Using 5 Dysfunctions Pyramid for better product strategy

14 Haz 2021 · BottomUp - Skills for Innovators

Hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance and we continue the journey into my favorite product strategy tools. Today we're getting into the five dysfunction. Other team pyramid, a bit of a mouthful, but this tool, I, I cannot tell you, I come back to this day after day, no matter whether I'm working with a big enterprise or a startup, the five dysfunctions of a team is some groundbreaking work from Patrick Lindsay.

Yeah. And it is the perfect guide on how your team should behave when they're going about creating an idea or whether they're building a product or anywhere in between. This tool is in dispensable. Now you might be thinking to your mind to yourself like Mike, you know, we've talked about growth, marketing funnel, great product to been talking about the lean hypothesis, the [00:01:00] value proposition, canvas, you know, that teamwork.

How is that so relevant to product? Well, what I would propose to you is that if you don't have a great team, if you don't have a tool that you can look at. That can provoke you and nudge you to think about the best design of your team. Not only on the work that they do, but how they do it, then it doesn't matter.

What other great design thinking or agile or lean frameworks they use. It doesn't matter if the team is no good. So this has been the huge breakthrough in the work that I've done over the last. Year or so is that you cannot really entertain product development, product discovery without looking at team design simultaneously the way in which we collaborate is a huge dependency of any good thinking.

You must have the right alignment connection. Trust [00:02:00] you must be cohesive. You have to be like a dream team. If you want to tackle big problems in the world and create solutions to it. So this is why we're going to look at the pyramid of the five dysfunctions of a team. Now, this is groundbreaking work that you can jump over to bottom-up dot IO and get a free copy of this.

Have a look at our agility in the digital age course, it's totally free. You can get a complete breakdown of the five dysfunctions of a team pyramid. I'm so. Delighted to share with you right now on the podcast, this tool, because I think it's informed not only how I build teams, but how I lead a company of over 250 people.

These themes come back time and time again. This is the key go-to tool that I use when I want to crack how to improve a team. When I want to support them to be the best versions of themselves and to do some great work. [00:03:00] All right. So let's do two things together today. We're going to talk about what the problems are and the good news is I've got solutions too.

So I'll give you the antidote as well, but we have to get a little dark here. We have to go into the valley of darkness. We have to look at some of the things that we've all seen throughout our career that happen on teams. All right. So teams that aren't doing well. Teams that are not producing the results.

They will have five common factors. Now this is built around the enterprise, this work frankly, you could easily apply this to sports teams and far beyond, but let's kind of cast our minds to our experience in the office at work. What would be the five things we could commonly use as a checklist, as the likely culprits of an underperforming team?

Well, [00:04:00] the, the first and foremost thing I would say to you is you've probably got an absence of trust. This is when you know, the politics are ruling the business. When it becomes a little dog eat dog, when people feel that there are members of their team. That are being selfish that are looking for personal advancement and putting themselves before the team.

That's what happens when you have an absence of trust, because to use a sporting metaphor. You've got to, you've got to believe that your teammates are going to be there when you're going to make the pass. When you're going to make the tackle, you've got to really just instinctively know, think about Michael Jordan and the bulls.

When they're at their peak, they were so good that Jordan could just pass it off to his teammate. And these teammates would make the shot because he trusted in them. That was the difference. [00:05:00] Well, it's just the same at work. And if there's an absence of trust, if your direct manager. Doesn't have your back.

If your peers are not wholly and heartedly supporting you, if you cannot be open, if you cannot have all of the kind of right conversations, it's often the central problem. Two teams. The one that occurs the most is this app absence of trust people, not being direct people, not being honest people. Not sharing what's really on their mind.

And as a result, they get a little defensive, you know, the ego kicks in. And so it's fight or flight. You see this classically in the tension between departments in companies, particularly large companies. So absence of trust, number one on this pyramid of five dysfunctions of a team. So what [00:06:00] happens if we've got this checklist teams underperforming, there's probably an absence of trust.

What else could there be? Well, for sure. Fear of conflict. That's right. People not saying not people not being able to give constructive feedback. People are not talking about the tough. Issues. So what happens is when there are not tough, but respectful competition conversations, when those conversations are not happening, it's what we call as a fear of conflict.

And the great problem with that is if you're not able to talk about biggest problems of the company, the biggest problems of your product or your team, then how on earth do you expect them to get solved? I mean, it's not magic, doesn't exist. So it's pretty wishful thinking if you're not going to have the conversation about the big problem, there's just [00:07:00] no way it's getting solved.

So that's the checklist. Number one, absence of trust. Number two, also very likely and very common, a fear of conflict, just not having the right conversations. Now let's get up into if those are the two big underlying ones, there's three other characteristics of the low performing teams. And I'll tell you what, they're probably, as a result of the first two, let's look at it.

Lack of commitment, number three. So let's say you've got a trusting team. That's having tough conversations, but they're not really aligned around a common go initiative. Desire outcome result, whatever it is, it's a lack of commitment. And if we don't know what's expected of us, if we don't know what we're trying to get done well, how, I mean, it would be a lottery to think that we're going to hit target if we're not even really committed to it.

