Let's talk about tech news. Those clickbait headlines about jobs being wiped out by robots I stopped reading long ago. And I discovered that I am not the only one who is suspicious of the daily news: John Zeratsky of GV (Google Ventures) talks about how they can be replaced with a weekly dose of The Economist. Jason Fried, founder of Basecamp, on the other hand, talks about his period of detoxification from Tech Buzz.
Watching what happens in the technology sector is too important to us. So important that we risk getting caught up in it, in that buzz. Following everything, often without coming to any conclusion.
Our job is to design technology-based systems, we have learnt for some time now to take a cautious attitude towards cycles of technological change. We have seen this with Google Glasses, with 3D glasses for watching television and most probably soon also with curved screens.
What we have learnt in the past two years of work is that technological innovation alone is not enough: the challenge is to design something new that is really useful.
“Technology has value when we understand how people can use it and gain real benefits.”
Nancy Duarte — Author, TED Speaker, CEO of Duarte
Innovative products do exist, but to find and design them you need to know how to look beyond the buzz.
Some of these products are born from a vision so clear and close to our needs and desires that they immediately strike us on an emotional level. The stories of the founders of these companies inspire us, we identify with their desire to improve the world.
“In a start-up, the founders define the product vision and go from there in search of the market.“
Steve Blank — Entrepreneur and author of the best seller “The Four Steps To The Epiphany”
Many of us would like to be the next Jeff Bezos. But the reality is that innovating is tremendously difficult.
Failure for an innovative product is by definition a high probability event. A key contribution to helping innovators around the world build new businesses has been made by the Lean Startup movement, thanks to the famous book by Eric Ries.
The Lean Startup philosophy teaches us the difference between building a solid product (build the product right) and building the right product (build the right product).
This shift has been the focus of attention in our last few years at Moze in building software products for our customers. During the early years of our company, we were lucky enough to work on many projects: we were good and quick at making beautiful, aesthetically pleasing and stylish websites and applications.
During that time, we supported Wanderio - an Italian start-up in the travel sector - in its initial growth phase. Our friendship and partnership with Wanderio gave us an in-depth understanding of the dynamics of designing and developing an evolving digital service.
Build the product right
Those were the years when we learnt how to build a solid product from a list of specifications. We learnt to work in teams, creating a common vocabulary between designers and developers.
We learnt that designing means creating a solution to solve a problem.
All projects back then almost always started with a specification document (the brief), with a request to implement a list of software functionalities.
We noticed that many of the projects aimed at creating innovative products followed a recurring pattern:
- The brief: a document written by the customer, full of details describing what the product should allow them to do.
- The development: the software is designed and developed - usually over many months of work.
- The launch: the product is released to the public with a big announcement.
Unfortunately, on more than one occasion we realised that something was wrong at that point. At the launch there was not the queue of people waiting for the product that was expected.
We soon realised that this was not just a problem for us and our customers: according to recent research by CBInsights, 42% of start-ups fail because there is no demand from the market.
In 42% of cases a company is working on an innovative product that nobody needs.
Often the starting point of a project is the solution: the set of technologies, the functionality to be implemented.
We have learnt, bit by bit, to start each project by focusing not on the ‘solution’ but on the problem to be solved.
To do this, we found help in a technique called Jobs-to-be-done, which analyses the tasks (Jobs), i.e. the needs of the people a product addresses.
The principle behind this technique is progress, understood as the natural tendency of people to seek some kind of advancement in their lives (functional, emotional, social).
Action, motivation, randomness and anxiety
We buy a bouquet of roses. The reason why we do it (our ‘Job’) is anything but functional: we want to make up for staying late at the office to work. During the commute to work we are nailed to our smartphone screens. What we really do, however, is keep our minds busy playing games, or reading the news. We take a plane, but we do it to reconnect with our family and spend quality time together.
First of all, therefore, it is important to clarify which ‘jobs’ we want to fulfil. Jeff Bezos is famous for saying that people's needs do not change over time.
What does change, also thanks to technology, are the products that are used to satisfy those needs.
So, if creating a new product means exploiting an existing need, we designers must convince people to abandon their current solution and desire a new one.
Jobs-to-be-done uses a scheme called ‘Force Diagram’ to understand which positive and negative forces influence potential customers to adopt a new product.
In 2009, Apple, with its ‘Get a Mac’ campaign, offered one of the best examples of the conscious use of the pattern of forces at play when choosing a new product. It consisted of a series of advertising sketches presenting the recurring theme of an affable young boy (Mac) being compared with an awkward man (PC).
Interviewing potential customers allows us to identify the forces at play in the choice of a product. In this way we can:
- Generate design hypotheses.
- Leverage the brand to speak to people's emotions.
- Devise new features that make solving a problem easier, faster or more effective.
Thanks to the JTBD technique, today we approach each new project by first asking ourselves which ‘Job’ we want to answer.
JTBD is a totally flexible ‘open’ technique. There are also many free resources available to learn how to put this methodology into practice.
Fully understanding the implications of the ‘Job’ to be solved allows us to focus our energies on the most effective solution.
We were looking for a way to shorten the traditional development and release cycle, to put the product concept to the test through feedback and reactions from potential users before technology development even began.
While we were looking for a better way to approach solution generation, GV (Google Ventures) publicised the Design Sprint: a design process to help technology companies rapidly validate business ideas.
The Design Sprint is a kind of time machine: it allows a leap forward before committing to long development cycles. It helps to obtain spontaneous reactions from potential users by creating a realistic prototype in just five days.
In the Design Sprint, a single team is created that includes the key figures of the company or product team: business, marketing, design, engineering, customer support.
The first day of the Design Sprint is dedicated to aligning the team towards the problem to be solved, analysing the competitive scenario and the research done up to that point.
On the second day, alternative solutions are generated, drawing design concepts that will be compared on the third day, when they will converge towards a single solution. On the fourth day, the prototype is built and tested live with potential users on the fifth day.
The team's energies during a Design Sprint are focused on learning as much as possible from user reactions, rather than on creating the perfect product. This is also possible thanks to tools that allow a realistic prototype to be created in a short time, such as InVision to create interactive UI prototypes, or Typeform and Botsociety to design conversational interfaces (chatbots). Why we start every new project with a Design Sprint
To conclude: beyond Tech Buzz, beyond Tools
We talked about how the daily industry news can distract us, how the key to success still lies in knowing how to harness emerging technologies to create a truly useful product for people.
We wanted to help our customers create a digital product that was useful for their users. In our experience, studying and applying techniques such as JTBD and Design Sprint helps reduce the risks involved in starting a new project (Steve Blank defines a start-up as ‘a company operating under conditions of extreme uncertainty’).
In our case, around 70 per cent of the projects that started with a Design Sprint saw us reformulate the concept initially envisaged in order to avoid building a product based solely on assumptions.
We would like to leave a final message that goes beyond the buzz of industry news, but also an exclusive focus on design tools and techniques: when entrepreneurs around the world were creating technology products and services ten years ago, there was much less knowledge than today.
Year after year, professionals and entrepreneurs have increasingly started to divulge part of their secret recipe.
This does not mean that creating a successful technology company today is easier than in the past, it does mean, however, that we now have many more tools and shared knowledge to determine whether our company is on the right track, investing resources where there is measurable evidence of success.
These are the things we have learnt so far in an ever-evolving journey. Now that it has become impossible to keep up with tech news, and where background noise threatens to distract us from real opportunities, being a good planner - or designer - is still the best way to bring progress and innovation to people through technology.
