SOLD OUT: Tell me your idea in a story

A storyboard speaks 1000 words…or more 🤯

It is one of the quickest and cheapest ways to experiment.

Especially when you want to get MORE precise FEEDBACK while conducting interviews and surveys.

What is a storyboard though?

It is simply a sequence of illustrations that visualise the CRITICAL moments of a story.

It could be any story…especially your business story 🙌 🙌

At Bayer, when we were in collaboration with Strategyzer, we learnt the storyboard way of experimentation.

That is, storyboarding helped us bring out our VALUE PROPOSITION i.e. how you will solve a real PROBLEM for CUSTOMERS.

When you have something to look at — a visual, an illustration, a to-do-list — it’s much easier to understand than wordy documents.

It’s also easier for customers to relate to your value proposition when they envision themselves in a scenario where they are actually using your product or service.

So what exactly is the purpose of storyboarding? 👇👇👇

To understand and map CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE.

YES!!

Storyboards create a visual story of your idea. They help you outline your customer journey. Your team can see what needs to happen and in what order.

They force you to think – about:

1. Who the customer is? (This could come in the form of a name of the character/persona in a storyboard)

2. What problem he/she is facing? What is the situation when they face this problem?

3. How do they feel they face this problem? What is their state of mind?

4. How do they then discover your solution?

5. How do they use your solution to solve their problem at hand?

6. How does their life change after the problem is solved?

When can you use storyboarding?

You can use Storyboarding in combination with:

1. Problem Interviews – to visualize the problem the customers face and when (which surroundings) they might face this.

2. Surveys – to ask close ended question around the visuals/illustrations they are looking at.

3. Problem Landing Page: Put the visuals/illustrations on the landing page to tell a story and collect emails from users if they feel the pain and want to know more about the solution.

4. Design Prototype – Convert the storyboard into a visual design prototype of the solution – which can further be tested for solution with users.

Storyboarding is a great way to COMMUNICATE with your customers and see what responses you get.

What does storyboarding measure?

Storyboarding helps you map customer experience and then translate it to a ‘WOW’ experience.

Airbnb used storyboarding to uncover hidden patterns for its customers.

They started out by designing three storyboards for their three key processes:

Host process
Guest process
Hiring process

The purpose of these storyboards was to ALIGN everyone in the company around the critical elements of the customer experience. And from there, they went on to create the greatest customer experience.

When we founded Airbnb in 2008, our dream was to help create a world where you could belong anywhere, and that vision has taken root in almost every country in the world. – Nathan Blecharczyk, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Airbnb.

If creating great customer experience is the highest priority in your company, then STORYBOARDING will help you:

Empathize with your customers

By creating a storyboard, you can understand your customers deeply. You can map, or even empathise and feel the emotions and moods of your customers at every step of their customer journey.

Map your customer journey

A Storyboard will help you depict the different steps your customers takes end to end — from the first time the customer hears about your product/ service, up to the time they have consumed it.

Know what you’re missing

Storyboarding will help you uncover steps that you might miss out on. It will help you map out all the ingredients needed to create a great customer experience.

Choose key moments

Storyboarding should look and feel manageable. That’s why you must map first only the most important/key moments in your customer’s journey.

For example, 15 is a good number of moments.

Build a roadmap on those key moments

Once you have chosen your key moments, you can figure out what your customers expect and what you can provide in those key moments.

Fill the gaps

A storyboard will help you see the gaps at various steps of the customer journey — Where are you failing to fulfill your customer expectations? This could be a chance for you to provide a WOW customer experience.

Go for it!!

✅ Say yes to Storyboarding and combine it with Customer Interviews

✅ Storyboarding is all VISUAL and a lot more effective than lengthy explanations

✅ If there is a problem, Storyboarding brings it out immediately

✅ Storyboarding gets straight to the CRUX of the message and can get everyone on board in a couple of minutes

✅ Storyboarding is inexpensive and can be done quickly

✅ Even bad storyboarding will get you more engagement from your team than a nicely worded document

Surveys to test your idea: YES or NO?

Don’t just rely on surveys (or for that matter focus groups) to test your idea. We have seen many startups and corporates deciding to invest just based on survey results.

