Step 5 — Prototyping (Part 2)
Blog 8/10
Test, reiterate, test, reiterate, test reiterate pretty much sums up the past few weeks! We’re getting closer to implementation but there’s two crucial steps to complete before we get there — MORE reiteration based on the last set of customer feedback and then experimenting.
As an example of reiteration, one of our original ideas was giving employees the option to spend one day a week working on a project outside their job. The main concern from customers was that it felt too rigid. What about employees who work part-time? What if having a whole day out a week is just not feasible? So, we needed to come up with something more flexible…
With that in mind, we evolved the idea into a ‘development credit system’. To allow for more flexibility, employees could be given credits to spend on their development. It would mean they could block out the time when they want and spend them how they want on activities like projects, sprints or shadowing. Once we were happy with the reiterations we moved into experimentation…
The purpose of experimenting is to test key questions and assumptions using quick, low risk experiments. We spent the morning designing them with our coach from Treehouse and it was much harder than we anticipated! All our ideas involved spending money and time, and we struggled to think of alternative cheaper solutions. After a couple of hours we got there, and we came up with three experiments. We should have had four, but we couldn’t agree on the last one, so rather than wasting time, we parked it to revisit later!
Here are some of the assumptions we needed to test:
- Managers and employees would want a company-wide rotation scheme to experience working in different areas of the business.
- When deciding next career opportunities, employees would be able to find opportunities without any additional support, using a careers platform that matches employees to opportunities based on their skills and aspirations.
- Employees need dedicated time to focus on their development and career.
Our three experiments consisted of two quick online questionnaires and one face to face experiment involving a ballot box. The pictures above show an example of an original storyboard and the actual experiment — as you can see it was very quick to make, and extremely low cost! So quick in fact, that we designed our experiments in the morning and tested them in the afternoon.
The aim was to get feedback from as many people as possible. So, we set up camp in our London and Scotland offices and stopped people on their way to lunch and asked if they’d ‘help’ us with some research. We used the approach of asking for ‘help’, because our assumption was they’re less likely to say no. Luckily for us this was true! Overall, we had over 100 responses across three experiments in the space of two hours.
The results of the experiments were positive with some clear preferences showing. In some cases the results were surprising. For example, our second assumption above turned out to be incorrect. Lots of employees felt that a careers platform wouldn’t be enough. They still wanted someone to talk to, aside from their manager, who could coach and help them.
Next steps:
- Decide which ideas to take forward
- Reiterate based on experiment feedback
- And finally, implementation!
Stay tuned…
