songkick and ask questions; eg Why did you come to the site today? What were you looking for on this page?

e) Mock up and click tests

You can tell if an interface is working without writing any code with tools such as Helio and Usabilla.

f) Remote usability tools

Songkick also use remote usability testing solutions eg usertesting.com and whatusersdo.com

g) Face to face

Michelle’s favourite method for user feedback; sitting down with users face to face and asking questions.

Real example product discovery process for Detour

Detour is a marketplace for fans – where fans can make pledges to bands to appear in a certain city.

Before building anything Songkick conducted interview with agents, artists, promoters and venues. During dozens of interviews they asked the same questions and recorded answers. Then the team looked for patterns in the results in order to determine what problems the industry has.

Questions included

What is the process an artist goes through to book a tour?
What are the interactions between the stakeholders in the process?
What are pain points and frustrations?

Customer discovery interview tips

Write an interview script and repeat for every interview?
Ask open ended questions and listen
Ask respondents to tell you stories about specific experiences – not generalisations
Dont ask respondents to predict future behaviour
Pair interview with a colleague
Transcribe audio into text

Synthesize interviews into nuggets of insights

From studying the interview transcripts – the team looks for patterns within the answers given. They distill these into golden nuggets of insights and feed those insights back to the wider team.

Product proposition landing page tests

Having identified the customer problem. How do we know what solution to build? Landing page tests provide a very quick way to test a product proposition.

By summarising a proposition into a single line of text with a ‘pre-sign up’ capture form is a great method to glean resonance with customers. Split testing different headlines helps the team to work out the best performing ideas and language.

What if the new feature doesn’t work?

The first step if a product isnt performing as planned is to diagram their funnel. They do this by screengrabbing every step in the users process to perform an action.

Next the product trio came up with a list of questions about the funnel for users engaging with their new feature. The key was to work out – where are people dropping off in the funnel? Then try to diagnose the problem eg is this a usability issue or do people don’t know what to do?

On all the key pages of the funnel the questions raised by the team are then converted into analytics events that will fire on key events on each page eg clicking submit.

Why is the feature not working?

The data is telling Songkick “what” is not working. Usability labs are used to determine the “why”.

It turns out users didn’t add their credit card to pledge to artists because they didn’t realise they had to.

How to fix the problem?

Songkick forms a team – including people outside the core product team – in a group setting called a design studio.

Design studio tips

Frame the problem clearly
Give participants time to come up with their own ideas before meeting in a group
Agree on the best ideas and prototype different options

A/B Testing

The final stage of finding a new solution is to run split tests. Songkick don’t just run random tests. They follow a template for each variant.

If…
Then…
Because…

Each split test result is recorded. Once the tests are run and a winner is chosen. The final version is implemented and the code for other variants are removed.

In conclusion

Songkick manage 3 to 4 product discovey tests a week. The speed and quantity of learning is key. Ultimately the product team is looking for the cheapest and fastest way to get feedback.

1) Establish customer-defined value

There are 3 types of customer value; desired value, perceived value and wasted value. Desired value refers to what customers want in a product. Perceived value is the benefit that a customer believes they have received from a product after it was purchased. In the product development context we need to laser target customer defined value. The ability of a product development team to focus on high value features and eliminate low value features is what separates the best from the rest

2) Front-load the product development process

Anyone who participates in the product development is familiar with the agony of late-stage changes, or loopbacks. Development teams strive hard to avoid them, yet almost all practitioners consider loopbacks as inevitable, and even plan for them. But reworking a product late in development is always best avoided. By adopting a front-loaded development process we put together cross-functional teams from the very start of the project. Teams consist of capable representatives from all functions necessary to bring a product to market: sales/marketing, product engineering, software development, creative and finance. The key is to ensure that all viewpoints are considered from the early stages to avoid unexpected ‘realisations’ late in the process.

3) Organise to balance functional expertise and cross-functional integration

Strategic cross-functional management is central to capitalising on functional excellence, and in order for functional specialists to make the greatest possible contribution, they must take a broader view of their functions and understand how they fit into the web of the organisational processes and, ultimately, into the overall product development strategy.

