Building Products the Delta Studio Way

We had an incredibly successful Delta Venture Talk event on the 10th of October 2019. I thought it may be worthwhile to share my presentation notes. I’m really looking forward to the many Delta Venture Talk events to come. Keep your eye out for Delta Venture Talks in Cape Town!

Enjoy! :

Around 10 years ago, I was involved in a non-profit which provided access to high-quality teachers for children in townships (low-income housing in South Africa).

The founder realised he could design an educational platform, which didn’t require an internet connection, which could optimise the impact they were having.

He had been involved in the specification of many custom software systems before, so to him, this was just another problem he could solve. Another system to be designed.

So he drew out the specifications for how he thought it should work and headed off to a dev house he had worked with before.

Now as a dev house, it wasn’t really in their interest, or their expertise, to ask questions about the product’s validation, they wouldn’t want to potentially push away this source of income.

Months later, we launched the product, and it worked perfectly, but for some reason, the target market, children and teenagers, just weren’t using it.

So what was the solution? Clearly, we needed to add more functionality, or maybe cater to different types of users. If we just add this one extra feature, that will change everything. This was a continuous cycle that we got into, that was just made worse when the government got involved. They had a list of features that they thought were necessary, and then never proceeded to use.

A few years later, we had a system which could fulfil the needs for about 8 different types of users ranging from teachers to school administrators, to government officials. And of course, our original user, a child in the township, who we were still struggling to get on board.

Discovering Lean Startup

I ended up leaving the startup, going to uni and thereafter spent some time as a software developer myself. A few years later, I ended up back in the startup scene, but something profound had changed. A book called the Lean Startup had been published in 2011, and it had created a movement across the startup world.

I remember the first time I read it, I was gobsmacked. It felt like it had been written about the educational startup I was a part of. I couldn’t believe how accurately it explained nearly all of the mistakes and challenges that we had made, and that thousands of founders before us had made. Not only did the Lean Startup outline all of the problems, but it provided a methodology as a solution.

The Problems

So what were some of the typical mistakes that were outlined in the Lean Startup that I related to?

Founders often start the development with an idea that they think people want.

So, “think” is the most important word in that sentence. In the case of the educational startup, the founder was convinced that what he was developing was what the user wanted and needed.

We spent months and months developing and perfecting the product, without ever sitting with a customer and validating some of the hundreds of assumptions that in new products, are always part of the game.

Founders add more sprinkles before getting the ice cream right

Louis, the founder of The Delta Studio, told me this analogy and I absolutely love it.

When I go to an ice cream shop, I love to get my ice cream with sprinkles.

Sometimes I go, and they may not have sprinkles. But I still buy the ice cream. Cause even without the sprinkles, it’s still ice cream.

If I go to the ice cream shop, and all they had were sprinkles, I’m not going to buy anything.

Regardless of the hundreds of thousands of different types of features, or sprinkles that you put on top of your product, without the ice cream or a strong core value proposition, the customer is not going to be interested.

Startups typically fail slowly and at great cost.

At that educational startup, it took us months of expensive development before we even realised that we hadn’t got the ice cream right in the first place.

By jumping into extensive product development before performing sufficient validation of your assumptions with actual customers, you are essentially gambling with a lot of money, and with incredibly low odds.

So what was the Lean Startup’s solution?

Within the book, there are a number of principles which are now adopted by startups and companies globally, but the principal I want to focus on is the one that reinforces the approach of failing fast and learning quickly the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop.

The Lean Startup recommends that you should build as little as possible, a minimum viable product, to validate your key critical assumptions.

In the case of the educational startup, the product launched to market contained several features that were not necessary to figure out whether they had product-market fit.

You build as little as possible, you launch that and try to learn quickly what works and what doesn’t. Once you have your MVP, any features or changes that are made can follow this same process of building, measuring and learning.

Our Lifecycle

So at the Delta Studio, how do we use the build-measure-learn concept within our ventures or the products we develop?

Typically, we categorise ventures within the Delta, into three life stages. Ideation, Build and Launch. The build-measure-learn cycle is the foundation of these stages, as well as what we do within them.

Ideation

Ideation is the phase where we work with the founder and to take their idea and transform it into a validated value proposition. At The Delta, we consider this the most important stage of developing any product.

Often what we do in this stage differs based on how far or refined the value proposition of the product is. Sometimes founders will arrive with nothing but an idea, and other times they’ll have a clear and validated value proposition.

But there is one process that we always recommend to our clients before any code is developed, and that is the design sprint. This is a technique which enables us to rapidly “build”, measure and learn within 4 days.

The Design Sprint History

The design sprint is a process developed by a former Google employee named Jake Knapp. This was 2 years before Lean tartup was published, and he was incredibly frustrated because, at Google, they were trying to be fast-moving, but they were struggling with the same challenges — their big features would sometimes take up to 12 months to finalise before they could get any feedback or insights from users.

Google has the 80/20 rule, so 20% of the time Google employees are allowed to explore their own projects. In his 20%, he ended up brainstorming with some colleagues about an online video meeting idea they had. His colleagues were based at the Google offices in Sweden, so he flew over and they only had 5 days to work on an idea they had.

By the end of the week, they had a working prototype, which they sent out to a bunch of their colleagues in the company. A few weeks later, most of their colleagues were actively using the prototype. The product today is Google Hangouts.

Jake realised that a time-boxed intensive workshop, produced more insights and product direction, then they’d achieved over year-long projects. And so he began the process of defining what is now referred to as a design sprint.

What is it?

The design sprint is a 4-day process, which is designed specifically to allow us to identify our key assumptions in our ideas and validate these with actual users. We typically do two days in workshops, we’ll spend one-day prototyping and the final day is spent testing with users.

Why We Love it

At the Delta, we’ve run at least one design sprint for nearly every product we’ve worked with. We love it because:

Often you get founders or stakeholders who arrive, and when it comes to UX-ing the product with them, they are completely misaligned on how it should work, and sometimes even the customer persona it is for.

The design sprint is one of the most effective tools I’ve used, to create alignment between stakeholders. It’s particularly effective when it comes to developing new products with corporates, who often have to consider the opinions of many stakeholders. The design forces us to make quick decisions. To fail fast and learn quickly.

A design sprint is a 4-day process. In 4 days, we can validate key assumptions that most companies would typically take months to do. The cost of building a product that fails far outweighs the resources you need to run a successful design sprint.

So how does the design sprint fit into the larger product life cycle of The Delta Studio?

So essentially from our side, when it comes to product development, whether it is deciding the base MVP, or deciding on the addition of a feature to a product, we learn as much as we possibly can without having to develop anything.

If we can do a design sprint to get more certainty, that is always the better option. Once we have alignment and feel as though we have sufficiently validated our assumptions, only then will we start the specification for the build.

You can see that our entire lifecycle is designed specifically to build measure and learn more about our customers, so we can develop products that they truly want.

In Conclusion

Looking back at that educational startup, I wish that I had been able to use a lot of these tools and leverage the knowledge that is available for startups today.

At The Delta Studio, we see that there are many people today who start new businesses and still make many of the same mistakes that I saw in that educational startup 10 years ago. This is why I love what we do at the Delta Studio.

We pride ourselves on being a company that will tell you when we think you should build less, that will question you when you want to add sprinkles because we are invested in the long term success of every single business we work with.