Stop building products nobody wants

Companies are still taking too long and spending too much to address customer problems.

One of the problems with innovation inside many companies is that there is too much emphasis on the novelty of an idea: everyone is searching for the next shiny object to outdo their competitors and ignores the less sexy but more urgent opportunities. Everyone is searching for a silver bullet.

And look out! Once there is a whiff of the next big thing (usually because a competitor beat you to it, or a senior exec just said so), organisations frantically arrange themselves to deliver at scale. In the process, jumping from 'good idea' straight to a project team of 20 people to get this idea delivered at all costs. Success in many companies is usually determined by one’s ability to get things done, not by one’s ability to get the right thing done.

“Great landing, wrong airport”

The downside is that many companies commit too much, too early and bet big on an idea they think will solve a problem (ie costing over $1m and taking over a year to deliver). Building an MVP too early is no different. If like Jay-Z you’ve “got 99 problems..” you’re going to need a lot of millions and a lot of time if you keep doing that.

What’s worse, most products fail (7 in 10 actually), so the real challenge is to quickly and cheaply find out what works and stop doing what doesn't work. Put another way, you need to limit the time you spend on the wrong things. You can’t pick the winners without investing in the losers: in a recent study, Correlation Ventures (a data-driven VC firm in USA), found that 65% of VC investments lost money, 25% make some money and only 10% deliver a higher than 5X return on investment.

Because no one has a crystal ball, you need to learn how to pick the winners faster and cheaper than you are doing today.

The good news is that there is a step by step process which drastically improves your odds of success and delivers tangible outcomes in just four days at a fraction of the cost. It’s called the Design Sprint.

The Design Sprint was invented by a team at Google Ventures and is a four day process for quickly solving big challenges, creating new products or improving existing ones; and compresses months of work into four days. Think of it as the ‘greatest hits’ of Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Agile, Service Design and UX Design. It takes the philosophies and tools from many methods and turns them into a step by step, repeatable recipe to get from rough problem space to tested prototype….in just four days:

Monday: define the challenge and scope of the week.
Tuesday: decide what challenge you are going to prototype.
Wednesday: quickly build a high fidelity prototype.
Thursday: test the prototype with five people and develop a next steps recommendation.

That’s it. Four days from a team of no more than eight people to get you from rough problem space to tested prototype with recommendations on next steps. From my experience, that would normally take over six months and over $200k inside a many org.

Now, running one Design Sprint isn’t going to solve the problems of the universe or guarantee ‘the next big thing’; so you need to make sure that the team is supported to keep carriage of the problem and is able to continue to iterate the prototype until it’s ready to be beefed up further or ditched altogether.

One approach we love is to run two Design Sprints over two consecutive weeks: the first week’s objective is to discover & validate, and the second week’s objective is to refine & iterate.