Number [00:08:00] four avoidance of accountability. This one really comes if you're not committed to a target, if you're not having the, the, the, the really tough discussions, fear of conflict. If you're not trusting each other, I like, I don't know how anyone can be accountable with any of those underlying, so avoidance of accountability, if people are not prepared to say.

I dropped the ball. I missed that one. That's on me. Here's what I'm doing to fix it. Here's what I need your help to fix it. That would be great accountability. But often we see the fourth part of this pyramid is underperforming teams have an avoidance of accountability. What happens in the sporting field?

Classic blame the referee for a bad call? Well, what a great coach will tell you is if you lost by a point and let's say it was a bad call. It was your fault for letting the score be that close, or if do you use that's a common [00:09:00] mantra from bill Belichick, the coach of the new England Patriots, another great guy.

Charlie Munger talks about accountability saying don't be a victim, take responsibility for everything it's on. You. Because being a victim and saying, oh, it was somebody else. So judging somebody else, nothing good comes of there. And lastly, number five in these reasons teams, underperform and dysfunction is the inattention to results.

And this is a big one because as you can see, it's at the highest form, if you've set a big annual target or a big launch target, Whatever it might be. If you're not obsessed about achieving those results chances are, you're not gonna be totally going in a right direction. It's a bit hit or miss. So they have five big, big dysfunctions of a [00:10:00] team.

Let me give you just briefly what those answers are. How do you solve the absence of trust you as a leader need to be vulnerable. You need to show that it is safe. To be open and to be vulnerable, to say things like I screwed up, I messed up. I don't know the answer. That's vulnerability. That's how you build trust.

Because if you do it then your other teammates will follow with you. Fear of conflict actively go and consider every single idea from everyone do not shy away from inviting everyone to participate in the discussion of problems and solutions. Next one lack of commitment, be clear, set their expectations.

How are you going to reach the results? Be very clear. Get people on board. Number four, avoidance of accountability, have the tough conversations. [00:11:00] Lastly, inattention to results. It's all about talking about communicating the team goals and particularly in these last three. Tough conversations, setting expectations and goals.

Everybody needs to get on board and agree to a challenge to discuss and to finally own those results. Don't just tell people the goals. Don't tell people the expectations, invite them to be part of it too. So there you have it. Patrick, Lencioni's five dysfunctions of a team. It's a beautiful pyramid. You can get a copy of that at bottom-up dot IO.

Just take the agility in the digital age masterclass, and you'll be able to enjoy that. And hopefully like me, you will be able to refer to it all the time and you need to be looking at this from day one. From when you have that original idea, you need to grab it, hold it. Check it go back to this time and time again, and you'll be on your way to making a great [00:12:00] product.

The other thing you can do, if you want to make great products, head of it, a bottom-up dot IO, you can check out all our free courses, design thinking, agile, lean, you name it. It's all there. So you can make the very best products possible. All right, that's a wrap of the bottom-up skills podcast. We'll catch you next time.

