Here’s what you’ve got to do before the interview:

Define your problem and customer segment. Write down the questions that you want your users to answer.

Here’s a list of some specific questions you could ask:

When was the last time you faced a problem________?
What was it exactly?
What was the toughest part of dealing with the problem?
Why was it that tough?
How would you tackle it now?
Why is it not that great?

Define a minimum success criterion. For instance, you are going to talk to 20 users about the existing problem and at least 12 of them should agree with the problem.

Recruit users through appropriate channels. For instance, if your target users are HR consultants, you would look for them on Linkedin. Or if you are targeting millennials who like to travel, you might find them on Instagram etc. and If you are targeting business travellers, find them in a waiting lounge at the airport.

Now here’s what you do during the interview:

Start with casual chitchat. Say who you are and why you are interviewing them. For instance, my name is Romeo and I am the founder of Love Actually. I have a business idea and would love to get your opinion on that. I am not selling anything.

Make sure you explain the purpose of the interview – what are you trying to achieve?

For instance, the purpose of the interview is to find out if millennial keeps an inventory of their dates. If so, then what tools do they use? Would they like to have an app that helps them keep stock of all past successful and failed dates?

Tell them there are no wrong answers. Your user needs to understand that you are testing a product or an idea and not the user themselves.

Be honest about how long the interview will take, and stick to that time.

Four key rules of doing user interviews are:

1. Don’t Pitch! Don’t try and sell your solution. Ask questions that lead to a dialogue. Allow the user to talk about their preferences. Ask them why? How?

2. Observe user behavior, not opinion. Watch their body language. Look for how they talk and behave while using the product. Inspect their emotions and body language as they talk. Pick on the things they talk passionately about. That’s where you’ll find your answers.

3. Concentrate on Past/Present, not future. Try and get the users to talk about their past and present experiences rather than what they anticipate in future.

4. Don’t preach. Never ever take on the expert mode and start explaining/preaching things to the user. Let the user talk even if he or she wants to go off topic.If your users are willing to talk, ask them more in-depth questions such as:

What sort of tools or techniques do you use?
What do you like/dislike about your methodology?
How frequently do you do this?
Where do you do it (at home/ at work/ elsewhere)?
In a utopian world, how would you do it?
Which key factors influence your decision? Prioritize them in the order of your preference.
Do you involve other people such as experts and friends in helping you achieve your goal? If so, where and how often?
Which are the most demanding and time-consuming tasks? How often do you make mistakes?
And where exactly? What are your biggest concerns or frustrations? What are the most expensive attributes of your journey?

While the users are talking, your job is to listen and react to what they are saying. Being a good listener will encourage them to keep elaborating. You could give them nonverbal cues such a little head nod or a smile to show that you are following what they are saying.

Typing notes on to your laptop is a big NO. It will completely throw the user off. So just sit back and listen. If need be, make notes on paper or record the interview if the user feels comfortable.

After the interview

Thank your users. Summarize your findings. Capture any special mentions or insights. And still, if you feel that the information gathered is not enough, explore a bit more.

Ask for more examples: Tell me about another instance when you faced a similar problem/situation..

Once you have done all this, take a step back to see if your users have validated the problem. Have they defined a pattern? Have they addressed the problem?

The answers to these questions will help you decide whether you want to pivot or more in the same direction.

Here is a user interview checklist for your next interview: Click Here

No risk, no reward: Why teams are being punished for high-stakes innovation

Digital transformation is one thing, but true innovation is another. It’s twenty-five years after the first PC was invented, thirteen years after the first iPhone was released, and five years since Space X’s reusable rocket, all major innovations that have changed the way people think about invention.

These three companies have one thing in common, which is that they have teams and budgets dedicated to blue-sky innovation. Unfortunately for existing, non-technology based companies, these types of creation are impossible standards to live up to. Most organisations have existing products and services that need to create revenue, and technology is used less as an end in itself, and more as a way to add value to the current offering.

There are three ways that companies typically use innovation to enhance their products and services:

Improving operational efficiency
Creating new revenue models
Better their customer experience

But in the process of pursuing these goals, not all teams can afford to fail. Failure in an organisation that makes FMCG products, or one that manufactures vehicles could mean that these teams lose their jobs. It can be frustrating trying to compete in the same innovation race as companies like Google and Tesla. And unfortunately, most teams are not incentivised or encouraged to push for greater innovation.

Here’s why we think that organisations are dooming their innovation efforts to fail, and what we can do about it.

1. In order to innovate, you need to take risks. But risks are scary, failure-prone and expensive; naturally teams don’t want to risk anything!

Fail fast – right? We’ve heard the fail fast sentiment so many times that it’s almost lost its meaning. Besides, “failing” is a very different concept across different industries. Tech giants in Silicon Valley can write software, launch it, see how it works, and then fix it. In the rest of the business world, when we’re launching a new sneaker, or pharmaceutical product, or car, there’s no room for abject failure.

Solution

Forget failing fast. Instead, test fast. Smart teams know how to break their highest risk assumptions into small, testable chunks, and get them in front of users as soon as humanly possible. Don’t worry about the fidelity or about how perfect the product is. Just test your highest risk assumptions to make sure you’re getting qualified customer or user feedback so that you can adjust or move forward with confidence.

In order to test whether an idea is a success or failure, you’ll have to make sure you have user data. That means you’ll need to know how to quickly test your assumptions. Our favourite ways to test include landing pages, social media campaigns, explainer videos and shadow buttons. These lean experiments will allow you to build, measure and learn, instead of guessing, building and failing.

2. People are geared towards getting promotions, and you don’t get a promotion if you have a major failure under your belt.

There’s a stage in every team’s career where they have two options: Take a huge risk on a radical new product or service, or go with the safe option and make sure it succeeds. It’s a painful reality that we are not only wired to avoid risk, but the companies we work for are actively discouraging us from taking a chance. And the creation of vanity metrics assists the process, allowing teams to fudge results to create the illusion of success. The product might have 100 sign-ups, but nobody converts, and that’s a problem.

Solution

First, identify and eradicate vanity metrics. Ask your teams the following questions:

Which marketing channels are you using for this product?
If teams are using every available marketing channel, it means they don’t really know who their customer is.
What is usage and/or retention of the product like?
Sign-ups are one thing, but actual usage is another. Make sure that the product is being used and that customers continue to use it.
What is your most critical and high risk assumption? Did you test for it?
It’s easy to address questions that we know the answer to, but the most important challenges to address are the unknowns.

