Lean + UX + Agile.

Lean Startup, User Experience Design and Agile Development are all approaches to improve your odds of creating successful products. Are they mutually exclusive, or can you assemble them together to make a lean, mean product machine?

In November Pathfinder’s Bernhard Kappe, Amy Willis and Reid MacTavish gave a sold out talk at the Chicago Product Management Association to share their lessons learned in making products with Lean + UX + Agile methodology. We have produced a video of the event including the slides with a narrative voice over for your enjoyment. If you’d like to view the presentation on slideshare, you can do so here.

We’re extending this into a half day workshop on January 20th that goes into practical details on how to make lean startup work.

We will cover:

• Pragmatic Marketing and Lean Startup- which is right for you?
• Lean UX – Design as the differential gear between customer development and agile development
• How to run a successful inception
• It’s never too early for metrics and analytics
• Agile practices and pitfalls
• Continuous deployment and A/B testing
• Team composition and how to hire

If you’d like to join us, you can rsvp here: http://pathfinderleanux.eventbrite.com/

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photo credit: Daquella manera

I’m always on the search for examples that illustrate the difference between problem and solution in product design. Recently, I’ve found a really sweet one.

In our various processes — whether it’s customer development, product design, or usability analysis — we end up asking people about their problems. What works for them; what doesn’t  work for them; what takes too long; what seems unnecessary? We asks lots of leading questions and play lots of little games to get at the underlying question of problem. Only then do we propose solutions to that problem and vet them with customers.

If you misunderstand the difference between problem and solution, you’ll end up launching a SaaS product for travel agents rather than Expedia or Orbitz.

My favorite example illustrating this problem up until recently was the automated scanning of license plate numbers at places like toll booths. It turns out that with dirt, lighting conditions, blur from movement, and different angles of the plate, this is a really hard problem. But it isn’t the real problem. You want to identify cars, not scan letters. Adding some sort of bar code that is much easier to scan than letters would solve the real problem.

My new favorite example is the beat-less artificial heart. If the problem is constructing an artificial version of the human heart, then we have mechanical versions of that. They have quite a few moving pieces and the unfortunate tendency to fail more often than we would like. If we look at the problem more closely, however, we see that the only reason a heart has to beat is that it is a muscle. Muscles need to expand and contract in order to keep working. But the problem really isn’t about that. It’s about circulating blood around the body. A highly reliable rotary pump with only one moving part and no beat will do just as well. The rest of the body doesn’t care that the blood pressure is constant and there is no pulse.

If you are an entrepreneur or product manager, realize that good problem analysis isn’t a luxury, but a critical step before you stumble toward a solution nobody may want.

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In a recent article, John Gruber masterfully compared Google’s and Apple’s software strategy. He insightfully concluded that Apple solved the software distribution problem through their app store therefore doesn’t have to rely on browser based software. As a result of that, they can have all the benefits of native apps. Read the article, I was impressed by its sobriety.

He does have a grave misconception that spans technologies in his following thoughts:

I’m biased, insofar as I consider Apple’s strategy more appealing than Google’s. But that’s because my interest lies in having the best possible user experience — the best-looking UIs, the lowest-latency responses, the smoothest animation, the most elegant designs. I share that interest with Apple.

The error is that Apple strategy does not lie in betting on native apps for “the best possible user experience”.

There are many Widows native apps that are horrendous. Flash, Java and HTML5 are all able to deliver equally good user experience. Most importantly, it is tremendously simple to create awful software in Objective-C, especially Cocoa. No, it’s not about the native apps vs. browser apps vs. any other apps.

Apple strategy lies in their approval process for the app store. That’s why you never get to see all the under-performing, ill-designed nonsense. Because it never get’s to your device.

I can conclude this because I’ve been developing for Flash platform for 10 years where that problems manifests in its fullest. People would often mention to me how they hate Flash because of the annoying advertising banners and non-usable web sites. I on the other hand have experienced some of the best software in the world in Flash.

How can those two impressions co-exist? Because Adobe doesn’t have an approval process for Flash software. Anyone can create and distribute whatever they can manage to compile. In such an environment, all kinds of good and bad work is going to show up. Bad work also gets associated with Flash and Flash ends up having a bad name.

Apple is smarter than that. They decide who is good enough to be associated with their brand. It’s their show and they are running it well.

Their interest lies in their brand image and profits, like of any other business. “Best possible experience” therefore, has nothing to do with Apple’s software and everything to do with how they run their business.

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Your desire is to make a great product. Or take an existing product to the next level. It’s great to have the intention, but how do you put that intention into motion?