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Using an Agile Sprint Plan for better products
12 Tem 2021· BottomUp - Skills for Innovators
Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance. And today we are going to talk about agile. And scrum that's right. This is the sixth part, the sixth instalment of my favorite tools for making better products. And today. The specific tool we're going to get into is this sprint plan.
And this is at the cornerstone of doing agile, scrum work, working in an agile way. And the sprint plan is like the go-to place. If you want to work in an agile way, it really starts with a sprint plan. And I'm going to explain what this is. It's a fundamental tool for you to work in a really. New way it's pretty simple and straightforward and what I would propose to you, it's how [00:01:00] we can you know, get our agile projects being closer to deadline.
It's how we can be on time. But more importantly, my experience has been that I made a lot of executives who understand agile at a very kind of top level. Maybe just some of the principles and so forth. However, what is fascinating to me is how once you get into all right, well, let's do agile. There's a number of things that I see.
Real confusion around or people just haven't had the chance to really dig in. I can tell you I've been digging in to working in an agile way for, for quite a quite a while. And the spring plan is something that I'm really delighted to share with you today. So we're going to get right into it. Now I'm going to do a little bit of laying down some foundation here.
I'll do it super quick. And then we're gonna get [00:02:00] to this sprint plan. First of all, we need to get this underlying idea of agile re super-clear agile itself. Agile software development itself is a set of principles. All guided to helping a product team be incredibly productive and work fast. I often say it's the nimble and much more iterative alternative to working in the traditional waterfall way, which was how we worked in software maybe 20 years ago.
Now the problem with that. Is that it's new? The problem with agile is there's lots of different flavors. So that's why I want to kind of cut to the core of it. Get to the sprint plan, get to defining some of the flavors of agile. Now this is an, a really important build. So agile is a set of principles.
There is then a lot of different methodologies [00:03:00] and practices that come out of those principles. So the power. Of agile is that I think why it will be around for so long. Is there, there are these fundamental, almost like first principal kind of notions that support this idea of agile and. Then you get, you know, it's commonly considered there's about 40 different versions of agile.
And probably now that I've said this 40 there's probably 41 or 42. So there's a set of values and principles that underline agile. It's all about Focusing on bringing people together and the quality of the individuals interacting. It really prioritizes work our working product overall, the comprehensive documentation.
Whereas, you know, waterfall was all about a very strict process well-documented but often the product [00:04:00] sucked, the software didn't work well. So that's why agile came about. So those are some of the values of the principles. You know, There's a lot of them. I would say it's, there's a lot of thinking around sustainability empowerment of small teams taking big challenges, putting them into a small component parts that there's a lot there, a lot of good stuff that kind of sets you up for the different flavors.
That I was talking about. So you've got many different flavors you could argue. Lean startup is a flavor of agile then. There's a lot of the Japanese inspired flavors continuous just in time delivery, that kind of thing, Macado method, or you could string right across to like decentralized management and governance.
You've got like Holacracy. You might've heard of that beyond budgeting begin with the end in mind, some of those [00:05:00] practices, but the one I'm going to focus on is scrum. Scrum is by far the biggest and most popular version method of agile software development. You've seen companies like Atlassian who produced JIRA and confluence, you know?
Right. They're like it's a big nod towards the world of agile. Okay. So we've established number one, agile methodology is, you know, agile at its highest form it's principles and values. There's many different flavors that bring it to life. That's the stuff we do. And in terms of doing stuff, we're going to talk about a flavor of agile called scrum.
Scrum is very different to canvas. In one essential way. So Kanban's also a very, very popular way of doing agile. The difference with scrum is it's time-bound so it really respects timelines. [00:06:00] This in some respects creates a tension, but I think it deals with that tension quite well. So I'm going to explain what your sprint plan should look like.
Some of the key parts of it. We're gonna describe some of the pieces. Some of the, the key tools and practices and hope fully, what I can do for those of you who are a bit newer to agile, I can introduce you into the practical, real, tangible things that you'll actually do do with agile and scrum. And for those of you who are trained, tried and true, hopefully I'm giving you a little reminder, a little update just to get you back into some of those foundational lines.
Okay. Sprint plan for agile scrum way of working. Now, the first construct is the sprint itself. Traditionally, I'm a big fan of two weeks sprints. So [00:07:00] in cross those two weeks, you will plan do and review the work. And then you'll start a new sprint after that I've traditionally found that most good first-generation products are a good six to 10 sprints.
And the big part of that to recognize is that it takes a team some time to. Storm and norm and come together and get productive. So I, you know, big Baton I see at work is that the second half of of a project. So if it was five sprints to start and five additional ones to getting us to 10, the second five are way more productive than the first five.
So if you understand that that's natural, then you can be a bit more patient at the beginning. As people kind of come together and take ownership for, for their, for their work. Okay. So the sprint it's traditionally, it's two weeks. Some people do for I [00:08:00] love a good two weeks sprint. You're going to expect five to 10 of these particularly for a first-generation project or product.
And there's nothing to say that you couldn't stay keep working in sprints after your product goes live. In fact, I'd highly recommended. We do it at quality once all the time. And I find this idea of, to experience is just a really good way. Not only to organize your product, but it's a pretty damn good way to organize.
An organization. So more and more, I find myself trying to design more parts of our organization to get like our 250 people working on a, on a structured sprint basis, whether they're building product or whether they're in. Strategy where they're in the finance support, HR. It doesn't really matter if we can kind of create that rhythm.
