Scrum Backlog Prioritization

May 14, 2016Leave a comment

“Portfolio management is the art and science of making decisions about investment mix and policy, matching investments to objectives, asset allocation for individuals and institutions, and balancing risk against performance.” – Investopedia

How do you manage your backlog? The strategists at the top are often accustomed to trusting their gut, while the engineers below insist on absolute scientific certainty. Handing priorities down that game of telephone is a circus side-show of bull whip effect and sociopolitical contract theory.

Not that it doesn’t work out just fine….

Meanwhile, accountants and financial analysts, with the help of algorithms, benchmarking, and actuaries, have been tracking the present value of an asset, mid-investment, with all risks taken into account for a VERY LONG TIME.

The real question is, do you need all that certainty? Should you be focusing on human interaction and the existential plight more? I guess that’s a separate discussion…

I mean, at one extreme, do you care about your customers so much that you feel an ethical duty to fix every little bug no matter how much it costs you, your employees, and the families they feed?

At the other extreme, do you love churning out features so much you don’t care how many of those features aren’t wanted or how unsustainable your product has become?

No, I assume neither of those are you (I hope). Instead, you are trying desperately to strike a sensible balance that lets you sleep at night while feeling good you pleased a small group with their favorite feature. You’re really in the business of political and emotional backlog prioritization.

I want to let you know that I’m okay with that. Relationships and society and worth building. That said, when you are the bridge between the c-suite and several thousand staff member salaries, you may want to find ways to think harder about whether or not you are building the right thing, at the right time, for the right reason.

Thus, I will give you some science on backlog prioritization, but I wanted to let you know that I completely understand where you are with your current methods.

Tell a Product Backstory

May 1, 2016Leave a comment

Scratch your own itch.

Maybe you want to start a company. Maybe you are at a company but you need to drive a new product to market, with very little guidance on what that product is. If you are still at the “I bet I can build something great but I don’t know what to build” phase – where I have felt stuck for the last three years – take the advice of Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the founders of 37signals (they make BaseCamp):

“The easiest, most straightforward way to create a great product or service is to make something you want to use. That lets you design what you know—and you’ll figure out immediately whether or not what you’re making is any good.” Via Rework

That’s exactly what I’m doing with Emphatic. Full disclosure, this post is an elaborate backstory for an app! I write about agile and product innovation, but I’d like to think the product backstory is as topical as the product backlog. The scope of the MVP isn’t as interesting as why I chose to build it. After all, software is part of the human social dialogue. An artifact of our organic will-to-power, collectively, when we come together as superorganisms.

You see, I found my love of writing again with this blog. I found my love of reading again because I ran out of knew ideas to think through and write about.

In the process, I found a pain.

Freshly laid off, I knew of a few great books – the source material for other great things I’ve read or seen presented – so I picked them up from the local library. While reading two of those books, The Lean Startup (Eric Reis) and Show Your Work! (Austin Kleon) – I was frustrated by how difficult it was to get in the zone reading the words on the page fully engaged when I so desperately wanted to capture notes, quotes, insights, page references, other books and authors mentioned, and tangential ideas to look up later. As a proud millennial, I’ve gotten accustomed to doing everything on my iPhone – emailing, applying for jobs, taking notes, reading news, social media, etc. I’ve written entire blog posts in the shade of a nice spruce tree using just my two texting thumbs.

So there I was, fumbling with my phone and a physical book and trying not to lose my train of thought or intense focus on the words on the page, I started taking pictures instead. Thats when it hit me. This is a pain. I’d solve it even if I were the only user.

To go further back, once upon a time, I was completing a philosophy degree and had to read hundreds of pages per week and write dozens of pages per week to show my understanding of complex ideas. In hindsight, whether in literature or philosophy, the biggest pain has always been attribution and annotation. I get so consumed by the book that I forget to write anything down for later. I write it down but forget the page number. Or I lose track completely of where I found something.

The pain of switching between “reader-response author” and “disciplined researcher” led me to over-compensation – as most people do with a flawed workflow – by separating the two completely! If proper citations was a requirement, I’d research sources and quotes and build out a bibliography and write whatever I came up with based on my predetermined attributions. If I was reading Camus for fun, I’d underline and dog-ear the book and never take a note, then write up my thoughts without judgement or attribution!

In other words, however mundane this pain may seem, is it really a necessary fact of life? No. A solution could be created. So when I see this advice, it really resonates with me:

“When you build a product or service, you make the call on hundreds of tiny decisions each day. If you’re solving someone else’s problem, you’re constantly stabbing in the dark. When you solve your own problem, the light comes on. You know exactly what the right answer is.” Via Rework

All of my time in custom application consulting and delivery, everything I have ever said about agile, innovation, and leadership, is fundamentally related to what they are talking about. At one end of the spectrum you know the pain personally and need almost no documentation. At the other end of the spectrum, no amount of documentation will create engagement and inspiration to build the software.

Laura Klein said it like this:

The first tool in any sort of design is truly understanding the problem you want to solve. […] The vast majority of time I talk to entrepreneurs, they present me with solutions rather than problems. They say things like, “I want to add comments to my product,” not “my users don’t have any way to communicate with one another, and that’s affecting their engagement with my product.”

By rephrasing the problem from you user’s point of view, you help yourself understand exactly what you are trying to do before you figure out how to do it. – Via UX for Lean Startups

So while I’ve been Tweeting out product backlog items and I will soon blog about how targeting and user persona validation dictates product roadmap, I wanted to share the product backstory first. If you can empathize with what I’ve said, you’re my target user. If you’d like to help solve this pain we share, sign up for the email list here.

Photo via Łukasz Popardowski

How to Have Your Marketing Automation and Eat It Too

April 27, 2016Leave a comment

So you are starting a blog. Or a company. Or launching a new product. Or you’re an intern or analyst somehow tasked with marketing and social media. Me too. I’m a couple of those – so we have things in common. Here’s where I’ve landed so far with Marketing Automation. Leave a comment or Tweet me @keenerstrategy if you have additional awesome ideas I can try or if you have any questions about what I’ve done.

This entitled “How to Have Your Marketing Automation and Eat It Too” because I have a fundamental impatience with my craft. I don’t want to wait until the perfect time to publish a post. I had the thought, I put it “to pen” and I feel closure knowing its OUT THERE.

Here’s what I do:

I use WordPress to write the post and I publish it as soon as its done. This doesn’t optimize for the WordPress Reader audience, but that isn’t the source of views for me. It also shares to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

LinkedIn and Twitter are the source of my views.

I have IFTTT (IF This Then That) set up to automatically Tweet my post like this:

IFTTT This way, using the insights from Hashtagify about my target market (people who would want to read about how I “do” product innovation and management) I can automatically add the high-impact hashtags and have Buffer send out the tweet at the time optimized for impressions.

So it looks pretty simple the first time:

After

Then the second time (when it matters on Twitter via Buffer) it has great tags added automagically:

After trying both, I do like Buffer better than HootSuite. I like the iOS app better, but the real differentiator is that it works with IFTTT – something I use for other fun things and intend to expand because it is awesome.

