Do the right things
How Discovery Sprints help us to discover value
I’m a big fan of the series Homeland. In this series, we follow Carrie Mathison, a CIA Analyst, trying to catch terrorists. There’s this scene in which she’s going completely nuts on a big pile of evidence trying to understand how to crack the case.
She starts to cluster evidence by marking pieces of paper with colours, adding pictures of suspects and plotting everything in a timeline. It’s this typical ‘Investigation wall’ scene you see in crime series.
While structuring the mess she is able to understand the problem space and discover the right answers on how to catch the bad guy or girl.
I know it sounds strange but the method that Carrie is using is weirdly related to the software that we develop in the Jumbo Tech Campus.
Except, we don’t discover terrorists while doing our research.
Discovery sprints
At Jumbo, we work on a large variety of topics. It can be hard for teams to decide what topics are most relevant to work on. What should they create for the biggest impact? To find answers we came up with the Discovery Sprint.
This results in
- Understanding of problems and challenges that need to be solved
- Understanding of where to create the biggest impact
- Business and IT are aligned on the future of the product
A time-efficient process
A discovery sprint takes 4 days. We want to avoid a big hairy strategy phase of months with a lot of lengthy meetings and hard discussions. We strongly believe in a more time-efficient and joyful process.
Our process is about energy, making decisions and doing stuff together!
To start off you will need a challenge for the team to solve. E.g: ‘How might we help customers lose weight?’ Or ‘How might we reduce calls about online orders at our service centre?’.
Let me explain what a week looks like. Keep in mind that the discovery sprint is flexible and we can use different tools and deviate from the setup if needed.
Day 1: Gathering input
On day 1 we start with a kick-off where stakeholders can share their knowledge. We cover topics like user behaviour, business goals and technical capabilities.
During the presentations, we invite the audience to write down ‘How Might We’s’ (HMW). Writing HMW’s is a method to reframe issues, problems and topics into challenges that can be solved without pinpointing the exact solution.
In the afternoon we will conduct customer interviews to learn more about their behaviour. The insights gained from these interviews will also be captured in HMW’s.
At the end of the day, all insights are gathered and sticked on a piece of brown paper. That’s the stuff we’ll be working with the rest of the week.
Day 2: Cluster & ideate
We’ll start with clustering all HMW’s and plot them on the phases of the customer journey.
We will highlight how the user is feeling in each part of the customer journey and add quotes from the customer interviews to make it feel more humane.
In the afternoon we conduct an ideation session to come up with ideas on how to answer the HMW’s. We will cluster the idea’s into epics and place each epic in the right column of the customer journey.
Day 3: User & business value
Day 3 is about defining value. We’ll do this with a Value Mapping exercise.
It’s basically a poker session where we invite a group of stakeholders to discuss the potential impact of each epic and score them on user and business value. All epics in the upper right corner are probably the correct things to work on for our teams.
Day 4: Recommendations & presentation
Since a lot of the stuff that we created is done on paper we have to digitise everything that it becomes easier to share.
In the afternoon we’ll present our insights and findings and present them to our group of stakeholders.
Catching bad guys or girls
In Homeland, Carrie Mathison is using her investigation to catch bad guys. Although her work is totally different, her process is quite similar. Start with research, analyse the research and formulate recommendations that define the winning strategy.
At Jumbo, it’s not our job to catch bad guys but it is our job to discover the problems that our customers face while interacting with our products and services.