I think it's kind of a nice integrated way of working and it feels very responsive to the changing demands of business. [00:09:00] Okay. So what's inside of your, your two week sprint plan. Well, the first thing is you need to nominate a product owner, a team, and a scrum master. These are three key roles, scrum master.
All about you know, helping people deliver their work in the sprint. I mean, it's, it's the ultimate constantly area support a helper, unblock her, if you will, for the team, there's the team itself, designers, developers, strategists, BAS all that kind of good stuff, building products. And then you have that key role of product owner.
Product owner number one, most important thing, because if you don't have someone totally dedicated to owning the product, the quality of the works, aren't going to be good. So where do we see the work? Well the work is. In a sprint backlog that is a set of tasks and activities that you've all agreed to do over the course of the two weeks.
You will. Then now we're starting to get into some of the things [00:10:00] some of the events that you have, you have a sprint planning meeting you will have at the end, a sprint review meeting, or what is often called a retrospective. And every single day you'll have a stand-up or a scrum. All of this takes context.
This sprint is everyone is working towards ticking off things in the back. That's for the spring bat log, but there is another meta version of this backlog, which is the full product backlog. And that starts to become a bit more like a roadmap as to what might come in the future. But the good news is at the end of every sprint, you decide what's next as a team and as a group and every think is captured.
Single source of truth. And you generally like to have at least one, if not two of those one manages the backlog that's JIRA. Secondly, the other one conference that is actually managing the documentation, the knowledge, all of that collaboration to decide what's in a user story, [00:11:00] what's in an epic, a theme.
What is actually. The knowledge that informs the definition of the user story is all in confluence. Now, if you have these two really centralized JIRA, what are we doing? Confluence, how are we doing it? What's the background? What's the content. What's the feature list? What is the content list? What are the assumptions as the user logged in, logged out, et cetera, et cetera, all those sorts of things, all of that becomes embodied together.
The tasks and the knowledge or the tasks and the data jobs to be done. And the data, all of that is centralized. So in the sprint and the daily scrum you'll be talking about, are you on track and know, are there any blockers for your backlog, for your tasks and you might discuss the search for more information in a tool like confluence, of course, at the [00:12:00] end you deliver your finished work.
And everybody comes together to review and decide what's next. And this is the rhythm that you get into. This is the sprint plan. So two weeks. Some key roles, such as product owner, you make sure you have a black cloud. You make sure that at the beginning of the entire sprint, you meet and at the end to review and throughout the day, the thing that keeps you on track is your daily scrum.
And all of this is captured and managed through tools like JIRA and confluence, plenty of other options as well. That's just a best practice advice from my side. So there you have it. This is the very heart of agile scrum. It's the split. Plan. And if you, if you adopt these sprint plans, if you define these key roles, you will have to unlock the para of agile, agile.
Is a great way to work [00:13:00] together when you're building software, but only works. If everybody gets on board, if only works, if everybody lets go of waterfall, you can't be half in the game. You're either in or you're out and you have to trust the process. And that's why the sprint plan is so essential. If you're gonna trust the process, you need to know what is building up.
Where are the lines where the goalposts, what game you playing? It's all in that sprint plan. I hope that's helped you if you want to go deep, but we have a whole masterclass on that job. You can get [email protected]. In fact, you can get over 20 different courses, all free at bottom-up dot PIO. I hope you've enjoyed it.
This is the bottom of skills podcast. That's a wrap.
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Designing User Journeys for better products
5 Tem 2021· BottomUp - Skills for Innovators
Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. And I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance. We are continuing to dive into my favorite frameworks and tools for product strategy and product design. And today we're talking about the user journey and at the heart of design thinking. Is the user journey. It's a challenging tool because it really is a forcing factor.
It makes you empathize with your user and it's not just at the start of their journey, but right through the middle and the end too. And this user journey is an essential tool for any designer, developer and entrepreneur. And the reason why it's so essential is after years and years of designing products and working on so many different projects, it is amazing to me how important literally projects I'm working on right now that often the key question [00:01:00] is what does the real end to end the aid is out of the user journey.
Look like, how does it start? How do we keep it going? And how do we wrap it up with a bow on the top? So this user journey is essential to understand, and the tool of creating a user journey is a true art form and it looks real neat. But you know, there's a lot of work that goes into a good user journey.
And I think if you can make a great user journey. I mean, it's so powerful because it'll give you millions of ideas for what should be inside of your product. Inside of your product inside of your business, but it also gives you the chance to look at the full scope of what you need to bill. And it kind of comes at it totally from the user's point of view.
So it also is really making sure that you're in touch, how your user thinks, how they [00:02:00] feel and how they behave. So let's dive in to use a journalist. If you're interested in more about user journeys and design thinking, head over to bottom-up dot IO, where we have a free master class on design thinking and user journeys, dig into that.
It's all free and you'll get not only a lots on user journey, but way, way more too. So when we think about a user journey, I want you to imagine. A line that runs from the left to the right-hand side of your screen. It's like a align with an arrow at the end. And what we do is we mark at the start middle and end of that different moments that make up the user's journey.
This is not just, oh, they're inside the app. And then they start doing this. What's interesting about a user journey is it really should start from the very, very first moment of the journey when they think to themselves, huh? [00:03:00] I need a solution to this problem. Why should I go now? That is where you start and where you end is how they talk about it.