For testing any new idea – always start with Problem Interviews — conversations with your potential customers about the problem you want to solve for them.

And once you’ve conducted about 10-20 Problem Interviews, you might be able to draw some insights on:

Does the problem really exist?
Is it the right customer segment you are targeting?
Are they frustrated with the problem?
Why are they unable to solve the problem today? (Are they even actively looking for a solution or created some workarounds?)

Now survey is a next logical step – in order to re-confirm your Problem Interview insights with a much bigger audience – 50-200 people.

What are surveys though?

They are simple questionnaires used to collect information from a sample of your target customers.

What’s so special about surveys anyway?

They are quick and have a wider reach. Speaking individually to potential customers takes a lot of time and resources. Surveys can help you target 100 or more customers in a short space of time.

What’s the catch then?

Surveys will only tell you what customers SAY they will do or what they think they WILL DO? (their opinion) And usually there is almost always a pretty big gap between what they SAY they will do vs what they ACTUALLY DO (their actual behaviour).

Healthy Food vs Junk Food

Sleeping at 22:00 vs watching netflix till 02:00

Meditating everyday vs going out for a drink

Exercising vs Watching Tv instead

So you have to be EXTRA careful while using insights from surveys. Their success or failure are both LOW EVIDENCE.

Insights from surveys are a good indication towards what your customers are thinking, but you will need to run a couple of more experiments to learn what they will actually DO.

Combining the insights from Problem interviews and surveys – usually gives us a good starting point for next experiments. We use insights like what users are thinking, how they explain the problem, which problems they perceive as big and sometimes how they visualize the solution to be?

All these insights become input to your next experiments that could generate HIGHER EVIDENCE.

Here’s how you can prepare your surveys:

Define your goal for the survey and what you are trying to learn
Identify your target audience for the survey
Assuming a 10-20% response rate, calculate how many people should receive the survey
Set a start and stop date for the survey
Create your survey

EXECUTION

Keep the survey short and focused on one topic. A good survey should have more closed ended questions and a few open-ended questions.

For example, let’s say you want to understand how users clean their formal expensive clothes today.

You might ask:

How do you clean your formal clothes today?

☐ Washing machine at home

☐ Wash by hand at home

☐ Wash at Laundromat

☐ Dry cleaners

☐ Others (Type In)

If they chose, dry cleaners, like customers in Problem Interviews did, you could ask them the next question:

What is your top worry about going to the dry cleaners?

☐ I don’t like queuing up at the dry cleaners

☐ I worry they would use unknown chemicals on my clothes

☐ I don’t like the smell of the place

☐ I don’t like the experience of carrying my clothes, drive and drop and go back to pick up my clothes

☐ I have some other problem

If your user chooses “the have some other problem”, you could ask an open ended question: What is your big problem? And let the user type in the answer.

Overall, it’s good to keep the survey length anything between 30 seconds to 2 minutes — short enough to finish quickly and long enough to engage with your potential customers.

Skin in the game: In the end, it’s important you ask your potential customers for their emails, saying something like: We are working on a new app to make dry cleaning a pleasant experience. Please leave your email – if you want to get one free wash.

example

Set up time: Surveys should ideally take a few hours to a day at most for your team to set up.

Cost: Surveys can be free to low-cost, depending on what services you use.

We use Typeform for running our surveys. They provide beautiful templates and provide lots of integrations.

Run Time: Don’t spend more than a few days or at most a week to gather results from surveys.

How to REACH your potential CUSTOMERS?

Run ads to bring traffic to your survey.
If you have an existing site with lots of traffic, then leverage that to get to your potential customers there.
Find out where your customers hangout online and try to convince them to complete the survey. Online platforms such as instagram, snapchat, facebook, twitter are some of the best platforms to conduct online surveys.
If your potential customers are available offline in co-working spaces, coffee shops or supermarkets, print physical copies of your surveys and have them fill them in person.

Iterate your Questions

Ideally, you should run the survey for 1-week and collect raw reactions. If you see low response rate, anything less than 10-20%, try to analyze the reason for it:

Are your target customers struggling with the language?
Are they put off by the length of the survey?
Are you pushing it to the right customer segment?