Then, create success metrics that actually mean something! Matching your customer needs to your business goals is, without a doubt, the greatest challenge companies face today. That means that before you start any project, you need to know what it is that you want to achieve, and then give your teams the freedom to get there, even if that means sometimes not achieving your objective. Being punished for taking the hard path is not going to help you, or your organisation’s long-term success, so make sure there are good reasons for your team to take calculated risks.

3. The task of “innovation” is too big. Incremental change is not encouraged or recognised.

Leadership is encouraging teams to create the next big thing, but the reality is, you probably don’t need a fancy AI solution to your challenge. Innovation, in its purest and most delightful form, is not always sexy. Here at Lean Apps, we love products and services that are so obvious that they seamlessly and quickly fit into your life – you almost can’t imagine life without them. Innovation is incremental, and by using the build, measure, learn framework that we use at Lean Apps, you can work incrementally towards your next innovation breakthrough.

Solution

Understand and reward incremental change. There’s huge value in marginal gains, and this approach is far less risky than hedging your bets on a larger, more radical solution. The iPod was an iteration on the mP3 player, the reusable rocket is an iteration on the standard rocket, Venmo is an iteration on traditional banking apps. Look at what you’ve got, and think about how you can make it better – not how you can reinvent the wheel. Whether its gathering data and using it correctly, or improving your supply chain, or heightening your customer service capabilities, the answers are often right in front of your eyes.

Finally:

Incentivise your team to take calculated risks using the tools that we’ve listed above. And enjoy the process! Testing fast gives a sense of accomplishment and understanding that traditional waterfall development doesn’t – you’ll be stunned at the results, and how excited your team is about taking next steps.

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for more innovation tips, lean development advice, and general tech hacks.

5 Lies Your Market Research Team is Telling You

In business, we are led to believe that collecting more data will help us to make better decisions. And when posed with an ever-growing list of business and customer challenges, teams are naturally searching for a better understanding of their customers.

So, we do what we’ve always done – turn to market research. This should give us a better understanding of how to approach a challenge, right?

Wrong.

Market research fails because you don’t know what you don’t know. Market research also takes too long and involves too many variables. Here are the five major misconceptions about market research, and how to get better results from research and testing:

Lie #1: You don’t need a prototype to get useful user data

A prototype, whether it’s a landing page, a video, or something clickable, will give actual yes or no answers to all your most pressing customer or user questions. This allows you to see how users are interacting with a solution instead of talking about how they feel, or guessing what they want.

Prototypes give you clear direction because they are binary: Does this make sense, or doesn’t it? Does this solve a problem for you, or doesn’t it? Also, insights from prototypes helps with alignment, because your teams can’t argue with the concrete results of user testing.

Solution: Never, ever skip the prototype!

By creating a prototype for your product or service, whether it’s a paper mock-up, a quick video, or a smoke-and-mirrors chatbot, and testing it with 5 users, you can gain 80% of insights on your problem space. Without this, the answers you’ll get from your users won’t be tangible or actionable. Always have something to show users if you’re looking for reliable insight.

Lie #2: Users are hard to find and recruit

Clients have been led to believe that recruitment and testing is a mammoth task, and while it’s true that it’s not easy, it’s also never been easier.

With social media, users are only a few clicks away. Try one of the many platforms that allow you to segment an audience, then place an ad asking this audience to participate in testing in exchange for a small reward. You don’t have to use your company or brand name, and you don’t have to disclose too much information about the project, so don’t let confidentiality deter you.

We hear businesses telling us that they don’t want to “bother” their users all the time. This is a huge misconception!

First, users are often excited about being asked their opinion. People love to talk about themselves and their lives, so engaging them in your product development process is not only enjoyable for them, but can build advocacy and brand loyalty for you.

Second, if you’re not actively engaging with your customers on a regular basis, you’re missing a massive opportunity to create solutions with a better chance of success.

Solution: Your users are everywhere

Some of the most successful products and services have been based on the quickest, dirtiest types of user testing. Take your prototype to the street to get some quick results, or for B2B products, find time with colleagues and clients to give your team more insight than a detailed market research report ever could.

One of our major clients built an app to be used for ordering products in their retail locations. They engaged us to do user interviews in order to check the pulse of the customers in-store, as well as finding out how they were interacting with the app.

Eight out of ten customers in the store were delighted to share their insights and experience about the store. But, to our client’s surprise, none of the customers were using the app, primarily because they didn’t know about it.

Within a day, we had identified a major problem, simply by going into the store and speaking with customers. We also came up with a cheap, simple solution (a couple of posters) to inform customers about the benefits (and existence!!) of the app.

Lie #3: Market Research will give you clear answers

When it comes to building digital products and services, market research can be broad and unfocused. Your results will give high level understanding of market behaviour, but they won’t give you clear direction on how your users or customers will behave in specific scenarios, or in relation to a product or service.

Results are left open to interpretation, and as a result, insights are not immediately or accurately actionable. Human beings are prone to bias, and without the clarity provided by user testing, data sets are susceptible to the many preferences, agendas and influences of our very human teams.

In his famous TED talk, Barry Schwartz uses a great “salad dressing” analogy to illustrate that not only do people not know what they want or what will make them happy, but once they’ve made a choice, they still don’t know if it was the right one!

Don’t force users to come up with a solution for you – give them a solution (in the form of a prototype) as a starting point and go from there. This works especially well because people are much more likely to tell you what they don’t like about something than what they do like. Validation and direction are achieved through prototyping, so if you’re looking to market research for concrete answers on your product or service, you should probably look elsewhere.

Solution: User testing is Market Research on steroids.

User testing is the process of testing how a user responds to a product or service by interacting with a test object, ie. a prototype. It’s faster, more effective, and gives greater direction. In one Design Sprint with a mobile app client, both our team and the client team were completely aligned on the focus area of the product. We were all completely convinced that customers would want to use our product in order to make a purchase.

As usual, we created the prototype for the agreed-upon set of features, and ran user testing with five users. The results blew us away.

After only the first two interviews, it was clear that we were not only on the wrong path, but that there was an easier-to-create feature that customers were super excited about. Instead of having to build a bulky e-commerce solution, we quickly pivoted to what the users wanted and needed. This process took a total of only four days.

Lie #4: Market Research is an effective use of time

When done correctly, market research should take a long time – months, even.

First, the assumptions need to be mapped out in detail. Then, for quantitative data, hundreds of customers need to be recruited, interviewed and the results synthesized. However, user testing can provide the same, if not higher quality results in a fraction of the time.

With the right team, you can get actionable, immediate insight in only a few days. This speed and focus will help you to get your products and services to market faster, giving you both competitive advantage and access to user data post-launch.