And share your product with others after a great experience. So that is the real scope of it. And sometimes those start to create loops and continuums of consistent return usage, which is really cool. But let's look at this as a linear process. Let's make it really simple. Let's start at a, and we're going to finish it Z, but what I really want to stress is it to really comprehend.
So you should be starting at that moment, which we might call awareness. So I will give some general best practice categories for each of the steps in a user journey. The one I'm going to give you is like a path to purchase. Paths to [00:04:00] subscription, perhaps. Obviously if it's an existing user they already are aware of you, but let's pretend this customer doesn't even know us.
So it really does start with awareness. And so what this might bring up for you as a product, let's say you're a SAS service software as a, as a service, you have a website and you know, if people are thinking, how do I solve Getting my car serviced. Okay. Let's say that's their problem. And they're thinking about ways to get their car service.
Well, then the first thing they're going to do is either ask a friend or they're going to ask Google, which would lead you to think about, okay, what is the awareness of my service? When people go to do that, have they given people a reason to talk about me? Do I show up? On the right search queries inside of Google.
So this is really an awareness thing sometimes for bigger brands in highly competitive markets, like their [00:05:00] general baseline of unaided awareness requires them to be pumping out a lot of messages to remain what we call top of mind. That's sort of. The world of big brands, but in this case, let's, let's focus on folks hit Google.
Do you show up? So let's say they come in through a blog post through your website that was listed well on Google because you optimize it for SEO and then they get some great content on your website. Now what's key. Here is the content is what they came for, but they might. Come for the content, but they might take some other things.
Maybe there's a free consultation. Maybe there is a download. Those things might have a reason to return to the website. In that point were really starting to shift from awareness into this very active form of consideration. Maybe you as a user in this journey, you're starting to create like a [00:06:00] shortlist of three different options for servicing.
Yeah. Now there'll be some really important things here at this moment of truth. As we transition from consideration into purchase this is really, really important. So you've had the awareness, you've got them to your site for the first time you've introduced yourself. You've built the trust with the content you've made the barrier to the first transaction.
Very low boom in they come. Purchasing or at least some form of transaction registration, so on and so forth, then it really becomes okay, you're now becoming maybe you're in a trial or maybe you've even booked your car for a service. So then it's all about all those magic touch points that you want your user to.
To map the confirmation. Oh, that's great. Yeah. They've confirmed me. They even confirmed via text, which is great, which makes me super confident. They sent me a reminder the day before they sent me the address. So I can just click it in Google maps. For example, these are all things that you want to capture in your user [00:07:00] journey and where you can start to see here is we've gone from awareness into consideration and you have to do that work to build the trust.
Then maybe they need to look at three articles before they moved towards purchase. So the user journey starts with awareness, goes into consideration and this path to purchase. This is the really essential bit. It's what we often call the moment of truth. This is where they buy something from you. And it's really critical.
This is really an emotional thing to making them feel confident, being super fast and transparent are all the characteristics of a great product experience. Okay, so you purchase your product. Obviously knowing when you can take hold of your product or your, of your take out of your product or your service sometimes it's instant or done online.
If you've got to take your car in for service, that's all part of it too, making that experience while you wait. Great. The delivery, the big moment that the reveal, the big reveal of Wila This [00:08:00] is also a great moment that you can map on your user journeys, but also for other sorts of experiences, like let's say I'm I've bought a subscription to a service, an online service maybe there's a community forum or an FAQ knowledge base where people share experiences.
That can be a really great way to build your user journey. You might even have whole user journeys just around the support. Maybe there's like three. Primary tasks that people tend to do in service. Then that's what you map out and you use a journey. Lastly, let's assume that, you know, it's been a great experience.
People are engaged paying one time, a subscription, doesn't matter, then it's all about advocacy and you use a journey. You got to give them a reason to become advocates and. This is the most cost-effective way to grow your business is if your existing customers are your biggest fans, your biggest [00:09:00] promoters.
So you need to map that. And again, I've given you this sort of broad five step user journey, awareness, consideration, purchase retention, advocacy. This is sort of a very little User journey. What you could see is you might even choose to break down a number of these into their own user journeys, particularly for more complex products and services that certainly a go to.
So this is the journey we started with awareness. We ended in advocacy that's the aid is ed mapping. This and those critical moments is really important. So now I want to go to a little bit more of an advanced. I want you to imagine we have those five main sections, five steps, awareness, consideration, purchase retention, advocacy.
You might call them slightly different things. They might vary first-time customers versus return customers. But the BA the main thinking remains the same. Here, if you [00:10:00] want to take it to the next level, if you really want to have this deep empathy for your users, what you can map on the, these events that happen throughout this year user journey, and you might have 15, 20 or so really major events it's in your product or service is you.
Don't just name the event. Here's what you can do is you can actually break it down into three parts. Every event has an action from the user. It has what the user is thinking. And thirdly, it can have what the user is feeling. Now, this is fantastic. This is really good stuff, because this is where you are totally compelled to understanding and empathizing with your user.
And if you can map that well, that's great. That's good for a start, but what you will also find is mapping the, the thinking the actions and the feeling of your customer is something that it's not like a set and forget these things change over time because your [00:11:00] product, your service changes over time.