Find your goof-ups and quickly make small tweaks and test again.

Remember, surveys can be very fast and useful, but only when they are paired with Problem Interviews, or another validation experiment, to gather data. Otherwise, there is a high risk of collecting false positives or false negatives.

5 ways to test your new business idea for $0

Start by answering these 3 QUESTIONS:

– Do people Google about the problem you want to solve?

– Do people complain on forums, or on social media, about the problem you want to solve?

– Are people frustrated by the current solutions being offered in the market?

If the answer is YES to these questions, then you’re sitting on a goldmine.

How do you find those answers though?

Keyword Research!!

Yes, that’s right.

Keyword Research is the fastest and cheapest way to know about the problems of your target customers online.

Forget about third party research firms.

You can do it ALL yourself through Keyword Research and find out exactly…

1. What words do your target customers use to express their problems?
2. What kind of solutions do they wish to have?
3. What part of their problem is NOT being solved by existing products in the market?
4. Why do they struggle with current products?

Here are the 5 MOST IMPORTANT tools you can use to do Keyword Research:

Google Trends

Google Trends, as the name suggests, tracks what terms people are SEARCHING and then translates them into TRENDS.

And Google has been collecting this from 2004 onwards – so that’s a lot of data.

You can refine your search by TIME period and LOCATION. And then? See the relative popularity of search terms at a GLANCE.

What’s more?

You could look for interesting insights into how various search terms have changed across time.

Or you can get a quick snapshot of trends evolving within the last few hours/days.

You can also compare the search trend on different channels (web, youtube, image), different locations to see where there is more traction.

How: Start by entering one or more keywords related to the problem you’re trying to solve.

Example: Let’s say you have an idea for a device that would track pets at all times.

Now start by coming up with 3-4 ways in which you think your customer would describe the problem.

1. pet log
2. pet tracker
3. dog tracer
4. pet finder

A good way to find these phrases is by looking into your Problem Interviews or Surveys.

Are there some specific words or phrases that the customers were using while explaining the problem during those interviews?

Now key in these specific words or phrases in Google Trends to see if they make sense.

Google Trends for pet tracker results Lean Apps — Google Trends for pet tracker results

As you can see, Pet log is the most popular of the keyword searches done by people looking for a device to track their pets and around the pandemic the interest in pet log suddenly spiked.

Here’s an interesting case study of how the idea of Bone Broth was validated by first looking into Google Trends with Keyword “bone broth”

One glance at the graph and you know that MORE and MORE people were searching for bone broth.

YES or NO? Rising trend is definitely a good positive signal for your idea. If more and more people are searching for the problem you are trying to solve, then it’s a YES for your idea. Go ahead…

Word of caution

If your target market is B2B or offline, then the searches on google trends might not give you any significant results. Having said that, almost everyone goes to Google these days when they face a frustrating problem.

Google Keyword Planner

It’s an effective research tool that helps you..

1. discover NEW keywords related to your business
2. see monthly SEARCHES of those keywords
3. determine the COST to target those searches

How: Start by entering words related to your idea or enter a website name that is already providing a solution to the problem your idea is trying to solve.

And voila! Keyword Planner will give you a list of keywords related to what you entered. It will look for keywords related to the content on the site you searched.

"Pet tracker" Ubersuggest results — “Pet tracker” Ubersuggest results

Result? You discover new keywords related to your business. And you can see the estimated monthly searches that those keywords receive as well as the costs to target them.

YES or NO? You can get another positive signal for your idea by looking for the value of your keyword. The higher the value of monthly volume and cost per click, the more valuable is the keyword.

This tool is commonly used by advertising professionals to generate traffic and leads on their websites. But it’s also a goldmine of insights for entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs testing a new business model.

Amazon

It is the world’s largest online retailer. If you have an idea of building a physical product or writing a new book, Amazon is your go-to place for a quick validation.

How? Look for products that are trying to solve the same problem as you are. Read the comments of the customers below those products.

By looking at the comments of customers, you can find out whether they are frustrated about the problem you are trying to solve. Or are they already happy with the existing products in the market? Do they wish to have some other solution that can solve their problem better?

