A good start
Amongst everything that we have learnt during our first 12 months as Velvet Onion, the importance of kicking off a project the right way stands out as one of — if not the — most important indicators of a successful product. A well facilitated project kickoff brings the project team together (something we value highly throughout an entire project), ensures that we all know what we’re aiming for (the problem that we’re solving, and why it’s an important problem to solve), and how we’re going to get there (and, importantly, what’s required of everyone in order for that to happen).
“A good start is more than half the race, I think, and our starting-point or principle, once found, clears up a number of our difficulties.” — Aristotle
In our experience the best way to achieve this is to hold a kickoff workshop. During this workshop, stakeholders from across the project come together for 3–4 hours to define the project at the most basic (albeit most critical) level, with the goal of forming a common baseline understanding of the problem from which to build a successful experience.
We’ve run this workshop with a number of clients — from pre-launch startups (such as Enablr and Recomazing) to large corporates (such as Isentia and IAG) — all of whom have identified an opportunity to address a need for their customers (existing or potential), but need help aligning the elements to deliver an optimal experience.
In each of these cases (and others) pausing to consider the basics with a fresh set of eyes resulted in clarity around the most appropriate next steps for the project, reducing risk and saving time (and money) in the long-term.
With Enablr, the problem was well-defined with an ambitious backlog of features; through the workshop, it became clear that user research was required to prioritise the features for the initial launch. With Recomazing, who were working towards an aggressive launch date, some core assumptions were questioned; following the workshop, we ran a design sprint to validate these assumptions, building out some core user-flows and testing these with potential users and providing the team with valuable insights allowing them to move confidently towards their launch.
Recently Velvet Onion was approached by Isentia, Asia-Pacifics leading media intelligence company with offices in Australia, New Zealand, South-East Asia and Greater China. Isentia had identified an opportunity and were looking to validate the concept before developing it further. The opportunity would have effects across the organisation, and therefore had a broad group of stakeholders (each with their own ideas of how the concept should work) — a kickoff workshop was the perfect way to get started.
Together with John Croll (Isentia’s CEO), Lane Cipriani (Isentia’s Chief Product Officer), and other C-level representatives including marketing, sales, and operations, we developed and prioritised a set of proto-personas, contextualising the opportunity with specific user behaviours, pain-points and goals from which to evaluate the opportunity. We then mapped out what an ideal experience could look like, before breaking out the Sharpies in a Design Studio (a design exercise using a combination of divergent and convergent thinking to explore potential design directions, understand the advantages and disadvantages of each direction, and iterate accordingly).
By the end of the workshop, we had a clear understanding of the problem we were hoping to solve, and why it was worth solving, and sketches of potential solutions to the problem which formed the basis of the concepts which we developed and validated during the subsequent design sprints.
Next week, we’ve got two workshops scheduled. The first is with Tokidz, a social enterprise bringing a bright career future for every child in Africa through a world class technology enabled education, regardless of their ethnic or economical background. The second is with The Rolling Fix, a mobile bicycle mechanic looking to expand their services.