The mood, the social context of any given product will change over time. So it should be returned to constantly this. Is the absolute key thing. If you can do these maps well and accurately, then what this is a proxy for is you get it, you understand your customer. And frankly, if you understand your customer, it's sorta becomes a lot easier to build solutions to their problem.
Otherwise, it's just a lottery. You're just guessing. And we don't want to be in the guessing business. The business we want to be in is building products that matter. So I hope you've enjoyed this little journey into the user journey. It's a proxy for the bigger practice of design thinking, and you can find out everything you need to know about design thinking.
A bottom-up dot IO. We have a bunch of free courses there. Go there, just grab it all. It's all open source. Download it, use it convince your [00:12:00] colleagues to have more empathy for their customers to do great user journeys. Okay. That's it. For the bottom up skills podcast. That's a wrap.
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Using Rapid Prototyping for better product strategy
30 Haz 2021· BottomUp - Skills for Innovators
Hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast and Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance. And today we're continuing. Our series on my favorite frameworks, my favorite tools for creating new products. And actually I have to say this one's all about rapid prototyping in this framework is actually by me.
Now I am a huge fan of rapid prototyping. It's so good in those early moments of creating something new, it can be so insightful to actually yeah. Create a prototype test that we'd use as get some very early stage feedback, so helpful. And this is kind of an emerging process and there's actually not a lot on rapid prototyping.
In fact, the guy that taught me to actually do rapid prototyping is Tom cheek. And he's like a guru, but outside of. Tom's work. There's [00:01:00] not a lot of documentation on how to do rapid prototyping and how to innovate through this process of rapid prototyping. So today I thought like let's add a little bit more into the universe about rapid prototyping, and we're going to dive into this five-step guide that I have for when you actually are prototyping.
And this framework is so powerful because I often find that people. Get super lost when they're prototyping. So I tried to create a little bit of a guide so that you can get the most out of what can be such a powerful process. So before we dive into this, a five step plan that I have, let's set the scene, let's define rapid prototyping, kind of get it into our minds a little bit.
And then we can look at this tool. So rapid prototyping is an amazingly good way to test and validate. Yeah. Idea a notion. It could be a product, a service, a business is a great way [00:02:00] to test it before you actually have to build it. And that's the big aha. Here. You don't have to build an entire product before you test.
You can test from day one and it's particularly good way to learn. That's using rapid prototyping. That is, it's a really good way to learn. And I would say the kind of foundation of rapid prototyping is to solve a problem that your user has. And it becomes a very clear almost binary black and white perspective.
You know, where are we able to relieve the pain for the user create gains for the user super clear it's sort of did we, or didn't we. You can argue a little bit in the middle there, but does the product, does the service get the job done? And here's the key thing I want to come back to. Rapid prototyping enables you to get really good feedback, really high quality, because you're not guessing.
You're not saying to people, Hey, I want you to imagine that you're using [00:03:00] a particular product or service. You go right to the moment. Say here's a product, here's a task. I want you to complete and see if they can get it. It's quick and it's easy. It's super straight forward. Now the, the art to rapid prototyping is making it feel like it's kind of close to a finished product, but it's actually not to put it in software terms.
How can you get good software feedback without writing code? That's like a really good way to think about it because as soon as you have to write code for it, As soon as you think about an analog product, as soon as you have to actually get the materials, get all the engineering, the bill of materials together.
Like once you have to get it all together, it starts to become slow, a lot of effort, time, money, resources. So here's the thing you only want to deploy time and resources into a software or an analog product. If you know, it's worth building. [00:04:00] And how do you know if it's in the earlier days? Like you're only guessing, right.
So how do we get out of this guessing how do we get into knowing? And that is by creating an experience that feels like it's sort of a model, a prototype an example of a product and how it might work. And what you want to do is you want to test it super early on and actually. If you're bold enough, you should test all the time with your users because that means you'll be learning.
And the more you learn, the more you understand your users, it's like, it's like magnetism. You just can't help, but going towards the right path. And too often, people sit there and guess a product deploy all these resources only to work out. It kind of sucks. Nobody likes it. Well, you don't have to do it like that.
You can just prototype your way to a great product. And sometimes in fact, [00:05:00] all of the time you'll have to change your idea, but you're not changing because you feel like you're changing because you're learning something from your users. You're getting this feedback, you're getting this data, you're getting them to truly test something.
Complete a task and Hey, maybe they complete the task and you realize there's more tasks in the overall user journey. Great tests. Those maybe you realize you're trying to solve the wrong problem. Also. Good. I mean, think about it. If you realize your product is not right, which is guaranteed by the way, it's going to happen.
Wouldn't you rather work it out when it's just a lightweight prototype. Rather than like the full finished thing. I mean, think about the pain suffering of a year or two years of work to build a project only to realize, well, ain't nobody liking that we don't want to be there so we can use rapid prototyping to create these light models.
[00:06:00] And here's the critical thing. You must test it with users. Don't go guessing don't go guessing. Don't assume people will want it. You need to know that they want. Okay. Now, before we get to this five step plan, then I'm going to give you for rapid prototyping. I want to set the scene. I want you to imagine you've said yes to rapid prototyping and yes.
To doing it with your real users. Okay. Not just family and friends, but come on, let's get the real users, people who might pay for this product. Okay. So you've got them, you've got the users in a room. You got a cool bunch of smart people who want to build something. Really good. We're in a good place right now.