Here is a simple exercise that you can try. Instead of thinking of the details of what might improve your product, simply consider your product as an “environment” or a place people go to get some kind of value. Try filling in the following sentences:

This is where people like to come to do ______________.
It’s way better than ______________ because of _______________.
Simply put, it’s the only place to go where you can ______________.

We can dissect these sentences and realize they are about thinking through differentiators, what makes the product competitive, etc. In narrative form, however, you are not just thinking of these items, you are also putting them in context of how they would sound to someone else. By using this “narrative” or mini elevator speech approach, you will likely find you are better able to come up with ideas that have an emotional tug.

Try emailing the sentences to your team and have everyone return a response. You can also use the exercise to kick off the beginning of a meeting or a brainstorming session.

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For anyone involved in product design, I highly recommend the book Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The book does a great job of explaining 6 principles that characterize products that “stick” in the minds of customers. The principles are:

• Simple
• Unexpected
• Concrete
• Credible
• Emotional
• Stories

For product designers, these principles are great tools for improving your product design. Much of what makes a design successful comes back to the critical thinking that drives what the core product is. Is the core product simple? Does it have an emotional tug? Can you express the core product in a story that evokes imagination? You can use the Made to Stick principles to guide the critical thinking process and involve your team in that process. You can also use the principles to judge the likelihood your product or a competitive product will “stick” in the minds of customers.

Made to Stick is a practical and insightful book that can be read cover to cover or a section at a time. The book includes numerous examples to illustrate the six principles and quick exercises to help you hone your skill at applying them.

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This is part 3 of a series from guest blogger Joy McCaffrey of SpendRadar.

In my former posts, I discussed the Who and the What. Talking about the When is easy. Once again, I’ll break it down depending on the type of customer.

When to Talk to Customers

Current Customers
Regularly. Whether you’re conducting annual surveys, or running user groups, find as many reasons as possible to talk to as many customers as you can.

New Customers
With New Customers, I try to conduct the Win/Loss report about 4 – 6 weeks after the sale. It may depend on the sales cycle, but I wouldn’t wait any longer. Too soon and they may still be burned out from the sales process. 

Lost Customers
Similar to New Customers, I wait about 4 weeks. I wouldn’t wait longer than that, in case they forget some of the details or they just don’t feel a connnection to you or your product any more and will be less likely to talk to you.

Past Customers
If you’re new to the product or the company, I wouldn’t go back more than six months. Or if you work for a large company that always has a good supply of past customers to choose from, I would wait at least one month. If the customer left due to a bad situation, I wouldn’t want to talk to them too soon, when emotion may cloud the information you could potentially gain. Make sure that you never contact a past customer that is suing your company. Hopefully you won’t run in to one.

Potential Customers
If at all possible, if you have the bandwidth and the company can afford it, accompany sales reps on sales calls. I discussed the reasons NOT to accompany sales reps – you don’t want to end up as a sales engineer, technical support or a closer. But if at all possible, try to accompany the sales rep. My first product management job was at a very small company. Two product management teams. I had one sales rep and two developers working on my product. When I started, one of the best ways I could learn the product and the market was to accompany the sales rep on sales calls. Then that sales rep quit and in order to help bring the new sales rep up to speed, I accompanied him on sales calls. As long as you don’t end up as a crutch for the sales rep, it can be a great experience.

Non-Customers
Always. Always be on the lookout for Non-Customers and take every opportunity available to talk to them. I had one job where a good portion of my time was spenteither talking to Non-Customers or searching for Non-Customers.

Next I’ll talk about the Where and the Why.

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My last post focused on the “Who” of talking to customers. This post will focus on the “What.”

All conversations can fall in to 4 categories:

Talking To Customers About

1. Specific questions, with a specific goal in mind
2. Open-ended, exploratory questions
3. Meet and greet
4. Maintaining relationships

But what you talk to customers about depends on the type of customer that you’re talking to. To review how I classify customers, view the first post in this series. Let’s go through each type of customer and what you’ll be talking about.

Current Customers
There are so many reasons to talk to current customers, and you should take advantage of all of them. With current customers, you may be conducting surveys, or leading a focus group or running a customer advisory board, in which case you have specific questions prepared with a specific goal in mind.  You may go in to the conversation with no specific goal in mind. Open-ended questions can lead you to conversations and subjects that you would never have uncovered with set questions in hand. Depending on the number of customers you have and the time available, you should maintain relationships with as many customers as possible, in one form or another (be sure to read the future posts on When and Where.)  References are always a goal.

