Labs Reflection: How Incremental Experimentation Made Us More Agile in 2016

We recently wrote about the benefits of starting an innovation lab, as 2016 comes to a close, we’re reflecting on what we’ve learned and experienced from our Mission Data Labs initiative where we explore emerging tech. One key learning that stands out is the value of incremental experimentation — a key part of our product development and internal labs process philosophy that we share with our clients all the time.

When we first formalized our innovation lab, projects were quick, simple, and meant to serve as building blocks for larger, more complex projects. For example, one of our first Labs projects was to experiment with beacons. In order to get a feel for the technology, we created a simple app in Slack that would let team members know when someone entered the office. You can read more about that here. This was an easy project that only took a couple of weeks to complete, and its primary purpose was simply to get a better understanding of how beacons work.

Once we completed that initial exploration of beacon technology, we decided to go deeper. We augmented the first app by applying the beacon functions of ranging and monitoring. Experimenting with ranging and monitoring showed us we could determine the specific room in which someone was located. You can learn more about that project here.

Lastly, we were interested in voice interfaces, so we decided to experiment with integrating our beacon Slack app with the Amazon Echo. When prompted, Alexa (the voice service that powers the Echo) would “say” where a person was located in the office. Each of these projects took an average of two weeks to complete, and were concluded with short blog posts that presented informal highlights of our learnings including what gave us trouble.

Refining Our Process

As the Labs initiatives continued to evolve and projects became more complex, we lost our rhythm a bit in terms of treating each exploration of an emerging technology as an incremental building block. We became more focused on finished products as opposed to just sharing and demonstrating our new tech learnings as we were progressing. Lab projects began to stall when we weren’t innovating incrementally. Fortunately, this period didn’t last long, and we were able to get back to the agile process we had through most of the 18 months of the Mission Data Labs initiative. Once we got back to basics, we saw clear benefits and progress for our program.

Our process for developing Labs projects that deal with new tech is to: 1) determine what aspect of an emerging technology we want to explore, and 2) identify simple milestones that we believe can be accomplished in a one- to two-week sprint. An example of a milestone would be learning the capabilities of what can and can’t be done with the technology, or creating a simple product relating to the tech we’re researching. The key is to make the time period of exploration brief to maintain the forward momentum of the technology investigation.

Approaching technology investigation in this way ensured resources could be dedicated to the efforts without impacting their primary responsibilities of supporting the needs of our clients. Thus we gained the participation of our talent, enabled them to gain new skills, and did not disrupt our clients’ projects. By time constraining participation it also alleviated some of the pressure on our developers who work on lab projects to create polished finished projects. There’s only so much perfection one can attain within a two week cycle. Therefore the constrained time allowed them to focus on innovation and learning rather than the near perfect product demanded for client work. Finally, this high velocity and incremental approach has enabled our Labs team to flexibly participate in a wider spectrum of projects, increasing the number of Lab projects we can take on at once.

At the end of each milestone we re-evaluate the goals and direction of a project, and make a determination if we want to continue exploring with a given concept or technology. In a sense, doing this has made it easier to share progress with our followers and clients — successes or failures.

Conclusion

As mentioned earlier, incremental experimentation is a core component of our methodology in building great digital products. We always advise our clients to start with their Minimum Viable Product, so it was appropriate that we take our own advice and employ a similar approach for our internal lab projects.

Looking for a digital partner in 2017? Check out our website, missiondata.com