The other great thing to do with Buffer – because I write about innovation and Tweet posts from TechCrunch – is to use Chrome and the Buffer Chrome extension.

Have fun automating!

The Lean Startup (Notes)

April 23, 2016April 25, 2016Leave a comment

Here are the notes I took on my iPhone while reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. The difficulty of properly taking notes, referencing the pages, and getting exact quotes was my inspiration for my new app, Emphatic.

That said, enjoy: completely unfiltered or verified. Hope you catch the random Hunger Games reference.

Learning as Ex post facto justification versus a controlled empirical process
It’s better not to give into it. It takes 10 times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.
Pg19 innovation means learning, which takes controlled failure and is the opposite of efficient
Pg 30 definition of validated learning NOT justification of failure pg 47 conclusions
“Bit by bit, customers tore apart our seemingly brilliant initial strategy.”
Value vs Waste in Validated Learning – what is the simplest, most efficient, fastest way to learn which demand to supply?
Page 50 first to third paragraph
Page 52/53 the audacity of zero reinforces delaying exposure to the truth
54 squandered resources on theatrics instead of progress
Experimenting requires a predetermined definition of success and failure. If you can’t fail, you can’t learn. You didn’t actually test anything. P56

P111 dare you to get your startup idea stolen by a large company
P113 ” successful entrepreneurs do not give up at the first sign of trouble, nor do they persevere the plane right into the ground. Instead, they possess a unique combination of perseverance and flexibility.”
IMPORTANT! P126 – optimization vs learning
135 – comparison of agile team to machines in a factory
144 – guild-based sabotaging, actionable metrics the answer
“The problem with the notion of shipping a product and then seeing what happens is that you are guaranteed to succeed – at seeing what happens.”
Symptoms You Need to Pivot-

Decreasing effectiveness of product experiments

General feeling that the development team needs to be “more productive”
173 – types of pivots
Focus on only one engine of growth:

Sticky – retention, track compounding rate of growth

Paid – advertising, track margin per customer

Viral – word of mouth has an exponential impact, viral coefficient greater than one

P225 – scaling issues and adaptation

The PERFECT Agile Process

April 19, 2016April 26, 2016Leave a comment

THE PERFECT agile process for new product innovation achieves two things: everyone is intimately involved in creating something for a well-known archetypical user and everyone has scientific certainty that the next engineering feat and market risk is a hypothesis that merits experimentation and discovery.

Your agile process doesn’t do that? I’m not shocked.

If you aren’t sure – how happy are you with answers to questions like:

How did you prioritize this feature over that one?
Do you really think people want this?
Are you sure this is what they asked for?

Most agile implementations are focused exclusively on maximizing the efficiency of 40hrs of develop labor-time. Like optimizing a car factory for the performance of only one step in the assembly flow – that’s absolutely counter-productive.

Here’s the perfect Work-In-Progress flow:

Idea, hypothesis, commitment, construction, iteration, validation

To further smack the face of convention, I’ll add three claims:

You don’t need testers.

You don’t need estimation.

What we do need is the discipline to know we are building the right thing before we build it, then test that assumption objectively. This means A/B releases sometimes, cohort analysis, and a clear understanding of the most important metric for each product. This agile process combines all of my experiences with the concepts discussed in The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, and results in a Scrumban flow best suited for building a culture of innovation.

Let’s break it down:

1 – Idea (Pains to Solve)

The idea backlog is everything feature and improvement we feel reasonably certain will make the product more successful. This is where we discuss the future. These start as undocumented epics and end up split into user stories that can be objectively prioritized.

2 – Hypothesis

An idea gets to the hypothesis stage once we have collaboratively estimated the impact of the feature. This requires metrics and forecasting. The work we do needs to be traced via innovation accounting. If we don’t have an objective, realistic impact number that let’s us know if we built the right thing, we won’t be able to learn properly. We need ensure we small-batch-ify the features into releasable stories small enough to be code complete in around two days. The larger the story, the less likely our predictions are accurate. This is like being the first person who invented cake. Small changes in variables make the scientific method, even in an art like baking, successful.

3 – Commitment

Pretend there are 7 cards in the Hypothesis column. Because we have numbers that relate to value and certainty, we can easily prioritize our backlog and complete “Sprint Planning” for the highest-impact cards. This looks like a hackathon, so whiteboarding, pair-photoshopping, research, and hackathoning is completed. When we are confident we are building the right thing and that we know how to build it, we commit to our users what is coming up next for them.

4 – Construction

We pull cards into construction while we are building them. We are creating and coding, answering two questions as we go as new ideas come up. Is this realization something essential to our hypothesis? Can this wait until later? We want the construction process to be collaborative and insightful.

5 – Iteration

When we’re done coding, we review the working software as a group. This isn’t manual testing, this is more along the lines of “Two likes and a dislike”. If we see a defect or have an improvement, we ask the two questions for each thing – Is this realization something essential to our hypothesis? Can this wait until later? We want to remove “contaminants” from our experiment at this stage without changing the hypothesis. For example, if a different shade of blue will improve readability so much that we think NOT changing it will invalidate the hypothesis, let’s change it. If we think the user would like to choose the shade of blue, that’s a new idea and its added to the backlog.

6 – Validation

Our definition of done requires that we validate the hypothesis. This is done with product metrics, social listening, and customer interviewing. If we prove our hypothesis we should ask “Can we do more?” and brainstorm how to continue to reap the benefits of the new feature. If we disprove our hypothesis, we know we didn’t build the right thing and our retrospective (and customer interviews) should ask “Why didn’t this feature achieve {hypthosis xyz}?” and “What did the user want instead?”

What we won’t do:

We are purposefully avoiding what I call “guild-based agile” – a process flow that encourages functionally-distinct steps and hand-offs. I don’t want the engineers to optimize their coding output or designers to optimize their number of deliverables or analysts and testers optimizing their little area of concern. I know that mini-waterfall makes you feel more productive. I’ll help you show your work to the world in a way that makes that urge irrelevant. I want well-rounded creators who build a relationship with the people who use our product. The number of features added is less important than continuous innovation and deliberate empirical product development.

Now – Let’s challenge my claims:

You don’t need testers – In guild-based agile, where the step each card follows relates to a functional division, testers are the natural last step. Here’s a flow I’d never use – Requirements, Creative, Estimation, Coding, Testing, Done. The goal of a push-based workflow is for each step to maximize its own productivity. For a creative person, this means designing a large batch of screens all at once, iterating on their imperfections, shipping them off, and avoiding distractions from developers who don’t understand the designs. The same is true for each step in this dysfunctional process.

The presence of a tester is the symptom of immense process waste. A collaborative team creates with ideas, imagery, and code simultaneously. Collective genius around a goal – We will solve pain X for user Y by building Z – is more valuable than individual contribution. Guild-based agile encourages alienation and destroys creativity. As the batch size grows, getting things done quickly becomes prioritized over questioning “Are you sure we built the right thing?”

Having every function encouraging each other with real-time feedback, focused on the user, reviewing the working software together, and taking pride in the product is far more effective.