New Customers
With New Customers, I use a version of Pragmatic Marketing’s Win/Loss Report, as well as the Net Promoter Score (NPS) question. I have a Word version and an Excel version of the report. I use the Word version in front of customers to take notes, or even if I’m on the phone, and the Excel version is a compilation of all the results. For Win/Loss Reports I have specific questions with a specific goal in mind. Basically I’m trying to determine:

- What was their perception of the company and our products/services before the sale?
- What is their perception of the company and our products/services now that the sale is complete?
- How did they hear about us?
- What marketing tools did they use during the decision-making process and how effective were they?
- What was involved in the decision-making
- What other vendors were they considering and where are our strengths/weaknesses in comparison?
- How did our pricing compare to other vendors?
- What features/functions are most important?
- How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?

Lost Customers
I use the same Win/Loss Report, minus the NPS question (How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?). As you can see from the bullet points above, the same questions can be used, however the answers may be dramatically different. Again, specific questions with a specific goal in mind.

Past Customers
I use a variation of the Win/Loss report. Why did you leave? Specifically, was it particular features or functions, customer service, or price that caused you to leave? What are you using now? What would it take to bring you back? With this last question I’m not trying to win them back – I’m not in sales. But I am interested in what, if anything, would bring them back. And if it turns out there is a possibility to win them back, I refer them to the sales rep.

Potential Customers
I mentioned in my last post that you do not want to interfere in the sales cycle. However, if at all possible, this can be a great avenue to ask open ended, exploratory questions about market trends, competitive information, their buying process, their pain points.

Non-Customers
Depending on who I’m talking to, I either use a variation of the win/loss report, or I ask open-ended questions. It depends on how comfortable and how open the person is. It also depends on how comfortable I am with speaking to that non-customer. I’m not generally an outgoing, extroverted person. I have no interest in sales in which case I would have to constanly reach out to people I don’t know. Talking to non-customers is challenging for me. In any other situation, the person has heard of the product or the company, so they recognize my role. With non-customers I have to reinforce that I’m not trying to sell them anything, that I’m just trying to learn about the market. A wise sales rep gave me a few pieces of advice. Never take rejection personally, and try to make a game out of it. Anything that will get you through.

As you can see, for the most part, I have specific questions in mind when I talk to customers. But don’t limit yourself to that. Find any reason available to reach out to your customers as often as possible.

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I recently presented this topic at a Chicago Product Management Association meeting and when Bernhard (Bernhard Kappe, CEO of Pathfinder Development) asked if I would blog on the topic, I willingly accepted.

Talking to Customers

When I was originally approached to present on the subject of talking to your customers, I struggled with how to prepare a presentation on the subject. Of course it’s important to talk to your customers, doesn’t everyone know that? But who exactly are your customers? What do you talk to your customers about? Where and when should you talk to your customers? And other than the obvious reason (hopefully it’s obvious) of customer relationship management, why should you talk to your customers? And that lead me to present on the 5 Ws – Who, What, Where, When and Why. This post is the first in a series covering each topic.

Who:
With 15 years of experience as a product manager, I certainly have a lot of experience talking to customers. But just who are “customers?” I break up customers into 6 different categories:
1. Current Customers
2. New Customers
3. Past Customers
4. Lost Customers
5. Potential Customers
6. Non-Customers

1. Current Customers:
This one is pretty self-explanatory. A current customer is someone who is currently using your product or service. If you’re a startup company, you may not have customers yet, which is okay, since there are so many other “customers” that you can reach out to. You may find yourself at a company that doesn’t know who their customers are. While that may be hard to comprehend, I’ve found myself in that situation. Some companies just don’t keep track of who is using their product or service. They may not use any type of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program such as Salesforce or Siebel, or if they do, they don’t maintain it. When I found myself in this situation I reached out to project managers, sales reps and the finance department (to find out who paid for the product or service). You could also reach out to IT to see if they have analytics on users. If your company has a blog or a newsletter you could check out the subscribers.

2. New Customers
New customers have just recently begun to use your product. How do you find out who your new customers are? Ask finance, sales or professional services to copy you on all final deals.

3. Past Customers
Past customers no longer use your product or service, but they did use it at one time or another. These customers may also be difficult to find, similar to current customers. The same advice for finding current customers applies for finding past customers.

4. Lost Customers
This category title may be a little misleading. A better title may be “Should Have Been a Customer”, or “Would Have Been a Customer”, or “Could Have Been a Customer.” This was a prospect that went through the sales cycle but for some reason or another chose either to go with another vendor or solution, or no vendor or solution at all. Lost customers may also be challenging to find, as some sales reps, as well as some companies, prefer to downplay the number of deals they’ve “lost.”

