Demonstrating our expertise the only way we know how!

To illustrate innovation and leadership we need to find new ways to demonstrate our expertise to potential clients.

I wrote about design sprints in the past and many design sprints have been completed at MOBGEN since then, but how can we show someone who hasn’t attended our design sprints, what we do, and how our services create value?

One way of showing our expertise is by writing about it on our blog and creating posts on social media.

However, these methods don’t seem enough to create a truly engaging way to demonstrate the company’s collective knowledge on design sprints and service design.

I gave myself the challenge of trying to find a more effective way to show expertise and leadership in these subjects. After some consideration and playing with some options of what to do as a next step; I decided that my challenge would be to design and build a simple application which guides a user through a design sprint, with tools and resources to help. This would be a far more interactive way to show our expertise and would be a great tool to attract new opportunities.

The business values for this application include:

• It can be a sales tool to expose MOBGEN’s knowledge to potential clients
• It can be an internal training tool which collects all of MOBGEN’s resources to help MOBGEN employees run design sprints
• By having user profiles, the application can show expertise in different fields that are needed for a design sprint, for example, facilitator or designer. This can help MOBGEN sell a design sprint team.

When initiating this project my first aim was to see how far I could get with this app idea as a personal project, before making it a real company project with more people involved. This meant I would need to use design and prototyping skills that I had not used before, and that, for me, made the challenge more exciting.

I began by doing what I do best, and what I do often in my work, I ran a short discovery. Looking at what is available on the market for people who want to learn about design sprints, especially in the form of apps, as well as researching the design of content heavy applications.

I wanted the application to be a collection of resources, not just a timetable for running a design sprint, so I used work we have done for a client’s home feed for different services as my inspiration.

Next, I went about creating the design sprint guide, which includes a sprint time table and the exercises that are part of a design sprint. These are some of the original designs I created, that I used for my prototype. However, they are definitely not the final version and are still a work in progress.

Once I completed the designs to the best of my ability, the next thing I needed to do was to create a prototype, one which shows off the key features I want to have in the final application. I used a prototyping tool to create a click through app. I did this as an app demo can better explain my idea, and runs for under a minute. This helped me articulate the vision I had for the app, and the features I wanted to include and made it easier to show it to my colleagues for constructive feedback.

After a few weeks of evening work, this project is still a work in progress. I have been sharing the project with my colleagues and will use their expertise to improve the design of the app so that it will be a useful tool for MOBGEN team members and others who want to run design sprints with ease.

A few weeks in, I posted the work I have done so far on our company’s internal chat channel and since then several talented colleagues of mine have joined the project to help make it a reality!

What’s next? As a newly formed team, we are currently working on our first release. We are following the lean startup methodology of building only the necessary features to create a strong MVP, that will quickly gather valuable user feedback.

If you are interested in being involved in this app, seeing how it evolves, and having exclusive early bird access to the application, join our Beta-users-list by going to our Beta User List page.

Originally published at mobgen.com on September 13, 2017.