Solution: Speed is key

In today’s competitive digital market, time is everything. With an experience product team, the user testing process can be completed in a matter of days, allowing your team to iterate faster, and with more certainty. Many of our clients are shocked at the speed in which the can gain traction, especially if they are from larger, more traditional companies, where progress can be extremely slow.

“I didn’t realize how much could be done in such a short amount of time.” an Intrapreneur at Bayer AG

Lie #5: You have to be a researcher to get useful data

Guess what?! User testing is actually just talking…!

Anyone with the ability to speak can conduct high-level user testing. Your only goals are to keep your users talking in a natural way, and to stay on-topic. Sometimes, this is the greatest challenge – making sure customers aren’t telling you their life story, even if it’s a good yarn!

Another tricky skill to learn, and one that we could all do better, is asking open-ended questions. We are aiming to guide our users through the prototype, not towards a specific outcome. Almost everything they say is valid, there are no right or wrong answers, so be open!

Some great questions might include:

What do you see on this page?
How does that make you feel?
Could you tell me what you think you should do right now?

You should work backwards from your product goals to determine the right types of questions to keep the conversation going. A solid interview script with alleviate any jitters on your end, and make your interviewee more comfortable and trusting of you.

Solution: Use the right team.

Don’t ask a market research team to define or solve your user problems. Digital product specialists are trained to make the most of your subject matter expertise, while bringing their specialised understanding of how to use digital products and services to your advantage. Make your digital offering work harder and smarter for you by working with folks that know how to get you there!

If you’re working in digital products or services, you need to have basic research skills in order to understand how to find the answers to your questions. There are loads of free resources online (including info on the right questions, formats, etc) on how to do research properly. Check out:

Finally, don’t forget that your customers are people, too! Enjoy the conversations you have with them, and look at this as an opportunity to make a positive difference in their lives.

How often do you test your product or service with users? And what’s the most unexpected thing you’ve found in the process? We’d love to hear your stories in the comments below!

8 Essential Chatbots You Need to Know

Man: I love you Siri.

Siri: Oh, I bet you say that to all your Apple products.

Man (chuckles): Ok tell me what you are wearing?

Siri: Aluminosilicate glass and stainless steel. Nice huh?

Man (chuckles): Do you think I am fat?

Siri: I’d rather not say.

Siri is just one of many feisty chatbots that is fooling humans online. Some of these types of chatbots are so smart and funny that you would prefer to interact with them than real humans. And unlike humans, they never get impatient, or become unavailable on national holidays.

But before we go on flirting with the idea of making chatbot friends, let’s find out what these types of chatbots really are. They are computer programs designed to simulate human conversation with users through web-based applications or stand alone apps.

And believe it or not, by 2020 it is estimated that over 85% of customer interactions will be handled without a human. There are many types of chatbots that are already going far beyond performing routine tasks in various fields.

Here is a list of 8 most important use cases of chatbots across different industries:

1) Shopping Bot

Each time a walk-in customer has a query, and it goes unattended, the retail store loses business. Thanks to shopping bots designed to be virtual shopping assistants, the purchasing journey for both customers and sales staff has become very easy.

Now let’s say a customer walks into a store looking for a pair of trousers. He/she wishes to have a certain material, size and style of the trousers. The bot gathers information from various sources and then relays it in the form of pictures of the trousers available, the price range, the discounts and the in-store location. Bam! The customer clicks on his preferred choice and the purchase is done.

Example: Uniqlo IQ is an intelligent shopping chatbot that besides answering the basic shopping queries, also bubbles up product rankings by occasion, personal preferences, and even daily horoscopes. It helps digital window shoppers complete purchases by providing directions to the closest Uniqlo store with products in stock.

2) Lead Qualification Bot

Conversations can be the fastest route to revenue. But sales rep cannot be available to open conversations 24/7 with potential leads. That’s where Lead bots come in.

They are like smart sales assistants who target website visitors with personalized messages and then route them to appropriate sales reps.

Example: At Lean Apps, we have a chatbot that engages with visitors on our site, telling them what sort of services we offer – app development, UX, design sprint etc. This allows the user to choose the option that it is looking for and set up a meeting immediately.

And since we have integrated hubspot in the background, we are able to track all the information filled by the users and have our sales rep contact them personally through email.

3) Pharma Bot

Pharma chatbots are nothing short of medical advisers to patients that cannot immediately reach a doctor. These bots provide information on how to respond to certain health conditions, how to undertake a complex drug procedure or simply how to use a new medical device.

When patients feel too overwhelmed to read the fine-print written on drug packaging, these bots serve as digital assistants by educating the users on the side-effects and dosage of a certain drug.

Example: Florence is a health assistant bot that helps users stay on track with their treatment regimens by sending medicine-specific reminders and information. It can also locate physicians and pharmacies, and help users track their health information.

4) Productivity Bot

Let the bots do menial tasks while the employees get on with more important things! Almost all smart businesses are using productivity bots these days to automate their frequent tasks.

These bots are not dumb programs that can only respond to the same old clichéd questions such as when is the team meeting? Or what is the office wifi password?

You can customize these bots to practically do anything work-related

Example: At Lean Apps, we have created a slackbot named Potato that helps us raise impediments, list impediments created by others, delegate an issue, and raise sales and marketing tickets. On an average, we save up to 30 minutes everyday that would otherwise be spent creating tickets on Jira through the web option. And every morning, we can get a quick overview of different projects through release burndown charts that tell us the progress of various sprints.

5) Appointment Bot

Thanks to appointment bots, call-waits have become a thing of the past. Now you no longer need to slog through calls, or wait for the operator to connect you to the right department.

If you need to schedule an appointment, you can simply tell your requirement to the appointment bot, choose from the available slots, and bam! Within seconds you have your scheduled meeting. Just like that from anywhere on the fly.

It’s also a relief for the staff members who can get free from these routine, mechanical tasks and focus on giving a better service to clients.

Example: Andy is a scheduling assistant chatbot that helps patients set up appointments with the right doctor with few simple steps without requiring any sign-in, password, or download.

Feebi is a restaurant chatbot that helps diners to book a table online instantly without having to wait in queues.

6) DevOps Bot:

From creating new user stories in sprint planning to running deployment jobs, and performing analytics, there are bots for the complete life cycle of DevOps.

Example: At Lean Apps, we use Slack to connect to AWS. It’s called Clive and it allows us to stop and start servers from anywhere, even on a flight, through our phones. Just one simple command.

7) Finance Bot

Finance chatbots seem to have taken on more than mundane queries. They help clients manage their money better by suggesting them ways to save a certain amount each month.

