ReadyTalk Adopts Design Thinking for Innovation

We’ve long been advocates of the lean startup methodology at ReadyTalk. We love the concept of the build-measure-learn cycle and validating assumptions with customers — life IS ‘too short to build something no one wants’.

But when we established our dedicated Innovation team in April 2016, we decided to take a step back and start to incorporate design thinking principles into our work.

Design thinking still focuses on customer insights, rapid testing and iteration, but it has a different starting point. It’s appealing to me because it doesn’t start with a particular idea or hypothesis in mind. Rather, it starts with gaining empathy and a deep understanding of your customer’s challenges, so you are in a unique position to solve them.

Comparing the two processes (from “Design Thinking vs. Lean Startup: A Comparison of Two User-Driven Innovation Strategies”) by Roland M. Mueller and Katja Thoring

Three Week Investigations

In our first foray into design thinking, we gave ourselves one week for each of the three stages listed above:

1. Inspiration
2. Ideation
3. Implementation

Inspiration

During the inspiration phase, we have a loose idea of our design challenge, and the week is spent being open to as much information as we can. We used the batterii platform to gather our findings as a team.

Using the Batterii Platform for our Innovation Sprint

We purposely spent this week gathering input and NOT rushing to think about how to solve the first problem we were presented with.

Ideation

For our second week, we leaned heavily on the Google Ventures Design Sprint book and process. Those checklists were a life-saver!

After a week of open research, we settled into a more structured format to really focus and get things going. Over the course of the week, our 8 person design sprint team:

We were asked if we were solving a crime with all our ‘clues’ on the window

• conducted 4 expert and 5 customer interviews
• went through 10 packs of post-its
• identified 6 concept facets to test
• gained a much better appreciation for the needs of our target user
• devoured 2 lbs of trail mix
• made over 50 puns

Implementation

We’re in the implementation stage now, which we’ve adapted for our team. This is “business case week”, where we’re pulling together everything we’ve learned to make the case to our parent organization to continue to invest in this concept.

And it’s no small feat! We learned a lot during the Design Sprint, and the challenge is how to distill this in a way that makes it compelling to ‘our investors’.

This is where we can lean on lean again.

• What is our MVP?
• What is our riskiest assumption?
• How can we continue to learn quickly?

How smoothly did this process work for us? Well, I suppose I can let you know after we wrap up the week and check back in with our stakeholders.

But as someone who has worked in customer discovery and new product development for years, I feel really great about how we dove into our design challenge, and I look forward to continually improving how we approach innovation at ReadyTalk moving forward.