Where To Start With A Startup, Part III: Make It Real

As you can see we’re starting to make real inroads into various aspects of the idea. As we start creating a clear mental picture of what it will take to get something of real value to market, we can now begin ideating and conceptualising the product itself.

Concepts & Prototypes

Concepts

We conduct breakout sessions where our Customer Experience and Visual Designers work closely together — away from the rest of the group — and come up with low fidelity ideas that will (hopefully) range form the obvious to the absurd. As with the rest of the exercises there is no limit to how far our ideas can go. The breakout can range from anywhere between 2–4hrs (depending on the how complex the idea is) and will involve continuous collaboration between the people involved. Based on a 2 hour breakout, I have found the best way to break this down is to spend 30 minutes in ‘post-it mode’ with each designer coming up with as many ideas as possible in the simplest possible format. Then spend the next 30 minutes narrowing down on what we feel are ideas worth pursuing. Then as the Experience Designers elaborate on the chosen concepts the Visual Designers can mock up a higher fidelity version so our founders can easily imagine the concept in a more realistic scenario. Its important that those continuing to stress out the detail of the concepts work closely with those visualising them as conclusions and decisions made along the way may affect the overall design dramatically. The purpose of this session is to replay the outcome to the wider team and present the founders with concepts that will get them excited and hopefully give the whole team a sense of something more tangible. Most importantly we want to gather feedback (often from the designers themselves as they will have noticed shortcomings or improvements they could have made with more time) that will input into the next iteration of these concepts. But first we need to let the concepts breathe a bit and mentally percolate, so the next iteration has a fresh and reflective perspective.

The next day we can take the feedback from the previous session and spend a further 2 hours refining the concepts both from an experience detail and visual perspective. When we show the ideas back to the team we should be on the right track to creating an actual prototype.

You may have noticed that 4 hours have drifted by without our founders involvement. During the concept phase we conduct two sessions in parallel namely the high-level technology solution* and the business model canvas. We’d love to have everybody included in all sessions but to maximise our time and output we feel these are two sessions our designers can be working on what they do best.

I’ve often found that it can actually be conducive to good design for the visual and experience designers to not be involved in the high-level tech session. Of course it’s essential that people designing the product experience understand the technology that will drive it — and it’s paramount they consume the output of this session so they do — but the idea should be driven first and foremost by the best possible experience for the customer and technology should be leveraged to deliver the solution, not the other way round. As with the business vs customer consideration mentioned earlier, the balance between technology and experience design should dance in tandem.

Prototypes

After we’ve replayed the 2nd iteration of our concepts to the group and collectively feel we have narrowed down on a lot of the detail, we can start prototyping the solution. This can take many forms, from physical to digital, hardware to software, device to application or even a structure or process. The main thing is that we get to something ‘real’ as quickly as possible. We have several tools that can help us get there such as 3D printing, InVision, Flinto, Adobe Xd, Keynote and many more. Depending on the problem we’re trying to solve we all have the tools and capabilities to execute an almost replica product that can be tested in a multitude of ways with our founders, partners and customers. This gives us a great opportunity (after the workshop) to gather some feedback with people in the real world (outside of our workshop bubble) and gain insight into the needs and desires of our audience.

But for now, our idea is just getting started and within three days we have a prototype we can test, supported by our founders who have been integral and heavily involved in its creation.

Name game

Finding the right name

Finding a name can be a daunting task. I‘ve personally spent a disproportionate number of hours thinking about what I would call my (future/fictional) company — to no avail. Again, with naming it’s so often a case of just knowing where to start. The options are limitless and can seem overwhelming.

For our founders, we first think about our long term goal. We ask questions like; will we want to tag-on products in the future, or will it stand alone? Will we need an emotional connection to distinguish ourselves? Will our market need us to be specific about the product offering? Do we want to be seen as a bold brand willing to take a risk and be at the cutting edge of our industry, or is it important that we portray responsibility and safety? Once we considered these (and there are plenty of other) questions we separated our incoming naming options into four categories:

1. Descriptive: Does what it says on the tin (e.g. Travelodge)
2. Suggestive: That suggest the benefits (e.g. Twitter)
3. Metaphorical: That have connotations (e.g. Shell)
4. Arbitrary: (e.g. Apple)

Once these pillars were in-place, we let everyone spend a short but focussed amount of time (10–20 minutes) jotting down as many names as we can. We aim for about 30–40 names each. We then go through the names everyone has written down without anyone commenting (ok, you might get the occasional yelp of approval or grunt of disdain) to get them all out in the air. We consolidate these into a digital copy, removing any duplication and leave them to simmer until the next day where we can refine them down to a select few we think are on the right track. In our three-day workshop we are not intending on defining everything right here and now, and this is another item that will get us moving in the right direction and extract maximum value from the short timeframe.

Action

The final piece to our three-day workshop is to define what we want to include in our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and the subsequent wider Business Roadmap.

Our MVP should have some clear inputs by now and the whole team should feel they have a firm grip on the features that will make our business idea into a fully fledged product. Now we need to define the bare minimum required to get it to market and test our assumptions and hypotheses. This session will undoubtably generate some discussion around what those features are. And it should. It’s very healthy to have conflict over the contents of our MVP as it’s the face of the business and what our founders will be seen for and judged on by investors, peers and themselves.

As I mentioned at the beginning; the reason we have a time-restricted workshop is so that we can focus on each facet of the business and the MVP planning should not be taken lightly.

The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a key lean startup concept. The basic idea is to maximize validated learning for the least amount of effort. After all, why waste effort building out a product without first testing if it’s worth it. — Ash Maura

The output of this session will be an MVP backlog we will later prioritise and break into product design and development Sprints.

Another key action we need to consider in our three days is financial planning and how we will attract investors and funding. This often involves an investors presentation which will include the high-level topics we’ve discussed during our workshop, i.e. what is the problem they’re trying to solve, proposed solution, opportunity and market validation, revenue model and growth strategy, current financials as well as the team we’re asking the investors to buy into. So much of the success will depend on this last aspect as investors are heavily driven by the people they’re investing in and whether they believe they are the type of people that are going to make this product and business a success.

Just three days

In just three days we have turned a great idea into a clear and categorised collection of deliverables that will serve as the structure and foundations from which to build a successful business. We finish by reinforcing to our founders that this is not a one off exercise but a template for the future. We have started a process of iterative validated learning based on a ‘customer first’ approach (but in-line with business goals) that will keep the business lean and flexible no matter what the market may bring.