By using predictive analytics and cognitive messaging, these types of chatbots are able to provide updates on customers’ accounts, make payments and even discuss options of getting rid of debt.

Example: Aida is a bank customer service bot that is able to handle requests like sharing client’s balances and reviewing statements with them. Aida helps employees open client accounts easily and more quickly, becoming nothing short of a full-time customer support staff member.

8) Music bot

There are many types of chatbots for artists and music companies that are already bringing artists closer to their fans.

Example: Katy Perry released a chatbot to promote her album Witness. And it allowed fans to interact with her, get ticket upgrades and use exclusive filters. Spotify chatbot calls its users by their first names and helps them create a group playlist among friends in Facebook Messenger.

Yet the music industry still has a long way to go. The show has just begun!

Overcoming Top 5 Challenges of Outsourcing

Outsourcing is hard. We get it. But chances are that if you are failing to outsource, you will fail to insource too.

We often hear horror stories from our clients on being cheated off by their previous outsourcing partners. And how they swear never to work with anyone from India, or from Eastern Europe.

Usually, their biggest complaint is that they didn’t get what they were promised. Or what they did get was not delivered in time.

Newsflash: It’s just as much your fault as that of your outsourcing partner.

Just like for a product to sell, you need to find the right product-market fit. You also need to find the right outsourcing partner that fits your company culture and needs. Only then can your relationship work. It’s like hiring a company employee, except that he/she would sit in a different office.

If you have been outsourcing or looking to outsource, then it’s not just enough to be aware of the challenges. You must also know how to find workarounds or solutions to overcome these challenges. Here are our insights into overcoming the top 5 challenges faced by companies while hiring outsourcing partners:

1) Communication

Communication can be very hard even with employees in the same building. So how does one go about communicating effectively across continents and different time zones?

First of all, lay clear Sprint goals via JIRA user stories. Secondly, talk to your outsourcing team daily via daily standup. Thirdly, keep in constant touch during the day via slack/Microsoft teams and make sure to use video to communicate. And finally, use post-it collaboration tools like Mural or Miro during workshops.

Remember that there is no such thing as over-communication. Go on communicating till it feels like face-to-face communication.

And to test the temperament of your potential partner, you can ask them for an estimated delivery date during the pitching and sales process. By doing so, you can find out if they make an effort to understand your business, your users, your product need etc.? Do they ask the right questions? Do they anticipate a few slippery slopes? Do they realistically consider all of this while planning the timeline? If they are setting early deadlines in their enthusiasm to get a contract, take this as an early warning of bad communication.

Before you sign the final contract, make sure you have an upfront understanding of each other’s roles/responsibilities. Get it absolutely clear how each of you would contribute to the efficiency of business.

What has worked wonders for us is to leave as little room for ambiguity as possible, and have clear deliverables and a daily contact with our partner companies.

2) Trust

It takes a long time to build trust between the two parties. But often you do not get a long time to decide whether you want to work with a company on a long-term basis. Such decisions have to be made quite promptly in business.

In order to make that decision-making process faster and more robust, we suggest hackathons or trial-runs to check the compatibility between the two companies.

In a hackathon or trial-run, we usually ask the hiring company to give us a project that is self-contained, and does not require any work from their ongoing projects. A timeframe of two-weeks is usually assigned to deliver the outcome. This allows us to understand the customer. Similarly, they can also understand the process we follow, how we communicate and the speed and quality of our delivery.

It’s truly a very hands-on experience. A snapshot of what to expect before signing a long-term contract!

3) Quality

One of the biggest insecurities of a hiring company is to find out that they have been served with a poorly written code. And if you are blindly trusting the services of your outsourcing partner, you might find out about the poor quality or problems in your product quite late in your journey.

To ensure that you don’t get swindled off, hire your own technical architect. And have the code reviewed after every sprint, or at least every month. Define code review guidelines for frontend and backend. Make it clear that sprint would be considered complete only after the code review has been done. At your end, you can achieve some level of code quality by implementing tools such as Sonarqube.

Companies that do not have in-house technical architects can also go for a two-vendor strategy: one for development and one for architecture. Make sure that you have a clear understanding with the outsourcing partner about the authority and decision-making power for the affected business functions. All of this must be written into the service contract and everyone involved must be aware of the terms.

4) Culture

No one can deny the power of working under the same roof, going out for beers in the evening or celebrating birthdays together. It’s all part of the company culture and the friendships that come out of such proximity.

When an outsourcing company is hired, sometimes it can lead to an “us versus them” kind of conflict in a company owing to culture clashes.

One way to avoid this is to give preference to partners that demonstrate similar values in their organizations. If honesty is the most important virtue of your employees, make sure that your outsourcing partner also demonstrates honesty in their work.

And if it’s your first time outsourcing in a company that is as close knit as a family, we suggest expanding your outsourcing slowly. Take baby steps before implementing a large-scale strategy to outsource. This will allow you to make adjustments, and scale up or back as your company evolves.

5) Cost

The cost of building your own in-house expertise can be very steep. So most companies take the fastest and the most innovative route of outsourcing. Makes sense! You get something built from outside, pay the cost and think you are done. But hang on!

What happens when you find bugs or your server goes down? You need your outsourcing company again for maintenance. It’s as if you are bound to those external developers forever. And by now your outsourcing company has other clients that have more urgent needs, so you may not be their highest priority.

To avoid such precarious situations, we suggest that you start building your in-house expertise slowly on the side whilst working with your outsourcing partner. Until then, it is wise to include the maintenance of your product in the contract with your partner.

Keep in mind that it is still cheaper to get the outsourcing company to build your product than hire a bunch of developers, pay them salaries, their insurances, sick leave and holidays at the outset. You can do it over a period of time, but it’s a huge cost to absorb at the beginning of a new project.

Remember your outsourcing partner is not a one-night stand. It’s a live-in relationship. So select wisely!

How to take an idea to app launch in 8 weeks?

Let’s say you have to take your idea to app. On average, it will take you about six to eight months to build/launch it. And it will easily cost you around $80-100k.

What if you could do all of that in half the time and almost half the budget? Well after having built 100 apps with around 10M users, and having failed multiple times in the last four years, we have finally devised a perfect formula for taking your idea to app in exactly 8 weeks in a budget of less than $50k.

By removing all the inefficiencies and waste out of the app development and design process, we have arrived at an incredibly clean, focused and fast-paced development cycle to speed up the journey from idea to app launch. (explained step-by-step below).

Timeboxing hack

Earlier our projects used to languish for weeks as the team would slog through the five stages of Design thinking: empathizing with user needs; defining user needs and problems; ideating by challenging assumptions and creating ideas for innovative solutions; prototyping solutions; and testing solutions.

