Improve your company with 8 principles from Agile, Lean Startup and Design Thinking
Dealing with many working methods:
As a startup founder, I have to deal with contractors to help with my work; I need to speak their language and understand what they mean when they say there is a ticket in the backlog or I can review it in retrospective meetings.
The Tech teams use Agile, Product folks run Lean, and Design guys conduct tests on design thinking. Lots of unique jargon, meeting types, and release cycles. Ultimately all this makes communication with teams daring to say the least.
Do not get me wrong; After more than 20 years of building customer-oriented products. I have to become an expert on these working frameworks: and they all have beneficial principles, but innovation will not happen unless those teams work together towards shared goals.
Let´s review this methologies:
You cannot fix everything with processes, but you can take their best principles to
Increase customer centricity with these principles:
Inspired by Jeff Gothelf's presentation while researching our previous newsletter, I decided to map his principles the context of early startups and solo founders to create the perfect early startup customer-centred company:
1. Customer values = business values
Are the same; ignoring customer value and optimizing for business value is risky and can cost your company's success.
Change the definition of done from releasing features to fulfil outcomes: A measure change in customer behaviour. This removes the focus from the building staff to the learning. We do not want to create something but rather make a change in the world.
Did people buy more stuff?;
User know more about your product?
Do assumptions instead of requirements. create and test hypotheses of how you think the outcome can be archived and finally measure to see if you archive the outcomes
Assumptions
A high-level description of what we believe is happening
Hypotheses
More granular descriptions of our assumptions that target specific areas of our product or workflow for experimentation.
Outcomes
The signal we seek from the market to help us validate or invalidate our hypotheses. These are often quantitative but can also be qualitative.
The results from our experiments with the hypothesis.
They can be data from our tracking analytics software:
if there is an increase in conversation in using these features, -or people click on these landing page buttons,
Or it can be the result of interviews, prototypes, online surveys, These types of experiments are the most beneficial on early state projects because they give you hidden information about users feeling about your product. They tell you the WHYs
Personas
Personas are the models that represent our customers. They are a central element in a customer-centric company.
They can describe hypothetical customers or real ones, give information about the problems they are trying to solve by using your app, frustrations and goals. In either case, we need to keep reiterating them.
A product customer relation is a fluid conversation in constant change. Trends change, your products change and so do people. Keeping updateing our personas is fundamental.
2. Work on short cycles
We cannot predict the future, so working on focussed tasks during a short period is ideal.
These cycles should not take more than two weeks. They help accumulate the evidence we need to understand if we are heading in the right direction, moving from doubt to certainty.
Short cycles mean low investment and low risk, and after the cycles. Catching problems on a two-week work sprint will not kill your product.
3. Hold regular retrospectives
Retrospectives should close the work cycles, see what worked well and what did not, and make adjustments.
Retrospective meetings are the secret source of highly aligned teams. They create a safe space for constructive criticism and improvement —Improving the product and the processes. Remove emotions and focus on actions and improvement.
4L Retrospective is a popular method, but you can use anything that works for you as long as the retrospective outcomes are accessible and reviewed in the coming work cycles.
4. Test only your high-risk hypothesis
You cannot work on everything. Start from the hypothesizes that are the highest risk and deliver the highest perceived value. --Critical technical challenges, customer acquisition are good candidates.
5. Do less often
What's the fastest way to test the following most crucial assumption. Run as many experiments as possible with quick prototypes, fake landing pages. Building features without previously validating them is the recipe for running out of money.
When Amazon developed Alexa, the riskiest assumption was that the device needed to answer the questions correctly. Instead of building the whole IA system for Alexa.
They first ran experiments with manually written replies to cheaply and quickly validate how users would better receive the questions.
6. Focus on a balanced team
Around 6 to 7 members. If you are a solo entrepreneur, connect your contactors through daily/weekly standups. Usually,
You will run these meetings in the morning, and each of the members must answer the three core questions: What did you do yesterday?; What are you going to do today? and What will you do tomorrow?
This daily presentation removes ambiguity, allows team members to support each other if a problem arises and creates alignments toward the coming releases.
7. Radical transparency:
I am a big fan of this point. I believe organizations must aim to create clarity (To the extreme ): Company's KPIs outcomes and employees' contributions toward those objectives must be accessible by everyone at all times. Also, regulars demo days, cross-functional training, and any activity that brings employees and their contributions are beneficial.
8. Learning as a core company goal:
We must understand that learning is the most critical asset a company can have to bit its competitors. Setting a safe space for learning via experimentation must be encouraged. Employees are not paid for building stuff but rather for learning how to give more value to customers.
A small projects like ours can respond and change way faster than bit corporations and we need to use this secret source of ours, "the underdogs" to bit the bit players.
The company that knows better their customer journey will retain customers more early and will overcome its competitors
Conclusion:
Building a digital product is not an easy task, as founders, must be honest and embrace an empirical model of experimentations, collect data from our experiments and improve our product based on the results. Working like scientists to reduce waste and improve the likelihood of finding "market fit" and move toward a customer centric company.