So what do we need to do? I'm going to take you through each of these five steps, and now if you're interested in them, you can head over to bottom-up dot IO, where we have a full master class on rapid prototyping. We will even have this very five-step plan in that masterclass. It's all yours. You can [00:07:00] download it, use it, go for it.
So what I want you to imagine right now is you're in the room and you're like, okay. Wow. What happens now, we're a bunch of makers and creators, and we're a bunch of customers. What are we going to do? Well, you sit your customers over to the side. And as a group, you need to start by understanding what. Is the real pains that your customers experience when trying to get a particular job done that job might be to study effectively.
It could be to save money while shopping. These are all jobs that people are trying to get done and they experienced pains and gains along the way. And new products and services offered. Relieve pains and create new gains. And so what you need to find out is, Hey customer, what's on your mind. What are the pains that you're experiencing with a [00:08:00] particular job that you're trying to get done?
Now what's essential here is to make sure. That you actually go to your customer to understand their pains. You do not guess them now in a perfect world. If you're doing a rapid prototyping session, you may have done some pre-research before that day in order to understand the customer. However, that's cool.
If you haven't done that, you can even prototype this a moment to get to know the customer's pains and gains. So this is step one of the plan. This is understanding and. What I want you to do is free yourself of all your bias and just be very open-minded about what you might hear from your customers. In fact, I would also add to that be a little bit curious, like really, I really want you to kind of Be like Sherlock Holmes, you know, try and work out.
What's bothering them. So how do you do that? Okay. So this part, [00:09:00] one of understanding is you can do things like mystery shopping or what we call fly on the wall. You could just interview. Or go next level. Why don't you role play a scenario that they encounter? Maybe it's like let's say trying to optimize the service experience at an automotive dealer.
Okay. Well, imagine that you're bringing your car in for the service. I'm the agent and you're the customer. Let's go. You can do card sorting activities you can do is fun. Exercise called heaven and hell what's heaven. These are all ways for you to go, huh? The customer, Hey, we've actually engaged our customer to understand their problems and what their pains are.
That's all you're trying to do. You don't have to get the answer to the problem yet. Okay. So what you might then do is go to this next. So you've done your understanding. Now you can go to your Ida. [00:10:00] You can ask yourself, okay. What's quite clear. They have this massive problem. When they go to the car dealer that once they put the car in, I'm just coming up with an example here.
They have three hours of dead time. What do they do? Yeah, it's not like the shop. No, it takes me two going together. I don't have my car. So like, there's a really big problem. They have, they have this dead time when they've put their car in for a service. Okay. Well, what if we could make it instant instead of three hours?
Or you might say something like, how might we make those three hours? Great. What would we, what needs to be true for that to be a delight, something that they look forward to. Okay. So I'm now just using this car dealership exercise, just as a simple way to show you how you might ideate. So you break out in, into group, do some ideation.
Now you get to stage three. So you've done understanding and ideation. You need to decide which of these scenarios you're actually going to prototype [00:11:00] and you might look for, and this is where you're getting a little bit more critical. You're getting a little bit more practical now and you're saying, okay, what might be the quickest to make, or what might be the most impactful for you?
Okay. Now there's lots of suggestions in, in our chart that you can get at bottom-up dot IO. Just go to the rapid prototyping masterclass. I'm just giving you some of my fives. Okay. So we're kind of three steps in here. We've understood the customer. We know their pains. We've ideated how we might relieve them.
Now we've had, we've got like a whole bunch of ideas up on the board. Okay. We've got to pick. Be critical. Be practical. Okay. Then you need to build it. You might build, this is step four. You might build a poster storyboard, a user journey map. You might bring up some content, maybe one or two little features.
If it's the first time it's probably in paper. You certainly don't want to be writing any code. And what you need to think of. Okay. What's the task. And what is the experience that we're going to build and you need to match them all up. [00:12:00] So you gotta be productive. You need to often have create some really clear roles here like who's doing, because the key thing here is you want to do this as quick as possible.
So you can test hundreds of times because actually this is like the 10,000 hour rule. You just got to test a lot and you'll start to see all the patterns. Okay, so step four is building. Okay. So you've built a prototype of transforming the car dealership. So this experience you're super excited. What do you do now?
Step five, you test it and you go to the customer and you create a scenario. Hey, it's 10 o'clock Saturday morning. You're at your local Ford dealer. You're bringing your car in for a service. Okay. What we want to do is we want you to really enjoy the next. Period is three hours of the service experience.
And we're going to create a, your goal is to pick an experience that you'd like to do for three hours. So you give them a clear set of context and a scenario and a task, and [00:13:00] you test it. I mean, I've tested crazy things, algorithms the finish line of a marathon, race banking experiences, and everything in between.
So you can really, you really can't. Everything. And once you've done it a lot, you can even say to users, Hey, well, you enjoyed this experience. The next customer that comes in, rather than me, the prototype, I explain it to you. You're a customer. I want you to advocate to this customer that's coming. I want you to advocate to them the experience, and I'm going to learn how you perceive the experience, super powerful stuff.
So then you have a five steps for rapid prototyping. You understand? Then you ideate and you've got to decide which idea you're going to try and solve. You, build it. Step four and step five, you test it with real users, get their feedback, set the scenario, set the task and watch it play out, listen and learn from your customers.
It's all about empathy, which is a cornerstone of prototype. And design thinking and those all come together to kind of be this system that we've created [00:14:00] called bottom up innovation. And you can use it too. So if you're interested in bottom up innovation, if you're interested in rapid prototyping, head over to bottom-up dot IO, where you can do the masterclass on rapid prototyping, where you can unlock the power of your creative.