Now we use the design sprint that forces you to do all of it in five days. You have a set of clear exercises and goals (explained step-by-step below), and at the end of each day, you measure your progress. Each sprint results in an outcome that can be presented to the user in the form of a prototype.

Agile hack

Even though we still follow Agile as before, we have fine-tuned it to maximize the efficiency of developers. Earlier, our developers would be pulled out of a running sprint on every Thursday to discuss user-stories for the next sprint in backlog refinement. This would take their focus away from the task at hand, making the development process much slower.

Now, thanks to Mike Cohn, we have a 3-day user story workshop upfront in which all the user stories for the next three months are written. And everyone is held responsible to write the stories. Not just the Product Owner. Even the developers and testers are involved in writing user stories. It makes them feel more connected to the product rather than just playing the role of code monkeys.

Re-usability hack

Through creating multiple apps over the years, we have been able to create a list of multiple re-usable components and libraries for web frontend (React JS), mobile app (React Native) and backend (using Java, Sprint-Boot). We have chosen React so that we could maximize code sharing between web, iOS and Android. That means we code less.

We have created generic components such as those required for registration, login, authorization, CRUD screens, notifications, analytics, payments etc. to shorten the development cycle. This way we don’t have to build these components from scratch, for new apps each time. Our goal is to reach a point where we can deliver 70% of the requirements through our re-usable components list and only develop the rest 30%.

Week-by-week plan from idea to app launch

Now to help you understand how we achieve our goal of launching an idea to app in 8 weeks, we have jotted down a week-by-week lowdown of our perfect formula that combines the best practices of Design Sprint, UX and Agile:

To execute an idea to app, you need a cross-functional team consisting of:

Product Owner (PO)
UX Designer
Frontend developer
Backend developer
Tester
DevOps
Scrum Master (SM)

In building such a team, you are bringing the best practices of each department to the table. There is better communication, more accountability, and the overall progress of the team can be measured from multiple perspectives. You don’t lose time coordinating between departments or playing politics. Each member feels connected to the product.

Once you have a solid team in place, you start working on your daily tasks. In week one, you run the design sprint — a focused five-day process to quickly gather insights on users, prototype ideas and then validate them. The idea of getting immediate feedback is to save yourself from spending months on designing and developing a product that your users may not need.

Week 1: Design Sprint (Idea to App Prototype)

Monday: Map out the key problems and find a focus area

First, gather as much information as possible about the idea and create a user journey map. Identify the complete flow of how a user will fulfill his/her goal using your product/service.
For each user task, identify the problems or pain points faced by the users.
Put down all the assumptions in How Might We format and identify one or two key problems that need to be solved with the app.
Focus on one piece of the problem that you can solve in a week

Tuesday: Sketch competing solutions on paper

Research the existing apps in the market that is solving the problem you choose to address.
Once you have found some inspiration, let each member sketch out its own solution. This will help you make your abstract ideas more concrete.
Start zeroing in on customers that fit your target profile for testing on Friday.

Wednesday: Turn your ideas into a testable solution

Critique each sketch and choose the ones that have the maximum potential of meeting your end goal.
Take the best parts of the chosen sketches and create a storyboard: a step-by-step plan for building your prototype.

Thursday: Create a prototype

Start working on the customer-facing surface of your app so that you can finish your prototype in a few hours (or maximum one day). All you need is a feature that looks real to test it with your customers on Friday.

One of the cheapest ways to prototype your app idea is to use the easily available online tools such as Keynote and Invision.
Make sure everything is ready for Friday’s test: schedule, prototype, and an interview script.

Friday: Test with real customers

Test your prototype with real customers, could be virtual, outside your building or inviting users in your office.
While interviewing your customers, observe and learn how they interact with your prototype. Their reaction will tell you how you would iterate the designs in next Sprint.

Between Design Sprint and Sprint 1, we have Sprint 0 in week 2.

A week that is solely focused on creating user stories for the next three months and doing the initial tech. setup required to start. Sprint 0 helps each member to hold accountability for the user stories they write. It helps them focus better in the upcoming sprints because they don’t have to worry about understanding user stories in the middle of an ongoing sprint in backlog refinement.

Design Sprint is an important milestone to achieve from idea to app.

Week 2

Monday and Tuesday

Once you have tested your prototype with customers and identified two prominent features that would solve your customer problem, start writing down user stories following Scrum in Agile.
Split the two features into smaller user stories spread across the next three months in JIRA, or use free tools such as Trello to do the same.

Each team member must write user stories to hold accountability and gain a deeper understanding of the features and product they are creating.
Team members must decide the success criterion of the feature and analytics that need to be measured in it.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday:

These tasks must be performed in collaboration among team members –

Agree on the technology stack
Create database architecture.
Map requirement to re-usable components list to see what can be re-used and what needs to be developed
Use boilerplates to set up the dev and demo environment (firebase, crashlytics etc.) and bitbucket repository
Set up the Jenkins pipelines and AWS cloud
Set up slack channel for communication

In addition, the UX designer and Product Owner (PO) work closely together to create a developer ready designs on sketch app for Sprint 1 and get feedback internally from the rest of the team.

In Sprint 1 (week 3 and 4), team develops one selected feature and test it internally with PO for immediate feedback in order to make informed decisions, such as whether the feature is solving the problem of the users, how it needs to be changed or tweaked to meet the the user needs and how the next sprint must be planned.

Week 3 and 4

Monday of week 3:

All the sprint planning must be achieved on the first day of the week. The entire team has to agree on the set of user stories needed for the current sprint.

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and Friday of week 3 and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday of week 4 :

Now is the time to start writing the code for Feature 1. Make sure to write clean code and maintain flawless back-end connections because they will help you maintain the code easily and deliver new features faster
While the development team works on developing and testing Feature 1, PO and UX designer update or write user stories for the next Sprint and create designs on the sketch app.
Once Feature 1 is developed and internally tested by testers, it is deployed on the demo environment on the cloud.

Friday of week 4

At the end of the two-week sprint, all the team members must sit down and have a Sprint Demo and Retrospective. In demo meeting, the team shows the completed user stories to the Product Owner and seeks his acceptance.
In Retrospective, the team reflects on the sprint output, and finds ways to improve. Nowadays we use Lightning Decision Jam for that
One of the biggest advantages of having short sprints is that they allow you to incorporate feedback from customers.
You can plan your next sprint based on your findings in the sprint retrospective.