5. Potential Customers
Potential customers are aware of and considering your product or solution. I’m not suggesting that you go through the sales funnel and start calling prospects. In fact, I highly recommend that you don’t do that. Some people have very strong opinions in regards to not talking to prospects or potential customers, for very valid reasons. You definitely don’t want to interfere in the sales process, and you don’t want to become the go-to person for sales reps to either close the deal or act as a sales engineer or technical support. I agree with all of those reasons. However, I also believe that there are a number of good reasons to talk to potential customers and that this segment shouldn’t be overlooked.

6. Non-Customers
I’ve heard different definitions for non-customers. Some are very strict, such as “someone who has never heard of your product or service.” That could be difficult if you’re representing a well-known company or brand. I’ve also heard very broad definitions, such as “anyone not currently using your product or service.” I prefer to define non-customers as anyone who is not a current customer, a past customer, a lost customer, or a potential customer.

I’ve found these 6 categories cover just about any type of customer possible. Have I missed any? Have I provided insight into possible “customers” that you can reach out to? My next post will cover the “What.” I look forward to your comments.

photo credit: mel_rowling

Steve Blank writes a thought provoking article about the folly of the complete software rewrite. He envisions a scenario where an agile team builds a product and that product gradually accumulates technical debt until it is difficult to maintain and, I assume, add new features.

The benefits of customer and agile development and minimum features set are continuous customer feedback, rapid iteration and little wasted code. But over time if developers aren’t careful, code written to find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. Ironically it becomes the antithesis of agile. And the magnitude of the problem increases exponentially with the success of the company. The logical solution? “Re-architect and re-write” the product.

For a company in a rapidly changing market, that’s usually the beginning of the end.

First, you should be careful to avoid the unnecessary accumulation of technical debt. You need to refactor with each iteration. You can’t avoid all technical debt, but can keep it small enough so it doesn’t snowball into a problem.

Second, you need to keep the user experience design debt under control as well. Your information architects have to keep an eye on the actors/personas and the overall arc of a feature as user stories are added and modified. Not only does design debt adversely affect maintainability, it also results in technical debt, as the code is contorted into supporting disjointed workflows and features.

Still, these agile projects usually have something going for them: they have good and lean documentation on functional and non-functional requirements. If you do have the original development team, you may be able to pull off a rewrite, but if you can, it’s clearly less risky to try to refactor the code.

A Thought Experiment on Rewrites

It is possible to do complete rewrites. It happens all the time, only it’s usually competing companies that are “rewriting” their competitors products and launching them. Think Apple and the iPhone versus the old crop of smart phones. Obviously having a single company launch a competing product to an existing one is a bit more complicated. But there the problem is not one of code or software product development, but rather of channels, marketing, brand, existing customers, etc. In short, it is a business problem, not a technical problem.

Other times the technical debt is just so large that rewriting is the only choice. In these cases — usually not developed with an agile or really any sort of method (pet peeve: methodology is the study of methods) — there’s the additional issue of poor or non-existent requirements. In this case you are essentially forced to define the product all over again. Risky? You betcha. Something to be avoided? Without a doubt. Avoidable? Not at that late a date.

The Cadaver in the Boardroom

While Steve gets the risk of rewrites right, I think rewriting versus not rewriting is a false choice. By that I mean that if you’ve arrived at that choice, you’re already dead; rewriting versus trying to resuscitate a troubled code base is a no-win decision. They’re both expensive, they’re both risky, and neither one of them is likely to succeed.

At fault is that the perceived risk of not doing the right thing in a single iteration seems so low. Let’s not refactor now, we don’t have the time. We have too much to do to pair. Let’s skip TDD for just a few stories while we get the next release out. Let’s not fix the broken continuous integration system for now.

All of these little simple shortcuts result in bad development habits (and, after all, a large part of agile is an accumulation of good habits) and a vicious cycle of increasing technical debt.

Then it’s not the CEO or VP of Development’s fault for making a “wrong” decision. It really doesn’t matter at that point. The company is already a corpse, stinking up the boardroom.

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We recently posted slides of Todd’s talk on Customer Acquisition and Retention at the Chicago Lean Startup Circle. The video is even better:

Pathfinder’s Todd Wyder on Customer Acquisition and Retention: Know Your Cohorts.

In this presentation, Todd discusses best practices on evaluating customers from first contact to customer to referrer and all the steps in between, drawing some of the great work done by folks like Dave McClure and Brant Cooper. The talk highlights what to measure, why it’s important, and the strengths and weaknesses of the various analytics tools available on the market today. Watch the video and be armed with the practices and tools you need to accelerate your product’s growth.

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