Reflection – Learning Launch

Challenge  Working in a highly homogenous industry as the telecom industry where the market players  offer little differentiation, the need to move fast is a critical capability. Each move in the  market is quickly copied by competitors and price is often the competing factor it comes  down to. From an inside-out perspective, the lead times are often long as there are often  multiple IT and network systems with critical interdependencies which means that any major  change to your value proposition must be planned months in advance. So how does one  avoid setting out to build a new feature or product, go through months of development, and  then finally when it gets to market it is not as attractive as one first thought?    Selection  I selected the Learning Launch as the tool to test out as I believe it resonates the most with  the challenge – it is about breaking down hypotheses early through small-scale hypothesis  testing and to avoid spending months on developing ideas that may not have real-market  potential. I also believe framing the statement “What must be true for this to be a good  idea?” is a really good one to have a value-adding discussion about the tests rather than  different stakeholders shooting down the idea directly. It is a clever move to avoid bias and  instead get down to the facts.    Application  We start out with a diverse team of people from multiple functions and not only the product  development side. The goal is to develop a new product. First step is to give all team  members the homework to think about products or customer experiences that they have  had and that they liked. It does not matter what industry it comes from, if it is a good idea, it  is likely that at the core of the idea there might be replicable elements to build on and get  inspired by. Each team member presents the idea, and we then let the people vote on the  ideas they liked. Then we divide the bigger team into smaller sub-teams to design and sketch  out what a combined product could look like with the best features from the voting round.  Next step is to ask the question: “What must be true for this to be a good idea?”. The sub- team then notes down all the key assumptions about the product’s value creation potential,  how geared we as a company are to execute, the defensibility and finally the scalability of  the product – will this work in a larger scale than this prototype? We then take a round again  with the big team to present the ideas. It is now time to prioritize the most important  assumptions that we need to test. With a prioritized list of key assumptions, we then divide  into sub-teams again to design a test for each. It is here important to let the most vocal critic  of the idea design the test – if we can get the most critical person in the team to set the  threshold for when him/her is convinced, then there should be no doubt if the test come out  in positive favor of the assumption. In our case, it was about designing whether customers  would more easily be able to choose a subscription if the purchase flow mentioned only  mentioned how many gigabytes the subscription contained vs mentioning gigabytes and  showing how much you could use them for (for example stream 20 hours of video as  additional information). We then designed two mock-up purchase flows and invited 15  customers to try them out and tell us their reflections.

Insight  In this experiment I learned mostly how the teams can use Design Thinking to foster a more  creative and inclusive discussion in product development. It is often that ideas get discussed  at length and you have non-value-adding discussions where the critics often steals most of  the show to describe how the idea can never work due to x, y and z. Instead, asking the  question “what must be true?” and then together figuring out the key assumptions is a  much better fact-based discussion. Also, letting the most critical team member to design the  test makes for a much better and controlled way of refining ideas. In this particular test, we  found out that gigabytes by itself is too “foreign” and hard to relate to and that adding  additional information in the purchase flow about how you could use your gigabytes was the  preferred idea. There were also some good sketches and alternative ideas that were put on  the “parking lot” for potentially future use.    Approach  We will definitely use a similar approach next time we enter a product development phase. I  think reusing the format of giving everyone the homework to seek inspiration outside of the  industry is a good one to get the creative juices flowing at the beginning of the process. It  lead to some good ideas when people could build on eachother’s homework examples and  pick the best from each to come up with new ideas. For next time, finding a more rapid way  to test the hypothesis and setting clearer thresholds of the tests to say whether the test was  successful or not could also be something to improve on for next time. We might also  incorporate a bit more of the visualizing tools from the past modules to improve the shared  learning and language throughout the process. Overall, I enjoyed the process and found that  the other team members did as well.

