Lean Day West: Get Research Out of the Silo & Into the Team #LeanDayWest

• 1. get research out of the silo and into the team

2. whats the matter with research? Its expensive. Its slow. We dont learn anything. Its too late. The sample size is too small. People lie/dominant respondents/groupthink 3. how could research be better? When is it really needed? What approaches are the most useful? What tools work best? What resources are needed? Who should do it? How much time should it take? What should it cost? 4. anyone for a little role playing? The roles: research lead product owner marketing & sales lead product designer 5. everybody gets involved But you should keep in mind your roles POV. What does someone in your role need to learn? Jot it down! 6. Start with hypotheses User stories: Who do you think are your customers? What are their problems? What job do they need to do? How do they solve this problem now? What tools do they use? Who do they turn to for help? Product hypothesis: How could a product improve their success? How could a product reduce their pain? Jot it down! 7. are you right? youll need people to find out You could send out a Google Form or a SurveyMonkey... But you dont have time for that today. You need to interview at least 5 people today - during this session. But not your fellow attendees. Youre going to get out on the streets, or onto Skype, and talk to some people. Youll have an hour - to nd them, and talk to them. 8. now: find some people to talk to Who? What are they trying to do? What gets in their way? What costs them time or money? How do they currently solve the problem? What denes success? How eager are they for a solution? Where? Depends on your product, but really anywhere - Starbucks, the mall, on the street, in a park, on a college campus. How? Together - dont divide up the team too much. If youre not asking questions, youre observing, making notes, taking pictures, recording, etc. 9. what do you need to learn? An interview guide will help you stay focused - but its not a script. To start, you only need 8-10 questions. It serves two purposes: Start by validating your assumptions about who the customer is and how they behave. Then seek additional information that helps you make decisions about the product. After 3 people, prioritize your top 3 issues or questions. After 5 people, start asking new questions. 10. Be nice and listen. 11. what are you going to do with this information? Make decisions - as a team! Are these really your customers? Is their problem really painful, or their desire really strong? Does it even exist? Are they really making decisions the way you thought? What do you need to change? What else do you need to learn? 12. THE ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS IS YOUR REPORT But youll have to determine what the best way to share the information across your team is. 13. Use the tools closest to hand 14. Skype + Dropbox Skype-based interviews allow you to get face to face or voice to voice without spending time & money to be there in person. You can also have shorter, more frequent calls; share a desktop to show stimulus; send les for them to view and vice versa; or, using Skype on a mobile device, get your participant to take you on a tour of their home or ofce. With 3rd party software, you can record the calls (audio and/or video) and save the calls directly to a Dropbox or other shared folder. 15. iphone + dropbox There are terric (and cheap!) accessories that transform your iPhone or Android into pretty good video cameras - you can then upload your videos and photos directly from your phone to a Dropbox folder the team shares. 16. evernote Using Evernote, you can enter your interview guide in a notebook and then hit the mic icon to record answers after each question, or post photos of anything relevant to the interview, within the note itself. Notebooks are shareable amongst a team and searchable, making it easier to nd specic themes or quotations. 17. produced assets - good enough is good enough. Edited video and audio Transcripts of interviews Produced decks with designs based on user feedback Playlists of rough snippets in Dropbox Shared notes on Google Docs Photographed/ scanned user sketches 18. nothing beats a conversation. To make research meaningful to the whole team, the whole team needs: Stakes Access Involvement Accountability Useful results 19. A few words of caution The process of transforming listening & watching into insight is what research is all about. But the process of transforming insight into action is what design is all about. 20. forget the horses mouth Dont count on users to make your decisions for you - thats not their job. Dont let the report be the end of your learning process - its just a way to memorialize what youve learned and provide a reference when you encounter similar issues again. 21. Lean research is about continuous customer, partner & team feedback. 22. ok. lets do this. 23. The Schedule 1:30pm-2pm: Identify your user personas (this will be your recruitment criteria). 2pm-2:30pm: Hypothesize a solution - some features, benets and pain relievers. 2:30-2:45pm: Write an interview guide. 2:45-3:45pm: #GOTB, talk to some people 3:45-4pm: Discuss and summarize what youve learned (1 thing you would change about your customer hypothesis and 1 thing you would change about your solution hypothesis) 4-4:30pm: Teams present 24. product: biz dev for small business The Problem: Small businesses and early stage startups dont usually have huge customer and prospect databases, but do need help managing and tracking their customers and deal ow. Most existing software is either too big and complicated for a small business owner or early stage startup to set up and use effectively. Those apps aimed at smaller businesses and startups focus typically focus on only one aspect of new biz - creating and tracking emails, creating group to-do lists, merging email contacts from mail & social platforms... But a lot of entrepreneurs just end up with a spreadsheet. How could we create a simple solution for these entrepreneurs? 25. product 2: vacation planning The Problem: People dont get enough vacation time - so they want to make it count. Today, travel sites assume you know where you want to go, when, for how long, what you want to do when you get there, and how much you want to spend. Which means people spend hours trying to gure out all of that before they can actually book their trip. How could a simple solution help these vacation planners? 26. USERPERSONAS(a.k.a.RecruitmentCriteria) 27. Products & Features Customer Jobs Benets Pains Benet Creators Pain Relievers http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/downloads/value_proposition_canvas.pdf Product-market-benefit hypothesis