Weeknotes s01e07: viable, or just minimal?
20–27 February 2017
The theme of the week has definitely been about putting the “viable” into Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Especially in the context most non-startups mean when they say ‘MVP’, which is “what’s the first version we should release widely to customers?”, rather than the true Lean Startup concept of “what’s the smallest, quickest, simplest thing we can build to find out whether we actually have a viable business here?”.
It was the theme of a workshop I ran on Monday for a new client, and then ended up as a thread through a number of discussions and debates back at NHS Digital.
Sunday/Monday
I headed to Newcastle on Sunday, and spent a lovely evening catching up with two separate sets of old friends who happen to live within 10 minutes walk of each other in Whitley Bay. The bracing sea winds of Whitley reminded me a lot of Dartmoor — always windy, always a couple of degrees colder than everywhere else.
Monday I ran a story mapping workshop for a new client. Two of their team came to my talk on “The Art of Doing Less” at NUX5 in Manchester last Autumn, and asked if I could run a workshop for their wider team. In the morning I ran an extended version of the workshop on which the talk was based, which I’ve run at UX Cambridge, UX London and other events, and in the afternoon we built a story map for a potential new product they’re considering. It was a really rewarding day. They’re largely a team of developers with minimal in-house UX and design, but they are all passionate about producing software that really works for their users. I was struck as ever by how powerful story mapping is, and how you can use it to build clarity and consensus in a very short space of time, in a format that is incredibly simple and easy to understand and communicate.
The workshop focuses on how to use story mapping to define a Minimum Viable Product (in that “first release to customers” sense) that emphasises the viable and not just the minimum — a minimum viable experience, rather than minimum viable product if you will. This means combining story mapping with ways of understanding what really matters to customers and users. The workshop is at least as much about understanding the Kano model and the power of identifying, and then eliminating, pain points in the existing user journey, as it is about how to arrange post-it notes in rows and columns.
I’m keen to run more workshops and facilitate story mapping and product prioritisation with teams, so get in touch if you’d be interested in learning more about it.
Tuesday to Friday
Back in Leeds with the NHS Digital team I found myself on the sharp end of ‘responding to change over following a plan’.
My plan for the week had been to spend it analysing a “true intent” survey we’ve been running on the existing NHS Choices pages for GP surgeries. However, the team really wanted to bring forward our next lab-based research session to 6th March, which was less than two weeks away. That meant instead of a nice clear week to focus on the survey, I spent much of it rapidly booking labs, drafting a recruitment brief and getting quotes from agencies to find us participants (as they normally need at least a week for recruitment, preferably two). Lots of bitty tasks and admin that made settling down to anything else difficult.
Happily I still managed to make a decent start on the survey analysis. Our true intent survey is mainly free text questions (along the lines of “what made you come here today?…. what were you looking for?… Did you find it?”) so the responses have to be manually coded (categorised) to extract patterns. To do that you have to read what each person has written in answer to the questions to decide which categories it fits into. We’ve had over 1,100 valid replies which is kind of one of those good problems because it gives us a good-sized sample on which to base our findings, but even if it only takes a minute to read each reply it’s going to take over 18 hours to do the coding.
Anyway I managed to do a first pass coding of 250 responses, using categories (“codes”) from a couple of smaller surveys run last year. The previous categories didn’t quite work on their own, but that enabled me to come up with a refined set of codes for us to use. I tested the codes on a second pass through about 30 responses and they seem to be holding up fairly well. The idea now is to get the whole team to help review and code responses. I’ve imported the raw data into a Google Spreadsheet so we can work on it collaboratively. Having 13 people contributing will certainly make lighter work of those 18 hours, and it’s belatedly occurred to me that an hour spent reading replies must surely count as Exposure Hours. Possibly that means team-coding is the plan I should have had all along. But better to come late to the party than never to show up at all.
We also had some sometimes heated debates about MVPs and the state of what we’re likely to deliver in March. I gave the team some fairly tough feedback — which is always difficult both to give and to receive — but which I hope will lead to a better finished product in the end.
Weekend
Saturday we got my desk at home set up. Our current house is a temporary rental and we unpacked as little as possible knowing we’d just have to re-pack it all again in 6 or 9 months. So for the last 6 months my home office has mainly been a pile of boxes. At NHS Digital we have a team commitment to enable remote working, which means I am getting to work from home a lot more than when I was at DWP (or Land Registry before it), as they very much stuck to the Gov digital orthodoxy that teams must be physically co-located to be effective. At NHS Digital all our team meetings are “remote by default” if possible, with lots of use of Trello and Slack for asynchronous communications. This week I worked from home Wednesday to Friday, partly to try to get some clear time to concentrate on the survey, partly to avoid Storm Doris. While it was great to have the freedom to do that, it cruelly exposed the shortcomings of working at the dining table or squatting at Andy’s desk (3 days is a bit long to deprive him of his work space). It’s been great to get my proper desk back and, more importantly, my big external monitor, it’s height adjustable monitor arm, and my ergonomic office chair.
Once that was set up I tidied up some loose ends from Monday’s workshop, sending a copy of the slides and speaker notes to the team, and fleshed out my talk on ‘Adventures in Policy Land’ which I’m giving at Service Design in Government. The other bonus of tidying up my office is I now have lots of wall space to play with, so I merrily set about outlining the talk in more detail on post-it notes. That lead to ideas about whiteboard paint which proved perfect displacement activity.
Metrics
Blog posts published: 1 (by a whisker!). YTD: 6.
Country miles walked: 0. Some serious walking is going to need to be done at some point to make up for all the weekends I’m working. While it only takes about 30 minutes to get to what we consider ‘decent countryside’ from the place we’re renting, that means that when things are busy there isn’t an option to just pop out for an hour or two. We’re so looking forward to getting back to having proper countryside practically on the doorstep, and being able to get in a quick walk no matter how busy things are.
On which front we inched a crucial step closer to buying a house this week when we got final approval through for the mortgage. We now ‘just’ need to agree the completion date and actually exchange contracts. Everything is crossed and if I’m not talking about it much it’s because I don’t want to jinx it.
Meditation: think I managed it about twice.
Reading/listening/watching: I finished How to Be a Heroine, which I felt tailed off a bit at the end. Perhaps because it’s never occurred to me to try to model my life on fictional heroines, and also because I actually haven’t read many of the books it features. Also possibly because having come to it late I found Wuthering Heights more ridiculous than romantic. Worth trying though, especially if you are an avid reader of fiction. My ‘to read’ list expanded as one of the friends I met in Newcastle recommended Andrew Marr’s We British as “a well-written and relentlessly interesting history of the British as seen by its poets”. And Jukesie’s post about 10 books that made him a better project manager reminded me I keep meaning to read Turn The Ship Around having heard him enthuse about it before, the art and science of forging high-performing teams being one of my passions.