You don’t need estimation – Remember when I said all the cards should be about two days of work or less? Remember how the card isn’t done until market data is reviewed and the success of the card hypothesis is validated? You don’t need estimation, because you can simply count the cards. You can forecast based on cycle time. From the time we have an actionable hypothesis, how long does it take know if it proven or disproven? The WIP limit depends on the size of the team and should be empirically adapted. The moment someone feels they don’t have a real sense of empathy for the user of a story or its unclear if you’ll know whether or not your work is valuable – slow down!

It’s true for every function, no matter how specialized the cross-functional team becomes. Don’t make more designs once the hypothesis column is full, do marketing and surveys on what you have, walk through each build with the developer to discuss new ideas. If the validation column is full, don’t code anything else – confirm if the right things are being built before building anything else. I have a hypothesis, of course, but I’ll share that later.

You Look Dumb – 5 Mobile Marketing Mistakes

March 9, 2016March 9, 2016Leave a comment

Your smart presence looks pretty dumb.

Welcome to the “smart” era – smart phones, smart cars, and smart homes are finally here! You can officially go to display rooms in your local appliance store instead of booking a trip to Orlando to see the home of “the future”. In our smart era, a fair percentage of the population now carries supercomputers in our pockets with computing power that would have filled a warehouse even in science fiction during the baby boom.

Unfortunately, as “smart” as all this technology should be in your business, I’ve noticed your company looks pretty “dumb” because things are getting done exactly the way they were before, but now on a smaller screen! As much as technophiles may blame late-adopters for not buying in to new devices and new apps, wake up – if you’re asking people to do the same old story, same old song and dance, but you’ve given them a more difficult form factor to do it on, they have no reason to adopt!

In that light, here are the 6 mobility mistakes you might be making RIGHT NOW that keep your mobile presence looking dumb where it ought to be smart:

#1 – You Encourage Channel Hopping

If your mobile marketing strategy has shifted consumers from one conversion funnel (web or brick) to another (apps) but hasn’t resulted in increased revenue, you’ve encouraged channel hopping. This is a nightmare scenario that often pits employees of each channel against each other internally, fighting for additional budget, unable to fully justify forecasted ROI. What happened? When you built your native app, the value created by your investment was captured 100% by your consumers!

This looks dumb to the smart consumer, because it is painfully obvious when the only difference between the native app and the responsive site is Touch ID. The choice between a link on the home screen versus a downloaded app comes down to space on the phone and speed of content loading.

The math for the mobile marketing individual is so simple that this mistake looks extra “dumb” to your boss. When traffic stays constant, but an additional channel is added, aggregate conversion across the channels must increase or else your funnels are just cannibalizing each other. That’s the ROI problem every mobile marketing initiative must overcome: when you invest $200k in mobile eCommerce and revenue stays constant, your consumers have captured all the value created. Sure, they may be happier. They might say “how convenient to have a desktop site AND an app for researching and executing my purchases!” Unfortunately, the return on your investment they capture doesn’t inherently result in more traffic, conversion, sales, or loyalty.

Admittedly, companies don’t make this mistake in a vacuum. They see traffic and sales moving from their desktop site to a new competitor’s mobile app – panic ensues – and they build an app of their own to stop the bleeding.

Remember, a bad bandage can be more dangerous than no treatment at all. The smart mobile marketing plan requires one of two approaches to respond to the threat of new entrants:

Double-down on web. Yes, I make mobile apps and I’m saying its okay not to have a (native-coded) mobile app. If your plan for mobile is to reproduce a brochure, a paper form, or a website, don’t do it. Seriously, just throw your money in a pile and set it on fire like the Joker in Dark Knight. If your site is working great but it isn’t a responsive site – start there. If it is outdated and anything is unintuitive, fix it. If you can’t create a unique relationship with consumers through your native mobile presence or capture the channel-specific value created, double-down on making your web presence best-in-class. This is Game Theory 101 – If you can’t win at both web and mobile, win big at one and forget the other.
Create a unique market via app(s). If your audience is shrinking or your relationship with your consumers is suffering due to the mobile presence of a competitor and a truly unique relationship can be built through a mobile app – do it. This means your mobile presence needs to accomplish at least one of two things: augment the physical experience in ways a website can’t (to increase conversion) or create a completely new experience for a totally new audience (to increase aggregate traffic). Which path is right for you will depend on your market, products, and competitive landscape – so do your homework (and get a “tutor” as needed).

#2 – No Context Awareness

This is at the heart of what is so dumb about the way many companies establish a market presence on smart devices. If you have the opportunity to look “behind the curtain” you will notice this problem is not isolated, but occur on two fronts for that firm – externally in their consumer native apps and internally in their custom enterprise solutions. I’ve touched on specifics of Context Awareness several times. The differentiating power of a native app is in its intimate knowledge of where a user is, where they are going, and how they think. Segmented push messaging, one-tap deep-linking, and social API integration make the native app capable of a completely new relationship with your consumer. They are using a supercomputer that aggregates an unprecedented amount of personal information – all you have to do is offer a reward that justifies opting in.

Don’t fall prey to the opposite though – opting out should be easy, transparency on the use of private data is key, and you typically have one “strike” per consumer when it comes to keeping an app on their device. Whether it is download size, loading time, or privacy betrayal, as W.B. Yeats wrote, “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

Talk to technology professionals so you don’t plan your mobile presence in a vacuum. Geofences, iBeacons, IoT hardware, Photos integration, BLE, IoT, QR, wearables, and triggered messaging are all tools of the trade for ensuring you are able to create a unique proposition in a native app. Find the biggest impediment to solving your consumer’s pain in a way they will pay money for you to solve. Do NOT invest in native mobile unless the pocket supercomputer is going to augment physical realities with digital awesomeness.

#3 – No Business Intelligence

Ignorance is bliss. Unless you are driving a drastic paradigmatic shift in how you engage fresh generations of consumers through a new and constantly-evolving medium. In that scenario, ignorance is death – the death of any success you could have achieved.

“No Business Intelligence” is the bad-joke-telling best friend of “No Context Awareness” who crashes the wedding reception of your otherwise-integrated-marketing strategy. Where context awareness can drive new forms of engagement by proactively anticipating needs and supplying easy answers, business intelligence is a trailing ROI that takes effort to reap. Business Intelligence is like planting a vegetable garden, as much as the visual presence of a lovely variety of plants may have delighted you on its own, you are leaving ROI out in the field until you harvest it. The same is true in mobile marketing. Until the big data you have created is collected, curated, and learned from in order to provide better plans, more focused campaigns, and the tightest possible updates to forecasts, you are creating white noise that should have been a joyful symphony.

At a minimum, it is essential you collect enough meaningful data to justify that you have accomplished your goals. The less you can prove directly that you have created new traffic, new converted sales, or new revenue sufficient to justify your investment in mobility, the more you need business intelligence to prove the indirect benefit provided to other channels. Better yet, even when new revenue is both directly and indirectly attributable to your mobile presence, you should drive BI insights like you are starting a company that will sell its knowledge. You may start by “selling” it internally to help justify you P&L, but don’t rule out the possibility external buyers may exist.