YES or NO? You can validate your idea by looking specifically at the comments of dissatisfied customers. Why? To see whether people are frustrated because the problem you want to solve has not been solved by this product.

The more the number of frustrated customers, the higher are your chances of validating your idea.

Here’s an example of how customers using a pet tracker are complaining about…

Reddit and Quora

These are two of the most useful online communities where people come looking for solutions to their problems.

And since most people start by searching for their problems on Google, you will find that their search results can be found on Google Trends and Keyword Planner.

How? Browse through threads where people are talking about the PROBLEM similar to the one you’re trying to solve.

Following our example of pet trackers, let’s see what we find on Reddit

You can find out..

1. What questions are people asking?
2. What kind of products and services are available to solve their problem?
3. What are their frustrations and complaints?
4. What kind of language/words/phrases are people using to explain their problem?

Innovators and early adopters spend their valuable time to support these communities and report problems. These platforms collect good insights about different products and services.

YES or NO? You can validate your idea just with quick browsing and finding out – how much of a pain point is the problem you are trying to solve? The higher the number of people discussing their frustrations around your problem, the better are your chances of validating your idea.

Social Networks

Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Youtube

How? Based on your customer segment (B2C, B2B, B2B2C), look for trending hashtags on different social networks (use keywords with higher volume and look for similar hashtags). If your customer segment is business professionals (B2B), go for Linkedin. If you are targeting B2C or B2B2C, go for Instagram, Tiktok, Youtube etc.

You need to look for growing trends. And to do so, you need to analyze hashtags i.e. the volume of mentions, the volume of engagement, the sentiment of people and related hashtags.

YES or NO? You can validate your idea by looking for the social media reach of your problem hashtags. More people are talking about the problem, the better validation you get for your idea.

Don’t forget, the fate of your idea can depend a lot on how well you manage your Keyword Research.

So waste no time or money and get searching!

But remember, testing through Keyword Research alone is not ENOUGH. You also need other EXPERIMENTS to validate your problem, customer, solution and viability (business model).

So download our Experiment Playbook to check 25 different experiments you can use to test your business idea!

Are your customers telling you their problems?

Are you solving the right problem? Not sure.

Are you targeting the right customer? Not sure.

All you’ve got is an idea? Yes.

Then it’s time to get started with Problem Interviews.

What is a problem interview though?

It’s a conversation you have with your potential customer about the problem you want to solve for them.

The goal is to find out:

Does the problem really exist?
Is it the right customer segment we are targeting?
Are they frustrated with the problem?
Why are they unable to solve the problem today? (Are they even actively looking for a solution or created some workarounds?)

Where to find your potential customers?

If your business model is B2C – you can approach customers face-to-face. Think about where they hang out.

Some places we have targeted in the past:

People who care about organic food – Outside Special Organic Grocery Stores
Frequent Business Travellers – Subway to Airport (people anyhow are waiting)
Golfers – Inside and outside of golf retail shops
Photographers – inside and outside of electronic retail shops that specialize in lenses
Foreign Tourists in the city – Near famous tourist spots or restaurants famous in that city on TripAdvisor or people who take free tours – join one of them
Athletes – Running parks in the city or Nike, Adidas retail stores
Writers – Writing meetups in the city (Find them on meetup.com)
People that own more than 1 apple device – Outside apple stores (they are also waiting in the queue)
Diabetic patients – Outside diabetic clinics (similarly find the other specialized clinics depending on the patient type you are targeting)

During corona, the face-to-face interactions have not been easy. But the good thing is people are spending more time online. So we have been successful in reaching out to B2C customers on different social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

Another good option to find people is by hunting for people on Reddit and Quora. Look for questions raised by people around the problem you are trying to solve.

Running an Ad on Google for the problem you want to solve can connect you with people actively searching for the solution.

Lastly, frustrated customers of your competition are always good to talk to. Look for online reviews left by frustrated customers of your competition and try and stalk them online to get on a call. These reviews are usually on their Facebook page, Google reviews, Trustpilot, or Amazon reviews.

B2B is much harder.

