Prototyping

Why prototyping?

The idea of prototyping is about learning and improving in iterations. Before thinking through every tiny detail it is much better to do it quick and dirty in order to get first feedback. Even if you do it on your own, iterations help to keep the focus on the overall flow first before working out all details.

We will do this hands-on with a concrete case study. The starting point is a high level workshop skeleton as described in the previous article. The workshop will be a more generic co-creation workshop and not a Design Thinking Workshop.

How might we boost the usage of …?

Case

One company I was working for developed a new digital channel how customers can request certain products across various markets. The people who should use this digital channel were actually sales persons and their customers. Next to the headquarter there were autonomous subsidiaries. Therefore, scaling of the digital channel was done via clear sale targets.

This is a common approach in such situations. Without explaining all details, the challenge we faced was that the engagement of the sales people was rather low adopting the new channel. Therefore, we decided to run a series of on-site co-creation workshops in the markets to boost the usage of the digital channel.

Situation

From the workshop design perspective the following constraints were given:

• We could utilize max. half a day with the focus group
• We could involve decider roles on the sales people side
• We could run a pre-survey to collect evidence on the specific situation
• We had the full support of the local market team
• We did not have full control over the location and needed to be flexible and adaptive. All we could count on was that the room had empty walls to work with and its size was large enough for the number of participants
• We knew that we will have the right participants (sales people) but we did not know the persons and we did not have a possibility to interact with the decider role upfront

Workshop plan

Goal:

• How might we boost the usage of the digital channel?

Deliverables:

• Understand if there are still features missing that cause a low adoption
• Make sure every sales person has seen the product to understand its capabilities
• Understand what activities can be executed locally to boost the usage of the product
• Clear commitment on agreed activities to boost the usage

Participants:

• 8 sales persons from diverse departments that already use the product
• 1 decider role
• local team members responsible for the digital channel

Iteration on the concept

One challenge was that we wanted not only to include sales persons that already use the product but also sales persons who have not used it so far. Therefore, we agreed with the local team members to run a pre-survey to address especially the question why the product has not been used so far. The results of the survey should become an integral part of the workshop. (Another approach could have been to run a dedicated workshop for people who don’t use the product, etc.)

Based on the deliverables, we decided to split the available time slot in two parts.

First, we planned a remote live demo of the product with a Q+A session to make sure every sales person has seen the capabilities the sales channel offers. This should be done not in a promotional style but rather from the perspective of the sales people and connect it to their daily work.

Second, the workshop itself, to which 8 sales people were invited with the following skeleton:

As you can see, planning already includes the initial concept for the workshop and is usually also done in iterations. Nothing is set into stone at this stage but you have already a good understanding how the flow of the workshop might look like.

In this particular case there were already one or two iterations with the responsible business person and the local team to agree on the deliverables. Understanding the desired outcomes helps a lot to develop already a concept for the main activities. In this case one activity that should focus on the status quo and another activity that should focus on concrete activities. Both outcomes are valuable to make commitments.

Next, we will focus how we can prototype the activities further:

Iterate to fine tune the concept

When it comes to the very specifics of the workshop, the facilitator must take the leading role and outline all the details. This is essential, because the facilitator is the one who guides through the workshop and is in the spotlight. Of course, when you plan the workshop with a second facilitator, which is the best scenario, then it is anyway easy. For this particular workshop I was not in such a lucky situation. Therefore, I did it in iterations with my business counterpart and kept the scope of each iteration to a level where I could get the best feedback.

Don’t prototype just to confirm what you want to do. Feedback is the most valuable asset! Prototype to improve! This is why you should never aim for perfection. I usually use a on-site or digital white board and post-its to sketch out the workshop flow. As long as it is done with post-its people are much more likely to give open feedback and you can immediately move post-its around and adjust the flow.

Prototyping the live-demo

It is always good to have a guiding question. The question should not determine the process but are rather be a tool to help keeping a clear focus. It is crucial to keep the question open to support ideation. Never hesitate to adjust the guiding question when needed!

For the first part of the day the question was:

We did a couple of iterations and explored various ideas. One idea was that both of us will take on a specific user persona and we will demo the application switching persona perspective. Additionally, we explored also the technical constraints we will face on location and ended up recording the video upfront utilizing story telling techniques. It was combined with a live Q+A session where we received questions via chat (or directly) and answered them on-site. To connect the live-demo with the workshop we collected all questions on a board to include them in the follow-up workshop.

Prototyping activities regarding status quo

This took also also a couple of iterations as we wanted to step into the shoes of the sales persons. After having talked to the local team we understood that the tasks differ between the different departments. We did not want to go into too much details on the specifics of their tasks but still create some awareness among each other that the process is not the same everywhere.

Additionally, we wanted to bring in the feedback from the morning session and the survey results.

After having sketched out a couple of flow scenarios we ended up with the following flow:

I have to confess, I love maps because they support creating a shared perspective. We already knew the Customer Journey and we prepared some steps of the tasks of the sales persons. In the workshop we planned to add the most relevant steps (tasks) on their side to create the awareness that although there are difference among departments, the overall journey is the same.

Having this framework made it also easy to extend it with pain points:

With the help of one large poster we could already validate the Customer Journey, get a good overview of the process for the sales persons and add all the issues that they currently face.

All of this is a good starting point to reflect on activities that sales people should commit to. Why? First, we focus on what still needs to be improved on the level of the product. In Design Thinking there is also the term brain dump used. It refers to the situation that people want to let go of their own ideas or issues they want to communicate before they can focus on something new. Starting the workshop with collecting what might already be on the mind of the participants helps to include everyone and have full attention.

Prototyping activities

On one hand we had already established a flow to show what still needs to be improved in the product itself but there was still some part missing: it was not enough to just show what still we be delivered as part of the application but we needed also to create awareness of the situation itself.

Therefore, we planned to include a presentation on digital penetration. We had an overview of the usage of the product by customers and also by sales persons. Examples: number of sales persons that use the product compared to the total number of sales persons; number of deals concluded with the product compared to the total number of deals, etc.

Based on this we planned the next task: how might we increase the usage of the product by customers and sales persons? We would do a voting on the most activities the sales people would see most effective to boost the overall product usage.

Commitment

The final activity we needed to iterate was the commitment part. Here, we wanted to achieve a commitment that was fully supported by management. Therefore, we asked the lead of the sales team together with the product manager from the headquarter to take all the proposed activities and make together a decision on specific activities the local team can work on.

Final workshop

Once the workshop plan has reached this level of detail, it is time to work out the details. This is also where timing gets full focus. For this workshop the detailed plan looked like this:

Where are the breaks?

This workshop design includes implicit breaks. Arriving with 15 minutes is already a break as we managed to have the live-demo already in the room where the workshop would start. The commitment activity was also a break as we involved only the two leader roles and we validated their proposal during the closing.

Techniques used to facilitate the workshop:

The following material was used to execute this workshop: