The organisation has recently undertaken a 6 week innovation challenge, as designed and facilitated by us. You can read more about that case study here.

For the last 6 weeks, the teams had been utilising various methods, tools and practices to explore ideas and embrace innovation through a test and learn culture. With their ideas now somewhat validated, they presented to a panel of judges who would either give them the green light to continue exploring their idea or unfortunately end their participation in the challenge this time around.

With the ideas now moving into the second of three phases in the programme, we were invited back to deliver a Product Management Master Class.

10 teams have made it through to the second phase and are now ready to test the Desirability, Viability and Feasibility of their ideas further, in order to pitch for funding to bring their ideas to life and put them into the hands of the customer.

To deliver a “Product Management Master Class” helping participants learn and understand different types and ways of prototyping and ways of gaining customer feedback and insight as part of a hack week. This is following on from the success of the 6 week innovation challenge previously documented in our case studies as listed above.

The hack week is designed for teams to accelerate their idea to prove that it has commercial viability and is technically feasible, whilst of course not forgetting the customers desire for their product/service.

Along with delivering the master class, we were asked to provide our expertise with hands on engagement in helping participants design and build appropriate prototypes in order to test and validate or invalidate their biggest risks and assumptions.

Building upon the success of our previous engagement with this group of participants we wanted to help grow their knowledge on product development a little further, in order to help them learn and understand why some of the below topics are so important to delivering products that customers love and are of value to the business.

We broke our master class into 2 parts, covering a varying range of topics listed below. In between the two halves of our class we worked with participants to understand the risks they were facing and help them identify what types of prototypes they could use in order to help them validate or invalidate identified risks.

– Introduction to building products; The 10 route cases to failed product development

– Product goals; Why goals orientated outcomes help achieve the product vision and business objectives

– Why design is important; Understanding that good design makes a product understandable and useful

– Creating prototypes; Helping identify the types of prototypes available such as Feasibility, Fidelity, Live Data and Hybrid prototypes to start exploring their ideas weaknesses and strengths further

– Metrics and what to measure and making it part of your prototype; Growing the understanding that we measure to learn, with the right metric giving us an understanding of the health of our product

– Getting feedback from your customers; The biggest waste in product development is obtaining feedback from your customers too late or not frequently enough, Leading to missed opportunities. We explored the ways and styles of getting the right feedback to help learning

Taking the 10 teams through the importance of obtaining feedback from customers frequently and early, combined with light weight prototyping techniques helped all 10 teams explore and validate/invalidate their biggest risks to product development in just 5 days.

Typically the end to end process for this organisation takes them around ~3 months to +1 year with prototyping and customer validation not taking place well into the product build.

By brining this process to the beginning of their development, we have managed to reduce the time spent on building unvalidated products from ~3 months to +1 year, down to 5 days.

This has saved the company £millions in product development costs (attributed across all 10 product ideas) and given them an opportunity to invest the time and costs that would have been spent on the additional 30 product ideas that didn’t get to this stage, into ideas that follow this new way of working

We received some nice feedback from the Innovation Lead that had organised the event too;

“A huge thank you for joining us last Monday to run a fantastic master class on building products and prototype. I know the teams have benefitted enormously from you, there were lots of discussions during the rest of the week annotated with “remember what James said about…..”

Really appreciate all the time and effort you put into creating a great talk and for sending through the links to interesting examples, it has been amazing working with you and having you as part of our Innovation experiment, you have certainly helped bring it to life.

Thanks again so much for all your support really appreciate it.”