#4 – No Game Plan for IoT

If you don’t have concrete plans for drone technology or self-driven cars, I forgive you. Not every industry will need direct adoption for these new technologies. However, if you haven’t given serious thought to what your products and services can be in a connected world – called the “Internet of Things” – you are going to find yourself left behind over the next five years.

IoT is already within reach and less cost prohibitive than you may think. Connected power indicators, pipe flow sensors, BLE chipsets for detecting and communicating almost anything – they are all out there. Today what is being “tacked on” to products by R&D will tomorrow be a seamless experience seen as the baseline for market entry. You can afford not to be the first mover to the extent Silicon Valley startups are learning the hard lessons for us all today. That said, don’t get out of touch and don’t get left behind.

The Internet of most connected Things means at least one of two potential realities your business:

Some products you currently market “dumb” will be expected to connect soon – a significant event in your product strategy because the value proposition of your physical Thing will not matter as much as how it connects to the app you provide with it. Think today what that app must be in order to compete. In fact, you should probably be building that app instead of reproducing your already-responsive web site. Then, more dauntingly, think about that product and app and their ability to connect with other Things that are connected in a way that creates a meaningful brand relationship.
Widespread IoT products will further segment your target market and the position of players across your competitive landscape. If your product’s three year plan does not clearly indicate whether you will focus on selling non-connected versus connected variations or both, including the business case for how each will be priced and marketed, schedule meetings right now to drive those discussions. The threat of new entrants on both sides will be higher as major players struggle to straddle the fence strategically.

#5 – You’re Stuck in Analysis Paralysis

Speaking of sitting permanently on the strategic fence, one of the dumbest responses to the introduction of smart technology is analysis paralysis. As my strategy professor emphasized while introducing Michael Porter, refusing to make a decision is your decision. That favorite Porter quote – “Strategy is the art of making choices”. In a Zero Sum game with multiple players and finite economic resources, strategy is the art of committing not only specific resources, but also commitments as a competitive position to the long-term continued investment of resources. By holding resources – even in the most uncertain times – you’ve made a decision to wait. The key to the good life, as Aristotle would say, is that the decision to wait, if virtuous, must intrinsically be deliberately decided.

If your organization is stuck in analysis paralysis, overwhelmed by the amount of aging IT investments behind you and the mountain of new (and sometimes unproven) technology ahead of you, a lack of action may preserve some capital in the short-term, but you are racking up immense opportunity cost and learning curve disadvantage. If your company has too many ideas and no commitment to a roadmap, here is how to get smart:

LESS IS MORE – Don’t try to reinvent your entire IT and Marketing infrastructure in one big push. Define Lean Startup-style MVPs that give you a “quick win” (or a few) while getting you past the rookie mistakes, first-time jitters, and growing pains that are inevitable out of the gate.
SOLVE REAL PAINS – Mobile for the sake of mobile fails the stakeholder, the end user, and leaves a bad taste in the mouth of executives and investors. Look for the biggest complaint of your customers or the biggest inefficiency in your operations workflow. If the solution is mobile, do the smallest possible iteration of that solution. If it isn’t mobile, fix the pain without mobile. Rinse and repeat as needed.
OFF-THE-SHELF is an OKAY START– On that note, with the thousands of tech companies out there, don’t go custom on everything. Open or paid APIs, packaged solutions, and white-label solutions, and SDKs are all alternatives to re-inventing the wheel in a vacuum. Review your options carefully (but keep the scope of your goals tight enough your review doesn’t paralyze you).

Warning: Your Company is WASTING Money.

March 7, 2016Leave a comment

Warning: Your Company is WASTING Money.

Companies are throwing away money. The bottom line is sick. Margins are dying.

In my last post I said the number one sign of “Information Inefficiency” is the clipboard. To take Lean and Six Sigma to the next level, a disruption must occur. The workplace experience must be transformed. However, accomplishing true disruption will take more than replacement of each paper process one by one with a virtual process. Replacing each clipboard in your company with a tablet is simply not enough.

Your company is losing money to the clipboard mindset.

The clipboard mindset has several symptoms:

The worker capturing information cannot easily pass that expertise to new employees.
The information lives in an abbreviated form until the worker adds context elsewhere.
The form/paperwork itself requires training before it can be utilized.
It takes more than a day for the information to “go digital”.

The clipboard mindset is pervasive in the digital era. Your workforce may not carry around paper forms on a clipboard with a No. 2 pencil anymore by my experience with hundreds of companies is that the inefficiencies of the clipboard mindset spread like a virus into our laptops, tablets, and smart phones.

What’s the real cost of clipboard mindset?

#1 – Delayed information symmetry.

Imagine the three most important pieces of information for your P&L. Where did it originate? Where does it go? How long did that take? In economics, information asymmetry is a crucial element of Game Theory and the Nash Equilibrium. In a zero-sum game in which each player tries to make a decision based on the potential decisions of every other player, “information asymmetry” is like being the only poker player who can see another player’s cards. While we typically apply this to businesses competing with one another, the same can apply to every decision that will impact more than one person.

Although it is not possible to know the same information that your competition knows about themselves, minimizing the time it takes to know your own business is critical. In the information age, information symmetry up and down and across the organization must be instantaneous to keep decisions informed. A clipboard delays information symmetry between the person who gained the insight and the person who needs to make a decision about it.

#2 – Social Decontextualization.

Whatever piece or pieces of information you’re imagining right now, this information is fundamentally social in nature. How often does it need additional explanation? How long does it take to get that explanation, or – worse yet – how often do you dismiss it because an explanation isn’t available?

Whether that information came from a conversation with an employee, a site visit by a sales manager, or diagnostic output from specialized machinery, every clipboard – physical or digital – is missing human context. Every checkbox strips out nuance, every fill-in-the-blank limits information sharing, every abbreviated word gambles against forgetfulness. Context is fundamental to human expression. Why is it decontextualization so inefficient? The social and tribal part of our brains and makes decisions has no capacity to understand language. As Simon Sinek shares,

Our newest brain, our Homo Sapien brain, our neocortex, corresponds with the “what” level. The neocortex is responsible for all of our rational and analytical thought and language. The middle two sections make up our limbic brains, and our limbic brains are responsible for all of our feelings, like trust and loyalty. It’s also responsible for all human behavior, all decision-making, and it has no capacity for language.

Sharing the feeling of the moment is the most important element of taking one person’s social context and passing it to another as actionable information. A clipboard captures very little of our context so that is not passed from the person who felt the moment and the person who needs to make a decision about it.

#3 – Decision Fatigue.

If your company has introduced a wellness program, you may have already heard of the idea of “presenteeism” – showing up to work for your normal day but so “out of it” that the contribution is well below 100%. While the wellness community focuses on the impact of poor-but-not-quite-sick “physical” health, the clipboard mindset is the root of another form of presenteeism: decision fatigue.

The neuroscience of decision-making shows that the entire brain and even a fair amount of the body uses up resources in the process of turning executive function into action. The more you have to recall from long-forgotten memories, the higher the level of attentiveness required, the more stress or other emotions that get involved, and the greater the threat or potential reward of the moment – these drain taxing multiple systems in a smartphone (geolocation, graphics processing, bluetooth) drain the battery of a smartphone.

Problematically, while we can make other plans for getting directions if our smartphone battery dies, when our decision-making “battery” is exhausted, we often have several hours of work and decisions to make! Feeling stuffy due to allergies may reduce your attentiveness, but hitting the decision fatigue wall at 2pm causes the brain to rely purely on fight, flight, or freeze. This type of presenteeism doesn’t just make us less efficient, it makes us overreact, avoidant, or complacent about the status quo.

While productivity experts will recommend structuring your day and creating a routine that removes unnecessary decisions, these are the low-hanging fruit of decision fatigue.

Transformative mobility revolutionizes businesses by tackling the the toughest, most painful consequences of decision fatigue – adding context, recommending information, removing fear of failure, minimizing the need of distant memories, communicating instantly rather than adding the fear of forgetting the meaning of your own notes.

Breaking the Clipboard Mindset

If your current Mobility Strategy has left the clipboard mindset intact, move the conversation to finding ways improving the workplace experience can increase the engagement and effectiveness of your employees:

Capture context seamlessly – location, weather conditions, and biometric data are all becoming simpler to capture along with the information the employee adds
Use visual cues rather than words – The decision-making part of the brain doesn’t read the words, use photo, video, and metaphor rather than words
Help answer questions – don’t just fill in the blank: one choice should simplify the next choice by narrowing the possible options, reducing the stress of poor decisions
Proactively provide information – from geofencing to notifications, employees should not hunt for what they need – it should already be there
Rely on search over personal memory – a simple front-end and powerful back-end will empower workers to find what they need rather than memorizing it

STOP wasting money!

The clipboard mindset is destroying the ROI of your human and IT resource investments, perpetuating bad margins through inefficiency and ineffectiveness, it is time to break yourself and your company free.

If you are looking for ideas or training on these concepts for you and your team, send me a message.

How to be the Apple of Lean Six Sigma

March 7, 2016Leave a comment

Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, and Process Improvement have revolutionized the way businesses approach Operational Effectiveness in their physical processes for decades. Elimination of wasted time, energy, and materials in physical processes took the world from the industrial revolution to the smart phone.

For an example of process improvement in Lean Manufacturing, imagine:

You start a lawn mower engine company in your garage. By the end of the engine assembly process the engine weighs 50lbs. The process requires six tables with equipment necessary for the process. These tables are arranged three on each side of the garage in the order you purchased them, oldest to newest . Your back hurts, your feet hurt, and you’re having trouble keeping up with demand.

One morning, sipping your coffee, dreading the job you once loved, you have an epiphany – changing the arrangement of the tables would allow you to eliminate walking across the garage three times while holding the engine as it gets increasingly heavy! So you take 20min to move the tables, but cut 30 minutes per engine from the process. You spend more time doing what you love, less time in pain, and now – energized and more efficient – you meet customer expectations easily.

Starting a small engine company in your garage in the digital era sounds pretty unlikely today right? Won’t we all 3D print engines soon? Won’t lawnmowers use solid-state hover-board technology that never breaks in the next decade?

This physical mindset for Lean is the fundamental issue facing anyone I know in Six Sigma or Lean Process Improvement. Companies large and small are facing the same problem I’ll call “Improvement Saturation”. Improvement Saturation is exactly why Operational Effectiveness is not Strategy – best demonstrated practices become common knowledge across and outside industries. While Lean initiatives can secure margins and save the health of employees, each short-term edge is destined to become commonplace (and sometimes, mandated by law). But what if that well dries up? What happens when you just can’t find another way to get more operationally effective than the competition?

Companies today MUST rethink their approach to Six Sigma in the digital era. The physical world has reached Improvement Saturation. The ROI of Lean projects are shrinking. What should you do?

Don’t just aspire to be the Toyota of Lean orSix Sigma.

Be the Apple of Lean Six Sigma.

In the digital era, process improvement must shift to the cost, the waste, and the inefficiency of the way information is handled, carried, and distributed across your employees in both the physical and virtual world in which your key business processes are completed.

What is the number one sign your company has information process inefficiencies? THE CLIPBOARD

Imagine the most important piece of information your company writes on a clipboard everyday. Now pretend that one piece of information is a 50lbs box. If you want to really feel the three gen of that information, grab a real 50lbs box and follow that clipboard with its imprisoned, currently useless, but mission-critical information until it reaches its final destination. How many days did it take? How many minutes or hours from Point A to Point B? How far did it walk? Are you tired now?

If that were a real 50lbs thing and you could “fax it” to a 3D printer instead of carrying it, how much time, energy, and money would you save?

Companies who keep carrying around baggage like this will get left behind.

If that information is truly mission-critical, that clipboard is delaying information symmetry and encouraging decision fatigue. A mature mobile strategy fixes this and it will launch your Lean Process Improvement program into the information age. Take the leap from improvement to transformation.

To become the Apple of Lean or Six Sigma you need three things:

#1 Intuitive workplace experience – Just like the assembly line removed virtually any need to train the location of fabrication and assembly steps and Apple brought the one touch visual interface to our preferred window to the world, mobile apps done right take the training out of new best practice implementation, minimize the on-boarding of new hires, and give your Process Improvement projects version control, instant feedback, and usage analytics.

#2 Crowdsource everything – Just like autonomation at Toyota let one Quality Control person oversee the output of triple or quadruple the output and safety has been revolutionized by empowering every employee to stop the line when they spot a hazard, the iPhone “went viral” once the App Store gave everyone a place to publish and distribute supply-side, download and consume demand-side billions of new smart phone software options. Lean Six Sigma in the digital age of social media and blog posts must empower the passion and pride of the people, engage the disruptive mavericks, and re-create the social ecosystem of your company in ways that transcend corporate structures to solve problems.

#3 Learn the ROI of Information Efficiency – 2014 was deemed the year of “Consumerization of IT” and 2015 was the “Re-enterprisation of IT” – the next three to five years will be both. The worker as enterprise consumer and the enterprise as solution provider will need cross-functional collaboration to reinvigorate stagnant processes. Just like Kanban removes the waste of a batch-and-queue system, Apple’s iPhone shifted information consumption to “on-demand” or “notification” driven. People love apps. They put the world easily and instantly at our fingertips, personalized to our needs. They tell us it will rain before we ask, where to go when we’re lost, and instantly answer virtually any trivia, schedule, and sports question we may have. Information efficiency is contextual, proactive, and self-advertising. You don’t need to “hunt” on a clipboard, spreadsheet, or green screen for the data that matters – that data, and its implications, should alert you proactively, predicting your need-to-know.

#4 – Don’t do it alone! If you are looking for ideas or training on these concepts for you and your team, send me a message!

Disrupt & Win: Next-Level Lean Process Improvement

August 18, 2015March 7, 2016Leave a comment

Disrupt & Win: How to Achieve Next-Level Lean Process Improvements with Custom Apps

Is your business having trouble keeping up?

It is time to get lean.

Kaizen – Continuous Improvement

Kaizen is a core principle from Lean that lays the foundation of how we choose the right custom enterprise mobile and web apps for process improvement efforts. Loosely translated from Japanese, kaizen means “change for the better”; but kaizen is bigger and bolder than tacking on an improvement to an existing structure – it is the process of continuously breaking down a process, removing unnecessary effort or waste, and rebuilding it as a more efficient and effective process.

In custom enterprise app consulting, kaizen is the ultimate goal of the discovery and analysis we follow in finding the key enterprise workflow that is both proprietary to an organization’s competitive advantage while (sometimes surprisingly) it is also a source of pain and waste. Because this seems contradictory, companies rarely ask for the application that will make the biggest difference to their organization. To plan a truly disruptive roadmap that will position your key processes for sustainable competitive advantage takes a level of honesty and vision that is not easy to tackle alone. Here are some key concepts from Lean that we use to help you plan your enterprise app portfolio and take your kaizen to a whole new level.

The Three Actuals – Genba, Genbutsu, Genjitsu

Lean consulting begins with finding the 3 Gen or “actuals” of your enterprise. Kaizen is impossible without direct insight into the organization, so these three “actuals” are critical to finding the right apps that can succeed big and drive the adoption of innovation and mobility as a competitive strategy:

The Genba – By visiting the Genba or “Actual Place” where business is done, products are built, and revenue is generated, an enterprise solutions consultant can view and understand the operations that create value, whether in a factory, a medical facility, or a sales showroom. Through first-hand observation, rather than conversation, far more can be learned about what an organization does, how it is done, and why it is done. Whiteboards and conference calls can never convey the real heart of an enterprise, the “What’s the point?” or the “What’s it worth?” as it is experienced by the people who keep each process moving, so coming to the actual place is critical to building out a solution that speaks to the pain felt by the people performing the work. These pains tend to originate from inefficiencies and information asymmetries that workers will protect out of a fear of change. Changing a process through training or a set of new rules often fails for this reason. The disruptive influence of a mobile solution shortcuts this fear – mobile adoption rates are accelerating and new generations of employees demand the simplicity and focus of apps in the workplace. These employees must capture real value in order to drive higher revenue and operational cost savings – getting to know their daily workplace experience is crucial.
The Genbutsu – If possible, a great consultant doesn’t just watch, it is even better to directly interact with the genbutsu or “Actual Thing” – the real equipment being moved throughout a hospital or the customer “hand-off” artifacts. In Lean Manufacturing, this often focused on the actual parts being assembled, the path those parts travel in a factory, and finding ways to simplify repetitive motions, reduce unnecessary travel distances through better placement of the work stations, or reducing the complexity of a step in the process by changing the order in which pieces were added to the final product. In enterprise mobile solutions the “actual thing” is often information and the path it takes before and after that information becomes data and drives actions that produce revenue. Information is easily decontextualized, so minimizing context-switching in the information-data-action flow is critical. Mobile solutions drive context-awareness that turns social information into actionable data immediately and cuts out waste.
The Genjitsu – Jitsu is an art, skill, or practice; a word that evolved etymologically from the characters meaning “a step along the middle of a road”. In Lean consulting, this means we must grasp and communicate the “actual situation” as it pertains to one process as a step in an overall flow. More importantly, we must quantify the reality of the process as objectively as possible, separate from emotional responses due to ego, social status in the organization, or feelings of blame. We do this by obtaining data, making hypotheses, documenting workflows, and validating assumptions. The goal is to not only make a well-informed decision about the most valuable apps that can be created, but to validate the features that will be part of it.

Once the three “actuals” are known, sources of waste can be objectively identified, solutions crafted and prioritized, and an initial Minimum Viable Product can be determined. First, let’s review how we can create custom apps using proven Lean process improvement tactics.

Just In Time – Why mobile?

Mobile apps are fundamentally on-the-go and on-demand. The instantaneous nature of communication using mobile allows the Just-in-Time management philosophy to apply to operations processes, delaying resource commitment and investment until it is absolutely necessary. This allows the shortest possible feedback cycle between demand and supply and removes waste due to information asymmetry. If you have ever been left alone as a sales rep checks inventory or watched someone wait on hold to obtain manager approval, you know you know how painful – for the employee and the consumer – a lack of instantaneous information-data-action can be.

Just-in-Time is well defined by its original proponent, the Toyota Production System:

Supplying “what is needed, when it is needed, and in the amount needed” according to this production plan can eliminate waste, inconsistencies, and unreasonable requirements, resulting in improved productivity.

via Toyota

Since our app strategy is founded on upgrading key resources by removing wasted time and effort, mitigating inconsistent process throughput and output, and unreasonable rules and requirements to “protect” against costly mistakes, Just-in-Time is central to every great enterprise app portfolio. Social information becomes actionable data, from answering time-sensitive questions to triggering purchases. Real-time communication can replace unnecessary meetings, a highly focused and intuitive user experience can replace training memorization of rules. The ability to ignite a chain reaction from 3 taps of an iPad is an incredible time and cost saving that can also create enormous additional value that can be captured more quickly.

Implementing Just-in-Time through custom apps allows real-time analytics about the process and its evolution, a “version history” for process improvements, gamification of as-you-work training, and a real-time feedback system for future kaizen. This means creating continuous flow, level-loading process steps, creating “smart” tools, standardizing quality of work, and balancing minimal investment against highest value productivity is not only simplified, it is easy to validate process impact quickly.

The Yamazumi Board – Creating Continuous Flow

The first step in improving a process with one or more apps is documenting the existing workflows as the focal point of discussion and as the baseline for hypotheses about potential improvements. There are software tools for this, but post-it notes on a whiteboard can work as well. Yamazumi literally means “to pile in heaps” and this is exactly what how the analysis is completed, by stacking each step in a process in columns representing each person or role in the workflow. This could be fairly high-level, tracking the flow of a paper form across the organization, or extremely granular, such as every step in the manufacturing and assembly of a complex product.

via Michel Baudin

By documenting the steps of a process in this way we can easily visualize the imbalances in a workflow, identify the “pace maker” process, discover bottlenecks, and clearly see the cost of unproductive downtimes. Combining roles that cause diffusion of responsibility, separating roles that cause unnecessary task switching, and removing unnecessary “fail-safe” measures will remove waste and reduce cycle time, making the process more efficient overall.

Once each process in the workflow is organized into an ideal future state on the yamazumi board, we can easily see the specific tool each role will need to be as effective as possible at creating value. If each tool has a unique user base, we will consider each tool a separate app that we can evaluate and prioritize based on expected returns. Next we evaluate how strategic disruption using a mobile-first mentality will create impact above and beyond simply reorganizing existing resources. Whether we are targeting information, inventory management, or customer interaction, our app portfolio needs to work as a seamless ecosystem that facilitates continuous flow across the entire value stream. Through notifications, context awareness, and on-the-go data connectivity, we are able to brainstorm solutions to each identified pain that can achieve heijunka.

Heijunka – Level Loading

The Lean Lexicon, 4th Edition defines heijunka as:

Heijunka is leveling the type and quantity of production over a fixed period of time. This enables production to efficiently meet customer demands while avoiding batching and results in minimum inventories, capital costs, manpower, and production lead time through the whole value stream.

Once we have seen how our piles of work are should be distributed to achieve continuous flow we then need to identify the pains and inefficiencies that exist even when the process is running smoothly. Before we can prioritize a roadmap of custom mobile apps, it is important to know the elements of a process that are consuming unnecessary time and resources, find and remove batch-and-queue systems that create process bottle necks, and smooth out supply and demand. Because we have distributed process steps across focused roles using the yamazumi board, we can now look at the specific pain points that each tool can address for each role.

In Lean Manufacturing, the concept of heijunka is taught using forecasting in supply chain management. The more unpredictable the demand, the more advanced the forecasting algorithm may be but delaying differentiation, stabilizing production, and reducing inventory holding costs is always possible. When creating disruptive-grade process improvement with custom mobile apps we can apply the same principles to “memes” and look for the inefficiencies, loss of fidelity, and bottle necks in processes that transform context-specific social information into data that is actionable across multiple roles. To win at disruption and to resolve internal information asymmetries and bottlenecks, we need to think through solutions that remove the noise from the signals we rely on to forecast processes. To this, we use custom apps to control selection, throughput, and output.

Jidoka – Autonomation

From the Toyota Production System, the concept of jidoka – “automation with a human touch” means that machines are “smart” enough to identify their own failure, empowering human operators to rectify the problem before faulty parts enter the production line. Before autonomation these parts were only tested at the end of the production line, so a single machine creating bolts for engines could make an entire day’s work unsuitable to ship! To mitigate the immense risk of an entire factory-day’s production being scrapped, an operator could be placed at each machine, checking quality of output at regular intervals. Jidoka is the next evolution of this process improvement, so that machines judge their own quality and a single operator is able to validate the accuracy and quality of several machines, reducing the number of resources required per machine.

In an enterprise app portfolio, the ability to focus a user on completing a single workflow quickly with context-based help and input validation accomplishes similar autonomation. The more focused an app is on a single user completing a specific task, the less we will need restricted access and complex logic. Instead, the technological investment can be focused on context awareness and assistance. This creates a powerful ability to the guide subjective observation of an employee into objective judgment. Rather than increasing training, creating new policies and punishments, and increasing managerial oversight – an a attempt at a “fail-safe” environment – we want to create intuitive “smart” solutions that create a “safe-to-fail” environment in which some mistakes are no longer possible and consequences are minimized. This empowers employees to consistently succeed and removes the stress of failure, all while reducing the need for direct managerial oversight and human approval processes. Anywhere your employee is asked to supply critical information or responsible for continuous flow to the next process step, we want to facilitate responsiveness and guided interaction, then capture and aggregate data as Business Intelligence that can inform both the worker and organization leadership about decisions being made. Anywhere an employee must manage machines or technology, the inner working of which only a specialist would understand, we want to create an interface into the health of the process rather than set the false expectation that every employee can be skilled at

Once the solutions to process pain and waste are imagined – with an eye on “smart”, intuitive mobile workflow tools – we want to look for ways to ensure that throughput and output are consistent in time, effort, and quality.

Standard Work

Through effective information architecture and user experience design, the mobile app user is able to follow an established and intuitive workflow of interactions that are ideally context-aware. So in addition to the focus, empowerment, and autonomation improvements, going mobile is a time to analyze current best demonstrated practices internally and externally, and standardize them. Standardizing what is done, how it is done, and creating consistency of output not only reduces the necessity of identifying and addressing under-performers, it creates a context for the employee in which output quality is held constant for them, enabling focus on critical thinking and social engagement rather than policies and spreadsheet-like information tables. Even more importantly, once work is standardized with a mobile application (e.g. instead of a document template) the consistency of output and capture of Business Intelligence will allow an objective review of “best” practices, assist with hypothesis and experimentation removing some of the emotion and politics from the kaizen process.

Once changes are identified, effective MDM enables your organization to control the shift to a more effective practice by simply releasing a new version of the software. Build any training (using interstitial screens) and feedback (with modal per-feature ratings) directly into the application.

Minimum Viable Product

The end goal of removing interruptions to continuous flow, level-loading processes against fluctuations in supply and demand, and removing information asymmetries and process waste is to attain Minimum Viable Production – a process state in which we find a “sweet spot” in the tension between minimizing invested value while maximizing return on that investment.

This goal will need to be reached on three levels: the process being improved upon, investment in improving the process, and prioritization of the custom app investment portfolio. Because we are disruptively and potentially drastically rebuilding a process we need to understand the point of diminishing marginal utility for inputs to the process itself as a precursor to determining the investment we should make in it. If we are attempting to increase revenue through an improved sales representative process, we need to recognize that increased capacity does not increase demand – we will need to identify stabilizing and increasing supply can result in an unfair advantage in the market. If demand for a process output is unlikely to grow, investing in increased capacity is ill-advised.

If we focused purely on minimalist production, we would drastically rebuild our core operations processes – stripping out anything unnecessary to gaining the “easiest” productivity possible. A true focus on minimalism might even cut revenue in favor of margins by creating less value. Opposing this approach would be a total focus on viability, in which we invest to upgrade processes and resources regardless of ROI to achieve the most robust value stream possible. Ideally, this would give us sustainable competitive advantage, assuming we raise so many barriers to entry that we create near-monopoly conditions. However, most gaining economic rents in this way can take years to capture, making the investment risky. By maintaining a tension between minimal investment and maximal viability, we can minimize necessary inputs while holding output constant, increasing process ROI. If desired we can then establish a path for increasing input while holding ROI constant.

With mobile apps, we facilitate minimum viable product by transforming the nature of the steps taken in a workflow, the number of steps, the number of operators required, and minimizing time to complete each step. By removing all delays in information transfer and introducing autonomation we are able to bring downtime to an absolute minimum. Maximizing ease of completion and minimizing time to completion is therefore the overarching goal of mobilizing any process.

Once we have a full understanding of the next-level lean processes, we take the mobile apps we have dreamed up and create a prioritized roadmap for investment in our app portfolio. While the “big dreams” white-boarding session is an important first conversation, defining Minimum Viable Product for both the processes we will disrupt and the process improvement investment we will make is critical to ensuring the app roadmap is continuously focused on the improvement with the highest incremental impact.

How to use the Lean Canvas for App Planning

August 7, 2015March 7, 20161 Comment

The Lean Canvas via http://www.leanstack.com

The Product Vision Imperative

Imagine a Ferrari with no steering wheel and no tires – no amount of horsepower or torque will win the race if a car has no direction. Increasing resources or efficiency without alignment and traction on a common strategic vision is utterly ineffective. While agile, scrum, and XP will maximize velocity, it is critical that we ensure the well-formed team has ultra-clear, laser-like focus on the goal. After all, no increase in velocity or decrease in impediments can supplement a lack of understanding of what to build and why it should be built. This is why the ability to clearly articulate the product vision of an app is critical to ensuring we don’t just build the right app and build it fast – we build it for the highest possible impact.

