Pivoting in times of corona. Remotely.
How we ran a virtual workshop to help a local startup pivot.
Time to adapt
In the last month, running a business that depends on movement of goods and on human contact has become a real challenge. Many companies reliant on logistics and operations have hard times in the current crisis, induced by COVID-19. It’s hard to argue who’s been most severely impacted by the lockdown we’re living through in the most part of Europe. In our home-town Berlin, we can easily observe a change that local restaurants, bars, hotels have to adhere to. At DAYONE, as much as we can, we’re remotely supporting our clients in the mobility and e-commerce sector which also have been experiencing newly arising challenges.
What is not visible at first glance are the struggles of internet businesses. We don’t see shut storefronts or reduced opening hours in online stores. Out of sight, out of mind. However, the negative impact also reaches online delivery services, digital product-driven brands and e-commerce. Which is why we decided to support one of the local e-commerce startups and together, search for opportunities hiding in this difficult situation. We started by naming the problems: the user problems, the partner problems, the internal operational issues. Because limitations can eventually point out chances for improvement — from a small design iteration to a full business model pivot.
From ideation to experimentation
With Lyght Living, a Berlin-based furniture rental startup, we decided to run a full day ideation session. I had the pleasure to lead this effort, aiming at modifying the business model that has proven unsustainable. Because of the startup’s early stage and the current context, we conducted this co-creative exercise on a pro-bono basis. An initial conversation with the founders allowed me to understand the main challenges and design the workshop to fit the needs of the business and use the team’s capabilities. The goal was to identify, which change would lead to the highest chance to sustain Lyght’s activity in and after the corona-crisis:
How might we digitise the company’s business model by leveraging its existing capabilities, to ensure its sustainable future?
1. Frame the Problem
Even though sometimes it might seem like stating the obvious, we needed to start by understanding the problem. Defining what obstacles and unmet needs consumers and suppliers have brings understanding of the scope we’re tackling. To make sure we get to the core, I asked the participants several times to answer ‘why’ does each problem exist. Most often, the product or operational challenges are caused by unsolved (intangible) user problems. Focusing on those effectively can eventually reflect in an improved ROI.
2. Identify the Opportunity
Each problem can be transformed into a potential opportunity. Once we determined the problems different types of users face (including the internal departments), we could look for ways to deal with them. At this point, I aimed at finding broad opportunities for design and asked the team to form How-Might-We questions that could generate a number of possible answers.
Each key problem on the user side got turned into an open question. For the furniture consumers it looked like this: the problem statement “Consumers are afraid of committing to expensive furniture because of changing lifestyles and living situations” transformed into a question “How might we take away people’s fear of commitment and offer them flexibility?”
3. Brainstorm Solutions
Those HMW questions then became a launchpad for our brainstorm — a set of creative exercises to find possible ways to address the problems framed earlier. It’s already the middle of the day, when we dive into the solution space — we often have a tendency to start with solutions, but only uncovering several layers of a challenge can open our minds to think of the inevident.
4. Formulate Hypotheses
In order to shift from the hypothetical ‘what if’ to a plausible action plan is to formulate hypotheses that link potential solutions to the real problems. Without that, they just remain abstract ideas. And it’s not ideas that drive design, but rather insights which can be empathised with. Hypotheses are a tool to create ‘business empathy’ for the brainstormed ideas. Just like in the example: We believe trading in old furniture for new will remove a barrier for consumers to commit to more expensive products. A clear format helped provide structure to a concept and direction for the service design process.
Hypotheses become the brief
Writing assumptions around possible solutions and mapping them against desired outcomes, helped the Lyght Living team to plan the following weeks. The hypotheses we formulated and prioritised together became a starting point for design experiments. In such experiments, as A/B or fake door tests, gathered insights can be validated against real-world circumstances. At DAYONE, we work with a hypothesis-based design process and recommend it as a methodology that yields learnings and eventually leads to viable and desirable iterations on the level of product or the business model.
Applying this way of working — at a startup or not — allows us to innovate while bootstrapping. Low-fidelity experiments don’t require huge resources to evaluate business opportunities while mitigating risks of failure. As the Lyght team embarks on their first ones, we’ll be supporting the progress from a distance.
On the way to digitisation
Many companies, including the ones driven by services and digital products, are seeking out ways to sustain their operations in the current crisis. We see a lot of brands inspiringly adapting to the new-found normality. Today, for many — not only traditional — business models, the process of digital transformation is led by COVID-19. Tomorrow, it might be a different challenge. Many German and European companies still rely on physical operations — a limitation that we believe can be turned into an opportunity.
At DAYONE, we also had to adapt. In the last month, we learned how to lead distributed teams in their efforts in creating value for our clients and their customers. Our ideation with Lyght Living was an experiment in itself: the first full-day client workshop conducted fully digitally. It required adapting our methods, trying out new tools and streamlining team communication. And we already see the potential of this learning.