In Sprint 2 (week 5 and 6), we develop another selected feature and test it internally for immediate feedback in order to make informed decisions. But in addition to that, we make use of the quick feedback received on Feature 1 and start fixing all the bugs in it. The goal is to reach perfection incrementally by actively engaging with users.

Week 5 and 6

This two-week sprint focuses on building Feature 2 and fixing the bugs found in Feature 1 during customer testing on the demo environment.

As the launch date approaches, the Product Owner and Marketing expert start building landing pages to create awareness about the upcoming app, using tools such as squarespace or unbounce.

They also prepare all the app store submission requirements like app icons, app screenshots, descriptions etc. You could follow one of the app submission checklists available online for that.

Campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc. help in creating the initial 20-50 downloads – a solid pool to do your first tests with real customers.

Week 7 and 8 (Idea to App launch)

This two-week sprint focuses on fixing the bugs found in Feature 2 during customer testing on demo environment.

Once Feature 1 and Feature 2 are tested and all their bugs are fixed, set up the production environment and submit your app to Google and Apple App stores.

Beyond week 8

After the first two features are launched, the development team continues to build further features in the same format of bi-weekly sprints.

The Product Owner continues to test the launched features with wider audience face-to-face. He captures new insights and requirements, tests them using feedback and data, and collaborates with the team to develop new features and components. It is the responsibility of the Product Owner to act as a liaison between the end customers and team members.

The iterations of the features continue until the point of the success criteria defined by the team in Sprint 0 is achieved.

Through all these iterations, the team strives to find answers to the following questions:

Who is using the app?
How often are they using the app?
Why are they using the app?
How could we acquire more users?
How can the existing users be converted into paying customers?

Getting answers to these questions might take anything between 8-16 weeks after the first launch. But once you get the answers, you will be able to achieve the desired product-market fit.

Continuous Testing for dummies

Continuous Testing for Dummies includes implementing end-to-end tests that can evaluate the end-user experience all throughout frontend and backend processes. One of the primary goals of CT is to ensure that the tests are broad enough to spot that whenever there is an application change, it does not adversely impact the functionality of the software. It is about reducing the number of false positives by giving importance to the most flexible and strong test frameworks rather than broken scripts. It is about code review and optimization in the test suite so that there are no redundancies.

The methodology of DevOps and agile ensures that the entire technologies, processes and people will have to undergo transformation while the testing component remains the same. Continuous Testing takes care to change the testing module as well.

Drawbacks of the legacy testing process

Most of the tests are done at the later stages due to the inability to have the user interface and the other components earlier
Most of the tests are time-consuming and hence regression tests could not be deployed after each build
There is no feedback regarding the impact of the changes to the existing user experience
There is a considerable rework to be in sync with the accelerated release processes
Most of the test environment suffer from instability due to issues in test data, lack of dependencies, false positives and more.

How Continuous Testing makes working so easy?

Using the right set of integration between the automation, collaboration and toolset it is possible to have end to end testing that can be performed more in line with the agile and DevOps methodology. The process of continuous testing can be divided into various modules like development, continuous integration, Quality Analysis and performance of the application. These four domains need to be tested in their own unique ways so that the complete end-to-end testing is achieved.

The process of testing starts with the development of the code which is done by using the tools like Appium and Selenium which we are using at Lean Apps for testing the functionality of the code.

Optimizing the test includes the process of test data management, test maintenance and test optimization management. Virtualizing the testing process means having access to real world testing process that can be done through early, frequent and ubiquitous testing. The effective continuous testing framework ensures that the elements of the testing strategy comprise the development, operations and quality analysis process for a holistic approach.

What are the advantages of Continuous Testing?

Aligning testing with business risk to optimize the test execution
Reducing the amount of manual testing and giving speed to automated testing
Automating quality check and providing insight for the software release
Moving the focus of testing to the API layer if possible
Integrating functional testing into the CI/CD to make it part of delivery pipeline

Testing is one of the most important pieces of the downstream software delivery process that needs to be given the right importance. It is all about mitigating the business risk involved with the testing process that makes continuous testing for dummies that much more prominent. If the software testing is not able to ensure that the business risk cannot be mitigated then it becomes an issue because the entire process of continuous integration and continuous delivery becomes a tough task to take to its logical conclusion.

If the automated delivery process cannot identify how changes impact business risk or disrupt the end-user experience, then the increased frequency and speed of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery could become more of a liability than an asset. The pace of modern application delivery is very fast and the continuous testing has to keep in sync with that and also with heightened complexity and accelerated rates of change that are demanded in the software.

3-Step Guide To Corporate Entrepreneurship or Intrapreneurship

Innovation is broken in the corporate world. Almost every big company today has an innovation department and corporate entrepreneurship team, but very few actually have the mindset to drive innovation the way startups do.

We all know about the famous statistic – 9 out of 10 startups fail every year. They fail fast and learn fast. But there is no such failure statistic for big corporates that so loosely claim to be innovative.

Ask an Innovation Head of a big company about its most recent launch, and you are likely to hear the usual responses such as “Our product is not finished yet”, “It will take three more months to launch it”, “We have a cool idea, but we can’t share the details”, etc.

The reality is that most of these companies either don’t end up launching anything, or launch something that they have built over a long period of time – typically 1-3 years. Most of the ideas that are launched fail to deliver any revenue for the company.

In the absence of revenue, innovation is perceived as a constant cost to the company. Success (rather than the potential of an idea) becomes the most important criteria of innovation. So much so that the innovation team sometimes forcibly tries to show that the product could work.

In such a setup, innovation is bound to suffer. It’s unfair to measure employees working on innovation projects in the same way as employees working on revenue-generating projects.

There are four different types of innovation that companies can aim for:

Improving the existing business model to save cost for the company
Adding a new offering to the current business model to upsell to the existing customers
Disrupting the current business model to capture customers from competition or acquire new customer segments
Working on a totally new business model, which is different from the core business of the company

The following is good three-question litmus test to use to define innovation:

How many new products did you launch last year?
How many new customers did you acquire?
How much revenue (real or potential) did it create for the company?

Most of the innovation departments in big companies would fail numbers 2 and 3. All three can be achieved through corporate entrepreneurship (or intrepreneurship or corporate innovation).

Corporate entrepreneurship is a practice of building small startup teams within a corporate to test and validate new business models following the Lean Innovation process.

The basic ideology behind lean innovation is, “Don’t let perfection get in the way of your progress.” Simply broken down into four steps, this is how it can work:

Validate your most critical unknown assumptions
Identifying the minimum viable product
Developing the first version quickly and testing it with customers, ideally in a real-world competitive situation
Repeating the process until the core product is competitive, or pivoting to explore a new approach

The goal of a team is to work on new business models and validate their viability very fast – within a couple of weeks. A team must generate enough real data about the idea to make this decision – is the idea worth further investment from the corporate? This process helps in filtering ideas at a fast pace, thus avoiding long-running project costs to the company.