In a B2B scenario, your access to customers will be very limited. But depending on your business idea – you can also hunt them. Here are few ways we make it possible:

Linkedin: This is best if you want to target people or a particular role within companies. You create a list of 80-100 relevant customers on LinkedIn, connect with them. And invite 5-10 of them for an interview to talk about a specific problem.
Quora and Reddit: You can use this too in B2B scenarios. This is where you will find people looking for help or solutions, very specific to their areas of work. It’s a great place to find early adopters.
Slack Groups: There are a lot of business slack groups on particular topics that you can be part of. If it’s not there – start one.
Youtube Ads: A lot of people are spending time on learning and upscaling their skills on Youtube during corona. Putting your content just before a topic your prospective customer is interested in – would definitely be a win

Tip: For B2B2C – always first validate with “C” and when you talk to the 2nd “B” – show them the data. Your conversation with them will drastically change 😇

Next step – invite them for a problem interview.

How to invite them to talk to you?

If you want to maximize calls with your prospective customers and want their honest feedback, you have to create empathy. Here is a script we use:

Hey there, I am Adam and I am trying to work on this new idea around <topic>. But before I jump into it, leave my job and put my savings into it, I want to talk to a few people and find out whether it makes sense. Don’t worry, I am not selling anything, I am just looking for your feedback.

Would you have time for a 30 min call in the coming weeks to talk? I would really appreciate your time and feedback.

Sometimes I also add:

I have a 3 year old and a 5 year old at home

You can use this in your face-to-face interaction or as a first message to approach them to talk to them.

What to ask during the interview?

Start with a casual chit-chat and thank them for their time. Tell them who you are and why you are interviewing them. And that you have a set of questions that you would like to ask.

Start with basic questions around the problem:

When was the last time you faced a problem <XYZ>?
What was it exactly?
What was the toughest part of your problem?
Were there any negative consequences (time loss, dollar loss etc.) due to this problem?
How do you currently solve the problem? Do you have a workaround?
Are you satisfied with this current solution or are you looking for a better way to solve your problem?
What is it – you don’t like about the current solution?
How many people in your team/company/network are affected by this problem?
To buy the right solution to this problem, do you have to involve someone else in the decision or you can decide on your own?

Insights from these questions will help you understand the intensity of pain your customers feel in dealing with the existing problem.

It will also help you hone the customer segment and identify early adopters:

Some interview tips you can follow to maximize your learning:

1. Don’t Pitch! Don’t try and sell your solution. Ask questions that lead to a dialogue. Allow the customer 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 explaining the problem. 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 customers 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 customer. Let the customer talk even if he or she wants to go off topic.

5. Listen carefully: Give nonverbal cues such as a little head nod or smile to show that you are following what the customers are saying. Typing notes on to your laptop is a big NO. It will completely throw the customer off. If need be, make notes on paper or record the interview if the customer feels comfortable.

Collect Skin in the game

Anything that your customers value and are willing to part with is considered skin in the game. Initially, it could be as little as a VALID email address (company email is even better) or a phone number from a customer.

Tell them clearly you will be using this to contact them about product updates and once it’s ready for a product demo.

Customers should share something more than just an opinion.

Remember: “It’s easy to get people to open their mouths, but not their wallets.”

After the interview

Summarize your interview finding in quantitative and qualitative feedback. Answer these questions :

On a scale of 1-10, how frustrated is this customer with the problem?
Did the customer validate or invalidate your assumption?
Did the customer give you an email?
Did the customer give you the phone number?
Did the customer mention any other problem – which is causing more frustration in their life?
Did they use some special words, phrases to explain the problem?
Any other juicy insights (like competition, what they pay now? devices they use, which all social platforms they hangout on?)

At the end of the day, after doing 5-10 customer interviews you should be able to draw a pattern and should be able to answer:

Do enough people realize that they have a problem?
Is the problem big enough for the customer you are targeting?
Are they willing to take action to fix the problem?

Once you’ve done that, you can move on to your next experiment.

Don’t forget to download the most important cheat-sheet on Problem Interview here

How to design experiments to test your assumption?

Can you guarantee SUCCESS of a new idea? Nope. Nobody can. Not even GOD himself.

Don’t believe me – check this Google Graveyard and Microsoft Morgue – and see how many times these most competent companies fail.

According to the law of market failure, most new products will FAIL in the market, even if they are competently executed.

