Eliminating waste is in our DNA at FordLabs. Our research, data and solutions help prevent Ford from spending money on solutions customers don’t want or need. We thrive on finding the root cause of a problem and providing a solution without wasting resources solving the wrong problem.
We do this by evaluating opportunities before we work on them, listening to our customers, ending or pivoting engagements if they’re not working, always having a mind for continuous improvement and helping other teams eliminate waste in their processes.
We Evaluate Opportunities
We only focus on products that fit within ideal parameters. These products have measurable value and are expected to positively impact the business and customer. Access to users and data, where we can experiment more, learn quickly, and create solutions with a balanced team and a lean start-up mindset, creates the best environment for a FordLabs engagement.
Recently, we implemented a valuation process that allows us to prioritize the work coming in and prioritize opportunities that provide the highest value to Ford and FordLabs. This helps eliminate the waste of working on products that aren’t the right fit for FordLabs or don’t provide high value.
A small product team researched what a high-value product opportunity looked like for FordLabs. Using the data gathered through interviews and survey results, the product team developed a scorecard that quickly collects information on opportunities. The scorecard allows FordLabs to compare and prioritize multiple opportunities in a standardized manner that speaks to what is highly valued, thereby saving time and resources from being assigned to lower-value work. After a quick three-week effort, we ended up with a product that allows us to focus on products customers actually want.
We Listen to Our End Customers
Recently, within the Model e Readiness Planner engagement, we were asked to add information about a related Commitment Program to the Planner that we launched earlier this year. Rather than simply putting that information on the page as the stakeholders requested, we talked to dealers (the end customer) to verify if that was where they would expect to find this information.
Through these interviews, we concluded that most dealers would not expect this information to live within the Readiness Planner but should be accessible from the Readiness Planner and assessed where the Commitment Program content could live. To provide value to the dealers, the Commitment Program information had to live where the dealer’s mental model assumes it should live, and if we hadn’t talked to them, we might have spent time and energy on an underutilized design and build.
If It Isn’t Working, We Pivot or Stop Working on It
At the beginning of each product engagement, FordLabs works with the product owner to agree on a set of stop metrics. A stop metric suggests a forward-looking view that if we can’t do or get something, that could be a reason to end our engagement with that team.
Stop metrics can vary by the product we’re working on and often relate to dependencies needed to conduct experiments, such as getting existing data or access to potential customers. Other aspects of stop indicators include things we want to measure but fall short of what is needed or expected, such as lack of conversion to click here, time spent on site, number of users, or actual potential revenue, as examples. We define stop metrics in advance to help a team determine whether we should continue or stop an initiative, thereby reducing waste.
Continuous Improvement is the Name of the Game
We’re always looking for ways to improve our processes and be Ford’s most effective and efficient team. We’re curious and ask, “What if?” which often leads to identifying pain points and minimizing waste in current processes.
We are committed to improving through consistent team retrospectives that highlight areas where improvements can make us a better team. One FordLabs software engineer tells the story of a product he was on last year, where they spent most of their time in meetings instead of building the core features for the product’s MVP. With plenty of features to implement, he recognized that they were not spending enough time building the product.
During their weekly product team retrospective, they coordinated with their product manager and product designer to set up some working norms so that engineers received relevant context from meetings without needing to sit through the discussions that didn’t need to include them. By doing so, they could dedicate far more time to the value-add work of getting the MVP done and in front of end users.
Internal Tools Help Other Ford Teams Eliminate Waste
We’ve developed some internal tools that help teams work better, and our services provide the business with a unique approach to solving problems and eliminating waste.
- RetroQuest helps teams better facilitate conversations during ceremonial retrospectives. They can anonymously discuss what went well and learn where to improve. This important ceremony helps teams identify actionable areas of continuous improvement, which eliminates waste in processes.
- Newsie empowers product teams to share meaningful progress updates and product information. It provides a central spot for facilitating communications between Product and Service teams, their stakeholders and potential collaborators. This eliminates wasteful progress update meetings and keeps teams working on products that will increase revenue.
- PeopleMover provides a birds-eye view of product team staffing and makes it easier to rotate team members across balanced teams within a group. This eliminates the need to search through notes or ask another team member who is working on what.
- StoryJam is a fun way for teams to give a voice to everyone in the room without influencing their opinions. Create a room, set a topic and get feedback. This tool helps eliminate time spent in meetings trying to get everyone’s opinions — making meetings more efficient and effective.
- Vibez is an anonymous, customizable health check tool that allows team members to rate their feelings on researched indicators and add anonymous comments to explain those ratings. It also prompts team members to share their feelings about bigger-picture topics they might not consider.
FordLabs exists to eliminate wasteful product production. We work with teams across Ford to help validate their ideas through rapid experiments and extensive research to discover if software solutions will solve customer problems. Our mission is to only deliver software and experiences that customers actually want and for Ford to only spend money on viable products.