There is a natural 3-level taxonomy to an app. The app Narrative (the entire app) is made up of Epics (major features), Epics are made up of Stories. Because an app (as we’ve previously defined it) is a relatively small and ultra-intuitive tool with a highly focused outcome, stating the Narrative is the Lean way to succinctly express the workflow being created, who will use it, and why. It conveniently looks like a massive user story:

The Narrative – A a sales rep, I want to support customers without having to turn my back or leave the room so I can build better rapport as their consultant.
Some Epics – Check inventory, Answer questions, Take payment, Notify inventory team
A User Story – As a sales rep on the sales floor I want to use Apple Pay to accept payment from my customer (Part of the Epic “Take Payment”)

The simplicity of this description will help align the team on the product vision, but it glosses over the business case that justifies the vision. This can be done efficiently for multiple apps using the Lean Canvas approach to documenting the business case for an app.

1 – Identify the Problem

Because the scale and scope of any given app MUST be laser-focused we must start with identifying the key problem we want to solve. Building the right app – A Billion Dollar App – means we don’t build a hammer and start hunting for nails. We identify the nut, bolt, or screw, take stock of the complex setting in which we find it, and build the right tool for the job at hand.

“Customers care about their problems – not your solution.”

-Dave McClure

This begins with the Problem Statement. The top three major pains for a single (existing) operations workflow often tie together in one overarching “problem”. The Billion Dollar App for an enterprise should also have no feasible existing alternatives. We aren’t reinventing the hammer! Instead, we want to identify the problems that are unique to the organization, making a custom solution the best approach. If a SAAS product for a non-core process is available for a client’s pain, we do the right thing and suggest the correct existing solution.

2 – Know the Target User

An appropriately sized and focused app must have a well-defined target user base. In marketplace consumer apps, this means identifying the target market segments in which an app will compete. For enterprise apps, this is typically limited to single business function (e.g. sales). While there may be a subset of users that have customized versions of the same experience, we avoid creating apps that lose focus by combining multiple unrelated workflows. For example, if managers want a dashboard for their sales rep app, the manager narrative (focused on analytics and the big picture) should be separate from the sales rep narrative (focused on point-of-sale conversion).

This is often accomplished by creating User Personas that describe an imaginary but likely user for the app. In order to properly determine Minimum Viable Product, it is essential to know the “80/20 rule” for the target user base. There are three personas that will assist with effective planning discussions:

The Early Adopter – Knowing your early adopter is critical. Whatever initial revenue or increased productivity the app will drive, the early adopter will drive it and provide the initial wave of feedback that can inform a pivot.
The Average User – 80% of people will use 20% of the app. That first 20% of features will also deliver 80% of the value created. Prioritize the high-impact feature that the average user will make use of and defer the rest until later.
The Power User – This user is both useful for building out the longest-term set of possible features and for helping define what type of person will likely not get everything they want.

3 – Summarize the Unique Value Proposition

Once we identify the problem at hand and who it impacts, we quantify the value a solution has the potential to generate. In enterprise process improvement apps we call this “Impact” – the time or cost savings potential or the potential increase in revenue associated with solving the pains we have identified. A business case is incomplete without this. It is easy to gloss over this in the excitement of imagining an app solution, which is why the App Roadmap Workshop is specifically designed to maintain this discipline – we need to know the value proposition before determining the solution.

Once we know the value proposition we are in a position to move from problem to high-level concept. This is often easiest to do by drawing from apps familiar to the audience, identifying both similarities and differences that we would expect to see.

4 – Provide the Solution

With a high-level concept and a quantified value proposition, we are ready to brainstorm the solution. The goal at this stage is to determine what an app would do for each of the pain points identified. At this stage, avoid over-thinking whether the solutions are separate apps or features combined in a single app. Instead, focus on the Narrative that uniquely solves the Problem for each User with an identified pain.

5 – Determine the Product Channels

Determining the Product Channel for each app means determining which devices and operating systems will be supported and how the app will be distributed to users. For web apps, we need to define the internet browsers that will be supported based on the target demographic or based on insights from IT. For enterprise iOS apps distributed through a Mobile Device Management (MDM) platform this will require an Apple Enterprise Developer Account that may take several weeks to secure – do not delay this process. Android, iOS, and Windows consumer apps each have a unique consumer marketplace with their own policies for content and distribution as well as unique marketing requirements (description fields, screenshots, etc). Regardless of which channel is right for the solution to the problem, add to your to-do list to look through the policies, terms and conditions, and Human Interface Guidelines for that channel. If your personal device or browser is not the product channel for your target market, be sure to look up a few “Top Ten Best Apps” and “Top Ten Worst Apps” to get a feel for trends in design and performance.

6 – Revenue Streams

The next step in the Lean Canvas method is determining revenue streams for the product. In the consumer mobile app marketplace this is often referred to as “monetizing” and may be a combination of selling a paid app, using in-app purchases, making space for iAd, sponsored content, or selling data that is collected. When planning web or mobile apps for the enterprise, the App Roadmap Workshop looks at how much cost or time savings or additional revenue (of the potential identified at the Unique Value Proposition stage) can likely be captured by the business given the possibility. This is part of an overall Balanced Scorecard that ranks the apps the business has identified in order of Return On App.

7 – Understanding Cost Structure

As part of the App Roadmap scorecard, we work with clients to identify the impact of the cost structure of the business processes we will impact. This can be done using relative estimation by rating a handful of subjective influences: switching costs, disruptiveness to employees, cost of waiting, and timeline to capture the value created. For example, if our goal is to improve the in-store sales process to increase revenue, we need to understand any costs associated with training employees to use the app, costs to change the layout or technology infrastructure of the stores, and the extent to which the change will be disruptive in a way that has a negative impact on revenue as the employees adapt to the new process requirements.

When planning a consumer app, fixed and variable costs associated with the longer-term product strategy are important to identify – an information website, hosting fees, product support, and ongoing development costs should all be taken into consideration.

8 – Identify Key Metrics

Because we identified the numbers associated with the problem we will solve, understand the unique value proposition, and have planned our monetization or impact, agreeing on key metrics should be relatively straightforward. If an app is tightly focused, there is typical “one number” that we want to move and a few numbers that we are certain contribute to our goal. Secondary metrics are important because our primary metric is often a trailing indication of success or failure and is therefore difficult to use for short-term planning. For instance, if the “one number” is increased quarterly revenue, the impact of new features may not be represented for several months. Secondary metrics like increased traffic conversion, increased items per sale, and increased revenue per sale may provide insights more quickly.

While the business case metrics identify the how we measure success or failure of the app itself, the Lean Canvas method can be repeated on a per-feature basis to prioritize Epics on the app roadmap. Key metrics at this point are typically called “analytics” and focus on the impact of any given feature on the user. This may include a combination of time-to-completion, time per screen, crash-free users, and user-provided subjective ratings (i.e. 1 to 5 stars).

9 – Competitive Advantage

While identifying revenue streams or process impact and establishing the key success metrics for an app allows us to prioritize and understand feasibility, identifying “unfair” or competitive advantage is essential for determining how to sustain long-term margins. At this stage, a Five Forces or Resource-Based strategic analysis can help determine how barriers to entry can be raised and also identify what quality about the new product or process improvement will be difficult for competitors to copy.