The process of building a corporate entrepreneurship can be divided into three phases:

Ideation: Collect ideas from employees and filter the relevant ones. Create small startup teams that will work on these ideas.

Acceleration: Startup teams learn about the Lean Innovation process and apply it to their idea. They collect real data to validate or invalidate their idea.

Execution: Validated ideas from acceleration are developed within a few weeks. Real customers are acquired and startup teams look for the right product-market fit.

Ideation

Collect ideas: The goal of this step is to involve employees in the process of problem–solving. Usually, employees tend to focus on problems that they face in their respective departments.

But we have seen that these ideas could become an upsell for the existing customer segment of a company. Some ideas may even disrupt the core business model of the company, while others may be lead to a totally new business model.

All ideas are collected using idea collection platforms that are set up by the innovation department within the company. There are a bunch of SaaS platforms available in the market that are usually hosted on the company intranet.

These platforms have the user experience similar to a social network where other employees can like, comment, and attach files for their colleagues. They can also vote on an idea.

The most innovative method we have seen so far is the one used by an automotive company offering X dollars to all its employees – if the employees like an idea, they can use this money to crowdfund it.

Filter ideas: Once the ideas are collected, they need to be filtered. The filtering algorithm differs from company to company. Some do it democratically based on votes from other employees. Some set up external innovation consulting teams that filter ideas based on their corporate entrepreneurship strategy.

Some companies allow the idea owners to have a five–minute pitch in front of a panel that usually consists of senior management, internal innovation team members, and external innovation mentors.

Form small teams: Employees who pitch their ideas form their own small startup teams. Typically they choose to work with four or five colleagues. Sometimes these teams are formed through the idea collection platform,where one employee from country X can be interested in working on an idea from an employee of country Y.

The basic principle is employees have to commit to 10 hours per week (20-30 percent of their time) on their ideas, along with their daily jobs.

Acceleration

Acceleration is a usually-12-week programme mostly offered by external companies, where startup teams learn about the corporate entrepreneurship process. Each team is mapped with a mentor, who is an active entrepreneur or has exited from startups, and is well aware of the way startups run.

The programme kicks off with two days of very intense onsite workshops, followed by 11 weeks of the virtual programme. Each week, mentors guide the teams to design their Lean experiments – different ways to validate customers, problems, and solutions without building the product.

Teams are given weekly assignments and they have to present the results in the following week. Based on the learning from the previous week, experiments for following weeks are designed.

Typical experiments conducted during the programme are customer interviews, online surveys, online ads on Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, landing pages, brochures, flyers, design prototypes, illustrations, and solution videos. All of these help in validation and collecting real customer data.

Often teams are not technically equipped to set up these experiments by themselves. So in order to avoid them from getting stuck, one can create a concept of a prototype fund. For example, a budget of €10,000 is granted to each startup team. This money can be used to set up experiments with the help of designers, online marketers, and developers.

The goal is to remove all the technical barriers during the programme and help the teams in collecting data faster with a limited budget efficiently.

At the end of an accelerator programme, each team must pitch its idea and findings to internal investors. A panel of senior management, the internal innovation team, and innovation mentors decide whether the idea should be further built or killed.

Validated ideas raise seed investments of anything between €100K-250K, which is used to go into the execution phase.

In 2017, we noticed that most of the viable ideas fail to go beyond acceleration if left alone. The reasons, we found out, were lack of support from internal IT, design, and marketing teams, and sometimes no support from innovation mentors. As a result, most of the employees working on corporate entrepreneurship ideas end up going back to their daily jobs.

Execution (a.k.a. incubation)

Execution (or incubation) allows startup teams to build a real product, acquire real customers, and get product-market fit within six months. By the end of this programme, teams are able to answer three key questions:

Who is using our product?
Why and how are they using our product?
Why will they pay to use the product?

The execution programme is usually six months long, with different targets every month:

0-2 months: Launch a semi-automated system to provide user experience to the end customer. Operations remain manual in the background.

2-3 months: Launch a fully functional Minimum Viable Product.

3-4 months: Acquire customers for your product and work on increasing the usage of the product.

4-6 months: Find the product-market fit, who is using the product, why and how they are using it, and why theywill pay to use it.

Revenue is not necessarily the only measure of success. There are ideas that could bring massive cost savings to the company. For example, we worked with a company that digitalized its paperwork to save X million dollars per year.

I recommend that once the product-market fit has been achieved, it’s time to scale up. Team membersmust be involved on a full-time basis and paired with experienced mentors. Expertise involved in product design, development, sales, and marketing must be developed in-house. This is the ideal time to develop as many skills in the team as possible.

(This blog post was originally published on yourstory.com)

Free eBook – Intrapreneurship or Corporate Entrepreneurship

Lean Innovation breeds a new work culture. The basic ideology behind Lean innovation is:

Don’t let perfection get in the way of your progress.

Simply broken down into three steps, this is how it can work

Identifying the minimum viable product.
Developing the first version quickly and testing it with customers, ideally in a real-world competitive situation.
Repeating the process until the core product is competitive or pivoting to explore a new approach.

This is very much in contradiction to how things work in a conventional product development cycle. Teams usually spend enormous amount of effort in creating extremely sophisticated products over many months without seeking any active customer feedback. And this often results in creation of products that are either too late in the market or are way too different from what the customers desire.

Release, Learn and Iterate

Lean Innovation can work wonders in different kinds of corporate environments. Not just exclusively process-driven ones. In fact, the real power of this approach lies in creating a great environment for learning in an organization.

Teams tend to iterate and release in rapid cycles while catering to the needs of customers in real time. This empowers them with massive amount of knowledge in a very short span of time, thus enabling them to become more efficient and effective in what they do.

Innovation must be tailored

Lean Innovation is exactly the answer that established companies struggling to innovate with the speed and urgency of startups are looking for. Unlike in startups, innovation needs to happen at different levels in a mature company.

There is no one-size-fit-all solution. Even within an organization, you need to have different levels of innovation with different focus, different tools and different goals.

So before you charge off to building and testing ideas at lightning speed, you must identify which part of your business can surrender to what sort of innovation.

The level of innovation is defined by whether your activities are supporting an existing business model, a partially unknown business model or searching for an absolutely new one.

Target innovation at three levels

Level 1: When it comes to a company’s core business, the existing business model is usually established and the management works by building repeatable and scalable processes. At this level, innovation must be targeted at processes, procedures, costs and product management.

Level 2: When a company looks for new opportunities in existing business models, the management resorts to experimentation with its existing capabilities. At this level, innovation could come in the form of trying new sales channels, venturing into new customer segments etc.

Level 3: When an established company searches for new business models, they must either incubate a startup or an innovation lab. At this level, innovation is just as disruptive as in a startup, running like a separate unit, outside company’s core business or existing operations.

Raj Singh, CIO at FordDirect, says “With the current pace of change in technology innovation is now the oxygen for any organization striving to be a disruptor. Every organization must have an innovation center with a license to go ‘outside of the lane,’ operate without constraints, and explore future trends without the fear of failure.”
“At FordDirect,” he adds, “we challenge our Innovation Lab to keep an eye on evolving technology, monitor changes in consumers’ behavior and model future needs.

The Innovation Lab’s goal is to focus on future value creation and solve future problems, four to five years from today.”

Success is not always scalable

Successful innovations can sometimes become so big that they turn into independent businesses. Or else they get absorbed by the core business. However, the inevitable chaos that such innovations create in the existing set up remains consistent.

Ideally the management in the core business must be equipped to clean up the mess, align and scale up such successful innovations. It is the most natural course of progression in Corporate Innovation.

Here’s a step-by-step guide for managers looking to test or discover new business models.

Lean UX: Create a Minimum Viable Product

Lean UX is all about cutting waste and minimizing work required in creating a product or service. That’s the reason a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is used heavily in its process. It is perhaps the fastest and cheapest way to find out whether a feature is worth investing in at a very early stage.

An MVP is the smallest thing you can create to test the validity of the hypotheses statements you have made.

To build an MVP, you need to know whether

a) There is a need for the solution you are designing

b) There is value in the features you are offering

c) The solution is usable

Keep in mind that MVP is not your final product. You will iterate and modify it multiple times. MVP should be treated as a tool for learning.

Following are the ways in which you can build an MVP:

1) Prototyping

A prototype is like a rough draft of the final version of the product. It allows you to simulate the experience of using the product without actually creating it. And you expend as little effort as possible in building it.

Depending on who would interact with your product, what you hope to learn and how much time you have at your disposal will allow you to choose which prototype to build.

Take a look at the examples below.

Low fidelity Prototypes: Paper

These are prototypes that can be built under an hour’s time. And all you need is a paper and pen. Commonly known as Paper prototyping, it involves sketching screenshots on paper as substitutes for digital representations. They are often used to create and test user interfaces quickly and cheaply. And they are highly useful in early-stage conceptualizing.

Low fidelity Prototypes: Clickable Wireframes

If you want to take your prototype to the next level, create clickable wireframes: a visual/onscreen representation of the user interface of a website/mobile app. The biggest advantage of clickable wireframes is that they can, to some extent, simulate the interactive experience for users as if it were the final product. And depending on the user experience and feedback, teams can iterate and modify these wireframes until the users are satisfied and the prototype can be used as a framework for the final application.

Mid and High Fidelity Prototypes

These are more detailed prototypes created with a visual and content design that is similar to the final product. You can create specific interface elements such as forms, fields, drop-down menus etc. And they allow you to assess a more precise user interaction and behavior.

Coded Prototypes offer the highest level of fidelity in creating simulated experiences for users. In such prototypes, users are unable to recognize the distinction from the final product. This is because such prototypes create as natural an interaction as it would be with the final product. They exist in the native environment such as the browser, on the device etc.

But the key question is what should go into making your prototype.

A prototype is not created to simulate the entire product experience. Instead you must flesh out the most important part of the experience for your users. Focus on the core workflow. Build an MVP around it and assess its validity first before moving forward.

Demos and Previews: As a first step, you could test your MVP with teammates, colleagues in other departments and stakeholders. Ask them to give you a detailed feedback on a) how well the product works; b) how they would use it in their routine; c) is it worth more investment?

Prototypes are the best way to demonstrate your progress to stakeholders. On the demo day, show the prototype to your stakeholders to get validation. You could also take it to your users and get feedback.

2) Non-prototype MVPs

A non-prototype MVP is best employed when you are looking to test the value of a particular feature of your product. It’s perhaps the most efficient way to know whether you are on the right track. And keep in mind that creating a prototype is not always necessary, especially if you have an option of going leaner. One of the questions you can ask yourself is what is the fastest way of finding the information you are looking for.

Following are the ways in which you can create non-prototype MVPs:

Email: it is the simplest way of learning about your users. You can collect data on the basis of open rates, click-throughs etc.
Google adwords: you can experiment cheaply by purchasing google adwords and assess what kind of messaging resonates with your users.
Landing page: A simple landing page with a call-to-action button (sign-up, buy now tec.) can help you validate your product idea with actual users.
User-button: If there is a new feature that you would like to test, simply have a dummy-button. The number of times this button is clicked will allow you to determine whether you have interested users. Of course, you would have to give out a simple message why the feature is not working (Eg: we are building it for you, we are on our way etc.). Or ask the interested users to leave their email address.

Once you have build an MVP, the next step would be to put it to test.

(Reference: Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden)

Author: Narjeet Soni

Here’s what you’ve got to do before the interview:

Now here’s what you do during the interview:

Four key rules of doing user interviews are:

After the interview

1. In order to innovate, you need to take risks. But risks are scary, failure-prone and expensive; naturally teams don’t want to risk anything!

2. People are geared towards getting promotions, and you don’t get a promotion if you have a major failure under your belt.

3. The task of “innovation” is too big. Incremental change is not encouraged or recognised.

Lie #1: You don’t need a prototype to get useful user data

Solution: Never, ever skip the prototype!

Lie #2: Users are hard to find and recruit

Solution: Your users are everywhere

Lie #3: Market Research will give you clear answers

Solution: User testing is Market Research on steroids.

Lie #4: Market Research is an effective use of time

Solution: Speed is key

“I didn’t realize how much could be done in such a short amount of time.” an Intrapreneur at Bayer AG

Lie #5: You have to be a researcher to get useful data

Solution: Use the right team.

Finally, don’t forget that your customers are people, too! Enjoy the conversations you have with them, and look at this as an opportunity to make a positive difference in their lives.

Timeboxing hack

Agile hack

Re-usability hack

Week-by-week plan from idea to app launch

Week 1: Design Sprint (Idea to App Prototype)

Week 2

Week 3 and 4

Week 5 and 6

Week 7 and 8 (Idea to App launch)

Beyond week 8

Ideation

Acceleration

Execution (a.k.a. incubation)