So is there anything you can do to prevent FAILURE of your idea? Yes, you can.

You can run EXPERIMENTS. They are the best way to reduce the RISK and UNCERTAINTY of a new idea.

In fact, experiments can give you the EVIDENCE required to decide whether an idea is worth pursuing.

Let’s start from the start:

Here is the experiment canvas you can download for writing hypothesis and designing your experiments: Experiment Canvas

Step One: You’ve got an idea. It looks brilliant on a yellow sticky note.

Step Two: You IDENTIFY all the assumptions (unknowns) in your idea. (Check out our last post)

Link to Assumption Canvas

Step Three: You turn all the assumptions underlying your idea into clear HYPOTHESES that you can test. (Check out our last post)

Step Four: You PRIORITIZE all your Assumptions with the help of the Assumption Mapping Exercise. (Check out our last post)

By now you will know the most critical unknowns in the idea. If you don’t validate them, they could KILL your complete idea.

Now what? Now you focus on running EXPERIMENTS to validate them one-by-one.

Start with turning your most critical unknown ASSUMPTION into an EXPERIMENT. And keep in mind that to learn quickly, you should try and go for cheap and fast experiments.

There’s a whole menu of experiments out there. Customer Interviews, Physical Brochures, Email Campaigns, Landing Pages, Customer Surveys, Online Ads, Tear-off Ads, Design Prototype etc.

Check our experiments menu to choose the right experiment.

How do you choose your EXPERIMENT?

You can choose your EXPERIMENT on the basis of:

(as explained in the right it by Alberto Savoia)

Hours to data: The faster, the better

Hours to data is a measure of how many hours it will take you to execute an experiment and collect some high quality evidence. The shorter the time-to-data, the better. You can typically set a limit of x hours, and offer bonus points if your team can get the evidence even more quickly

Tip: think in terms of hours, rather than days or weeks.

Cost to data: The cheaper, the better

Most new ideas for new products can be properly tested with very little money — some with virtually no money. It could be pizza for the team lunch or doughnuts breakfast. Come up with the cheapest way to test your idea that does not sacrifice evidence quality.

Distance to data: The shorter, the better

If you plan to collect your data in the physical world (eg: at a store, on a street corner, or in a club meeting), you can measure distance to data using your favorite unit for distance (eg: miles, kilometers, yards etc) and then try to minimize it. By keeping initial market validation efforts as local as possible, you save valuable time and money, which allows you to run more experiments or test more ideas. When your product idea allows it to be marketed, acquired, or tested online, you can replace units of physical distance with virtual ones such as emails, web posts, or web pages. Instead of counting physical steps, you count digital steps. It’s easier than you think. Eg: three digital steps could be

Writing one email to the forum
Writing one post to introduce your product
Creating a basic website with one landing page to collect some skin in the game (emails, deposits etc.) from potential customers

What is Skin in the game?

If your customer doesn’t have anything to lose or gain with respect to your idea, it means he/she has no skin in the game. It doesn’t have to be an investment of $100 in your idea to count as skin in the game.

Initially it could be as little as a VALID email address (company email is even better) or a phone number from a customer. Anything that your customers value and are willing to part with is considered skin in the game. Later, it could also be their time spent with you to get a product demo or the money they commit to you as a pre-order of your product.

It has to be something more than just an opinion. Remember

“It’s easy to get people to open their mouths, but not their wallets.”

What is a good EXPERIMENT anyway?

A good experiment is one that generates strongest evidence in the fastest way and smallest cost.

A good experiment has 5 important ingredients:

Assumption: A risk that is made explicit in the form of a critical hypothesis.

We believe that..(people who wear glasses would like to have special masks that do not fog their glasses)

2. Experiment: A description of the experiment you will run to validate or invalidate the assumption.

To verify that, we will.. (interview people who wear glasses in our neighborhood and ask for their email addresses)

3. Metrics: The exact data you will measure as part of your experiment.

And measure (ask 20 people who wear glasses in our neighborhood for their email addresses)

4. Time Box: The amount of time you spend in running an experiment to generate sufficient evidence.

For how long.. (4 Hours, 1 day, 1 week)

5. Minimum Success Criteria: The metric you use for your experiment to be validated.

We are right if.. (50% of the people will be frustrated due to foggy glasses and at least 30% of the people we talk to will give us their email addresses)

What do you do with the EVIDENCE you’ve gathered?

Well, sadly evidence doesn’t speak on its own. That’s why you need to ANALYSE it by asking key questions such as:

What was the ACTUAL REACH of your experiment? You might have set out to interview 20 target customers in 5 hours. But perhaps, you only got through 12.
Do you have STRONG or WEAK evidence?
How MANY of your target customers VALIDATED or INVALIDATED the assumption you were testing?

The answers to these questions will give you quantitative INSIGHTS.

You’ll also be able to gather qualitative INSIGHTS by observing your customers’ behavior and opinions.

For example, customers might describe a new problem that you are not aware of, or they might use a new vocabulary or specific phrases to describe a problem, or their body language might tell you whether they feel enthusiastic about your product etc.

All this will give you an understanding into how likely your idea will work. And this in turn will help you make informed decisions.

Next step would be to..

Put your EVIDENCE in the TRI (The Right it) Meter

(Taken from the right it by Alberto Savoia)

It’s a visual analysis tool that will help you interpret your evidence as objectively as possible.

It will also give you a rough estimate of how likely your idea will succeed in the market.

Here’s a guideline to help you map your data on the TRI Meter:

If your evidence significantly exceeds (2X) what the hypothesis predicts, chances are that your idea is Very likely (90%) to succeed in the market.

If your evidence slightly exceeds (1.5X) what the hypothesis predicts, chances are that your idea is Likely (70%) to succeed in the market.

If your evidence just meets the target (X-1.5X) of what the hypothesis predicts, chances are that your idea has 50-50 chance (50%) to succeed in the market.

If your evidence falls just short (<X) of what the hypothesis predicts, chances are that your idea is Unlikely (30%) to succeed in the market.

If your evidence significantly short (<0.5X) of what the hypothesis predicts, chances are that your idea is Very unlikely (10%) to succeed in the market.

Make a DECISION

On the basis of your gathered evidence, you will decide what your next ACTION will be.

Validated: If your hypothesis is validated with your experiment, you must move on to your next important hypothesis.

Invalidated: If your hypothesis is invalidated/refuted with your experiment, you must either pivot or find a new problem or test the same assumption with a new customer segment.

Inconclusive: If your hypothesis is inconclusive with your experiment, you must run another round of experiments to produce stronger evidence.

You must run 8-10 experiments to fully test all your assumptions in the problem, solution and business viability space. You have to mark each one of them on TRI meter and a pattern will start to emerge – with will help you decide

KILL VS INVEST VS GENERATE MORE DATA

Now run along and start experimenting 😉

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.

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!

5 ways to reduce the cost of app development

One of the first questions we get from our clients is: What is the cost of app development? Our short and quick answer is: Go to our app calculator and find it out in a minute.

But for those who insist on getting an instant rough estimate, this is what we say: A small, simple app with minimal features can cost anything around $15,000, whereas a highly complex app with deep integrations can cost anything around $100,000.

The long answer, however, is that the cost of an app can be negotiated and reduced significantly by taking into account these five basic measures:

1. Use React Native

React native is a perfect platform for developing mobile apps for both iOS and Android because its building blocks can be reused as native components. It helps you save an incredible amount of time and reduce the cost of app development significantly. You don’t require separate developers for iOS and Android. And you don’t require two separate code repositories either.

So far we have had amazing success with React Native. It allows you to create apps that are similar to their native analogs, both in design and performance.

We encourage our clients to first get their app developed solely for one platform, either iOS or Android. Once that version of the app is launched and tested, we advise them to build the other version.

Since each version has its own User Interface features, the cost for frontend creation can be very high, as you would need to hire several teams for each platform. One option is to go for a hybrid or cross-platform app. But in our experience, such apps have been lacking in performance capabilities.

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2. Use Minimal Design

It’s an outdated approach to spend months on planning and developing all the features, testing and then optimizing the app for the market. Chances are that you might end up investing a lot of time and money into developing features that the users may not eventually care for.

That’s why we recommend minimal design. By using design sprint, you can compress months of work into a single week – a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. Instead of waiting to launch a finished product, you can get customer reactions from a realistic prototype very early on without making any expensive commitments.

And by using Agile methodology, you can split an entire project into small sprints while keeping the long-term vision intact. Based on your consumer reactions, you can keep adding new features with newsprints. And if changes need to be made in a project, the team can respond to them quickly and fix the bugs simultaneously.

There is no need for re-planning or restructuring the entire project to fit any changes, thus helping you save a lot of money and time and reduce the cost of app development.

3. Launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

We always encourage our clients to launch the first version of their apps with minimum functionality and keep all the secondary features for later development. This will help you keep the cost of app development low. It’s only after you have identified the demand for additional features that you must start investing in them.

MVP fits in perfectly with agile methodology. It reduces costs and helps you avoid failure at a later stage.

By launching an MVP, you can test your core idea at a very early stage and in a very low budget. You can identify improvements and bugs in advance, without losing too much time, money or resources.

Not only does it keep costs down and speed up the development process, but it also allows you to develop your app with real user feedback when launched. By launching an MVP, you shall never be faced with the problem of users wanting something different from your ideas.

So don’t waste your time developing detailed interfaces and branded designs. Instead, implement an early version of your app. Fail fast and learn fast.

4. Outsource first, hire later

If you do not have in-house expertise in app development, don’t waste time and money building a team from scratch. Instead, outsource your work to gain speed. But make sure that you keep the code review process internal so that you don’t end up with an unstructured code. You could even rent a code reviewer if you don’t have one internally. But once you have reached the stage of finding a product-market fit, you should build a team for scaling up.

Meanwhile, for outsourcing purposes, go for a company that offers you end-to-end services and access to a large talent pool. If you have too many different hires from different places involved in the same app development project, you might end up losing hours of sleep coordinating with them in different time zones.

We recommend you hire a company that takes full accountability of testing, developing and fixing bugs, and employs best practices from design sprint, Agile and UX. All these factors will significantly reduce your cost of development and time required in building your app.

5. Use readymade solutions

A completely original and authentic software foundation for an app can increase the cost of app development and take a lot of time. To reduce the cost of app development, we encourage the approach of re-usability, either through the online tools or through a company that can provide you so.

There is already a huge glut of reusable libraries available for React Native, and a lot more is being added to the community by top companies such as WIX.

We are doing our bit too. Having built over 100 apps reaching 10 million users in the last four years, we are creating multiple reusable components to add to the libraries for web frontend (React JS), mobile app (React Native) and backend (using Java, Sprint-Boot).

We have already 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. We code a lot less and create a lot faster. Our goal is to reach a point where we can develop 70% of the requirements through our reusable components list, and only code the rest 30%.

Keeping these hacks in mind, we recommend you go back to the app calculator and find the cost of your app again. We guarantee you that this time your estimate would be much lower. If not, give us a holler to negotiate the cost.

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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.

Category: Digital Transformation

What is a storyboard though?

So what exactly is the purpose of storyboarding? 👇👇👇

When can you use storyboarding?

What does storyboarding measure?

If creating great customer experience is the highest priority in your company, then STORYBOARDING will help you:

Empathize with your customers

Map your customer journey

Know what you’re missing

Choose key moments

Build a roadmap on those key moments

Fill the gaps

Go for it!!

What are surveys though?

What’s so special about surveys anyway?

What’s the catch then?

EXECUTION

Where to find your potential customers?

B2B is much harder.

How to invite them to talk to you?

What to ask during the interview?

Collect Skin in the game

After the interview

How do you choose your EXPERIMENT?

Hours to data: The faster, the better

Cost to data: The cheaper, the better

Distance to data: The shorter, the better

What is Skin in the game?

What is a good EXPERIMENT anyway?

A good experiment has 5 important ingredients:

What do you do with the EVIDENCE you’ve gathered?

Put your EVIDENCE in the TRI (The Right it) Meter

Make a DECISION

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.

1. Use React Native

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2. Use Minimal Design

3. Launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

4. Outsource first, hire later

5. Use readymade solutions

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Ideation

Acceleration

Execution (a.k.a. incubation)