Visualization

Challenge & Selection

We are a team of 3 business consultants in Thessaloniki, Makedonia, Greece. We are planning to introduce to the

Greek stat up ecosystem a new service to help them transform an idea to a successful and viable business. As we

are acting to the local startup ecosystem we observe that most of the startups are failing to transform their idea to

a successful business. The basic step for helping them is to have a clear and common point of view about the steps

they follow and the problems they encounter.

We choose to use the visualization tool to draw the analytic job flow of transforming an idea to a successful and

viable business and to write down the main problem per step. We will use the jobs to be done framework, we will

interview startupers with different development stages like ideation, solution framing, prototyping, pitching,

funding, pivoting, etc and we will focus not to the stage they are but one level above to draw the total job flow. The

visualization tool will help us to have a clear and common picture of the “real” job flow of transforming an idea to

a successful and viable business and the distinct steps.

Application

Firstly our team drew the job flow of transforming an idea to a successful and viable business according to our point

of view. Then we made contacts with significant parts of the local startup ecosystem like coworking spaces,

accelerators, incubators, VC’s, etc to communicate our task and to ask for participants. They provided us with

potential participants and we contacted them to give more details about the interviews, (purpose and duration)

and to schedule their participation. Form those lists we conclude to up to 15 participants.

We prepared a questionnaire of 10-15 open ended questions. Our target was to find out the mindset of each

startuper and the roadmap they used or planning to use from the first stage of having an idea to the final stage of

establishing a successful and viable business and to write the main problems they handle with. The outcome of

each interview was a job flow, distinct job steps and a list of up to 3 main problems for every step they passed. We

used A0 paper sheets to draw the job flow and colored sticky notes to write the problems for every step. For each

interviewer we use different colored sticky notes.

Insight and Approach

Our team put all the job flows form the interviewers to a wall and looked for patterns and similarities. We discussed

a lot and we produced 3 different job flow scenarios with their specific job steps. After that we put all the sticky

notes under each job step. We merged the same problems/pains, we grouped together and looked for patterns.

We select the 3 common and repeated problems for every job step. Each one of us hierarchy the 3 job flows and

we select the one with the biggest grade.

We compered the job flow we drew at the beginning with the job flow of the interviews and saw the differences at

the job steps. Also we saw real “out of the building” problems, pain points and struggle points that effects the

success transformation. The final outcome was the valid job flow and the list of the real problems. The revised job

flow is the following:

From the revised job flow and the real problems we will choose the crucial problem/problems that affect the  transformation and for which we will create our solution.

