Rapid Delivery with a Focus on Customer Value
by Eric Konzelman and Kyle Truscott, Free Association
Rapid delivery is required to thrive as a digital product team these days. But as expectations for speed mount, the pressure to ship can increase the risk of building the wrong feature or the wrong product altogether. In the end, it doesn’t matter how fast a product goes to market unless it is valuable to its customers.
Fortunately, it is possible to increase speed without sacrificing the product’s effectiveness. It starts with redefining what “rapid delivery” really means. Release cycles, velocity, and other measures of productivity are important operationally, but they overlook the key dimension of customer value. For our teams at Free Association, rapid delivery means determining a product’s most valuable features and delivering their optimal user experience as quickly as possible. To balance expediency and value maximization, we have a few tools in the toolbelt.
Let’s start with job story development and opportunity analysis. The Jobs to be Done (JTBD) framework is based on a theory by Professor Clayton M. Christensen. It asks innovators to think about their product or service in these terms:
“What job does a user hire your product to do?”
Within this, it’s key to understand that “customers don’t buy products and services; they hire various solutions at various times to get a wide array of jobs done.” The basic format for writing a job story is:
When ____[situation]____, I want to ____[motivation]____ so that ____[outcome]____ .
To surface the unmet user needs, we give each job story an opportunity score, using a simplified version of Anthony Ulwick’s methodology for opportunity analysis:
Rate each job 1-10 based on the importance to the user of the desired outcome
Rate each job 1-10 based on the degree to which it is currently satisfied
Opportunity Score = Importance + (Importance - Satisfaction)
Compiling job stories and conducting opportunity analysis should be informed by customer and design research. Focusing on the job stories with the highest opportunity scores maximizes the chances of creating high-value features. It safeguards against waste and feature bloat, both of which greatly diminish a team’s ability to truly deliver rapid value.
With understanding of the highest scoring opportunities, our team can quickly synthesize an initial product strategy and high-level roadmap. Prioritizing accordingly, we plot design sprints against the highest-value job stories.
As our sprint plans take shape, it’s key to consider how to de-risk big design decisions, and quickly land on an effective UX that will satisfy a given story. One method employed by our teams at Free Association is called “divergent/convergent design.” To “diverge,” the team goes for breadth and determines as many viable UX design solutions as possible. To “converge,” we try to pull from the best ideas, refine, and test concepts or prototypes with potential users.
But, does exploring many different ideas, only to choose one, actually save time? It does for a few reasons. Done right, the process of exploring and arriving at a winning concept helps orient the product team and key stakeholders towards a singular experience vision. Alignment on a vision upfront builds excitement and momentum. It prevents confusion, conflict, and rework down the road. But the main reason divergent/convergent design contributes to speed, is that it (almost always) yields a better design solution faster. By quickly trying many materially different solutions in a low risk environment, the team lands on a superior solution sooner vs. building out and serially enhancing an initial design solution that seemed obvious at first. Throughout the diverge/converge process, we rely on a mix of user research and prototyping to help prove we are indeed honing in on the optimal feature, flow, or product concept.
After converging and de-risking key UX decisions, we can confidently run design and engineering sprints. We now execute against our roadmap and make our winning prototypes real. Though our focus becomes executional, each sprint is still rooted in maximizing customer value, especially on the UX/UI level. Executional sprints can be more effective and efficient by following a few best practices and getting the most out of a modern design stack.
First, don’t reinvent the wheel. Leverage the API economy of existing services and platforms to power routine parts of a product. Use it to de-risk implementation and move faster. There are many modern development platforms that help here:
Headless Content Managers - Rigid platforms and frameworks so often block creative UX solutions. Tools like Contentful decouple an application's data layer and frees the UX from constraining a templating system.
Authentication & Identity Providers - Customers expect top-notch security and multiple ways to register for an application. Platforms like Auth0, Okta, and OneLogin can quickly remove this traditionally complex and time consuming aspect of product development.
Edge Hosting - Platforms like Netlify and Vercel dramatically speed up infrastructure configuration. At Free Association, we frequently leverage Netlify to build and serve single-page-apps, static sites, and prototypes.
Second, create and adhere to a design system early in the process. A system of atomic elements will empower UX innovation and unlock efficiency across the full team. Designers can focus on composing divergent UX concepts instead of routine UI elements. Similarly, developers are able to quickly assemble and wire complex experiences.
Third, set up a design ops process that yields transparency and fosters flow across different business functions. True rapid delivery comes from cross-functional collaboration. Collaboration between design and engineering is increasingly made easier with cloud-based design software. We use Figma to keep our teams in lockstep when it comes to design componentry, versioning, and collaborating across discipline. This removes the "let me work on this problem in a vacuum and share the file when I’m done” workflow of the past. Instead, Figma allows iteration through design challenges together, in real-time. Figma also includes design system management features so that an update to a component can be made in one place, then deployed and used system-wide.
Throughout execution, rapid delivery still means proving value and user experience fit as quickly as possible. By definition, technology will always grant an ability to move faster. The latest tools are rapidly lowering barriers to design and development. No code/low code platforms are dramatically reducing the time and effort needed to create complex applications. Despite the toolset and the speed it affords, the critical question remains: with each release, feature, or new product, how can we ensure we’re delivering the most value for customers?
Eric Konzelman, Free Association
Eric Konzelman is a Partner at Free Association.
Kyle Truscott, Free Association