4) Develop massive competence in all team members

To excel at the talent-driven business of product development, an organisation must have highly-skilled, capable and motivated people. To achieve a successful agile process everyone working in product development must do his or her job correctly and on time. One weak link can disrupt the precise timing and grind everything to a halt. To prevent this disruption a company must be willing to make major investments in the process of selecting and developing technical competence in all of its employees.

People learn best from a combination of direct experience and mentoring. Excellent engineers that fit in with a high-performance product development processes do not arrive ready to handle important projects; they are built slowly and from scratch. Implement rigorous selection and training processes to support your product development function.

5) Fully integrate clients into the product development system

Projects involving gathering large volumes of complex client requirements upfront often struggle. Product requirements often occur during the product development process itself. Active Stakeholder Participation describes the need to have on-site access to people, typically end users or their representatives, who have the authority and ability to provide information pertaining to the system being built and to make pertinent and timely decisions regarding the requirements, and prioritisation thereof.

6) Build in learning and continuous improvement

Insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting different results. If you want to solve the problems that you are having, and deliver more value to your customers, you have to change the way you work. Agile promotes the usage of retrospectives: To help teams to solve problems and improve themselves. An agile retrospective, or sprint retrospective as Scrum calls it, is a practice used by teams to reflect on their way of working, and to continuously become better in what they do.

The whole team attends the retrospective meeting, where they inspect how the iteration (sprint) has been executed, and decide what and how they want to adapt their processes to improve. The actions coming out of a retrospective are communicated and reflected in the next iteration of the product.

7) Build a culture to support excellence and relentless improvement

The quest for excellence is similar to dieting -there are thousands of plans, but in reality none of them work very well, at least without a strong commitment from the top. According to research between 60 and 90 percent of organisational change initiatives fail. Making the changes that lead to excellence is not an overnight job, its a long process that often means rewiring an organisation’s DNA.

Change begins with asking what you want your company to do and what your company could be. The greatest skill a company can develop is the ability to harness the ideas and wisdom of its employees and apply them to a grand vision. Launch a program that trains your employees in the art of feedback. Encourage staff to give and receive feedback on a daily basis. Survey employees anonymously. Create an employee survey that asks detailed questions. Creating a climate in which employees can express criticism without worry is essential.

8) Adapt technologies to fit your people and process

Organisations around the world are trying to find ways to accelerate product development, seeing this as a way to achieve competitive advantage. Often their efforts to speed up the product development process focus on introducing advanced technology. Successful utilisation of new tools and technology depends on the ability to customise them in a way that makes integrate seamlessly into the company’s existing processes. Thought leader in Lean Product Development; Toyota – has had the foresight and discipline to customise tools and technology to fit within a broader framework, one that includes people and processes.

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” — Bill Gates, president and CEO, Microsoft.

9) Align your organisation through simple visual communication

Use internal communications to align your employees with customers. Create “profiles of typical customers, complete with photos, demographics, likes and dislikes—including what TV shows they watch and even foods they eat. Customers now become vivid, tangible and front of mind. Share the personas frequently with relevant teams – this can be in conversations, newsletters, or through digital signs in your offices.

“The best way to help team members focus on customers? Bring customers to life.” — Alison Davis, CEO & Founder, Davis & Company

10) Use powerful tools for standardisation and organisational learning

Renowned Masters of Lean – Toyota – attribute their core competitive advantage to organisational learning. While competitors are working on becoming lean, Toyota’s lean system continues to evolve because the company has built learning and evolution into its systems.

In an agile product development process, tools and technology can nurture and sustain human learning. But this can occur only if engineers with “towering technical competence” in specific functional areas take responsibility for using the tools to develop standards that become the company’s new (and ever-evolving) best-known way. Leadership is responsible for empowering employees to continually challenge and improve the standards until they become new standards. Whether these tools are manual or digital, employees must take ownership of their tools. This ownership at all levels creates and cultivates a learning organisation.