All right. That's it for the bottom-up skills podcast. That's a wrap.
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Using Full Marketing Funnel for better product strategy
15 Haz 2021· BottomUp - Skills for Innovators
Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance and we are now in our second installment of this series where I highlight. My favorite product strategy tools. And this one we're going to use the full marketing funnel sometimes called the growth marketing funnel.
It has all sorts of nicknames, but you get the gist is all about the marketing funnel done completely a to Z. Now, the reason that this matters so much is that traditional marketing is often obsessed with just the very top of the funnel, you know, sort of customer acquisition. So. The key thing that traditional marketing is all about is reach and frequency, blasting the message to as many people as many times as possible.
However, what we've seen the emergence of is a fully integrated entire funnel approach, which has been really brought by this [00:01:00] kind of movement around growth hacking growth marketing. And what it does is it follows the whole user journey. Completely. And what it does is it focuses on the conversion between the steps.
So not only are you looking big picture, very broad, but then you also go deep, which is what's so great about for marketing funnel. As a tool is you get really into the nitty-gritty of conversion optimization, testing and validation. So. The reason this growth marketing funnel matters so much, is it really helps you go way beyond traditional marketing to ensure that marketing is contributing to a healthy business.
It really dives in and tackles. The question of is it cost effective the way we're acquiring customers right through to the viral coefficient. That is how many [00:02:00] times your existing customers. Refer to new customers. How many times they share the experience and become your greatest advocates. So what at the heart of this is going to happen at the very heart of a growth marketing funnel will mean that marketing people not only get the customers in the door, but they can make a dramatic contribution to the very product.
Itself. And I think this is enormously powerful because let's be honest, the marketing people and the product people haven't traditionally hung out throughout the entire industrial age, it tends to be marketing, build the product and they knock on the marketing door and said, Hey, you better go launch this quickly.
Go find me a customer for this problem. This solution. So what I want you to do imagine that this growth marketing funnel really steps up the game for them marketing. This is how marketing can really contribute way beyond customers and [00:03:00] actually really be a central hub of a thriving product, service or business.
Okay. I've set the bar pretty high haven't I, well, let's go through the six main parts of the funnel, and then let's look at this as sort of the thinking behind each. So the funnel starts with three A's and ends with three R's. This is when you put it all together, it sounds like are. And that's why it is sometimes called pirate metrics, which was a name famously given by David McCullough.
Let's have a look at these three A's and then these three RS at the very top of the funnel is awareness. How many people recall no are familiar with your name and brand, then there's acquisition. That's actually having some meaningful, inter direct interaction with them. Then you need to activate them, which is all about getting them activated in the door of your store.
Trialing [00:04:00] testing. Experiencing some product or service. And then there's a question of revenue and retention, pretty self-explanatory. And one of the key ones, one of the most neglected ones is referral. How often they go out into the world and say, you must try this product. Okay. So awareness acquisition activation, top half of the retention revenue referral, bottom half of the funnel, we're in a good place.
Okay. Let's look at it. Questions that fundamentally get to the essence of each of these. This is the question that leads to the source of improving your conversion rate. So again, what is the fundamental question here? How many people do we reach? Are we getting just is the top of the funnel wide enough?
How many people know us? How many times did we show up when we're indexed on Google, against our given practice? Yes. Acquisition. How many people actually let's use a website as an example? How many people actually come to [00:05:00] our website? So if it gives zillion, people know about us, but our website traffic's really low.
We got some improvement. In acquisition to do. There you go. That's the model starting to work here. Let's go to activation. How many people take the first important step in the relationship with us? Providing an email address right through to a trial or a money back guarantee, starter package, whatever it is now, if you're hugely famous, getting a ton of people to the website, but very few people are activating.
There becomes your focus, elegantly simple, super clear, and really a great way to ask yourself, are we maximizing our opportunity? Then we kind of shift into the thinking the three R's about, are we taking full advantage of the customers that we're acquiring and the customers that we're activating. So, first of [00:06:00] all, it's like how many people are using our product as second or third time?
I mean, this is a key and a lot of startups might do a great job at that top of that funnel. A lot of enterprises could be the same here, but actually very few actually become very active, ongoing customers. You know, that you look at the classic example of this is you work really hard to get people to download your native mobile app from let's say the iOS app store.
You use it once. And then within a couple of months, it hasn't been using gets deleted. This is a very common paradigm in actually the native app universe that after 30 days, app usage decline to essentially a dozen or so key apps. And beyond that, people are not using very much at all. So are you retaining your customers?
Are they staying active then? There's the big Chestnut. How many people stopped paying and how much did they pay? [00:07:00] There's all sorts of great acronyms items you can use here. Cost per customer revenue per customer revenue per user. I mean, it there's a lot here. Key thing here is you could have a lot of customers using the free version of your product, but you're actually getting very few into revenue or you might have people locked in revenue, but the revenue is not growing.
As a, as a gross amount. If you look at on a per individual amount, you might. Have delivered one valuable feature product or service to a customer, but it may have, let's say is 10 10 euros a month, but maybe it's been 10 years a month for weeks, months, maybe years. That's the point that you say, Hey, do we need to like, you know, increase our revenue per user?
Do we need to like, Try getting them to upsell, cross sell. And lastly, [00:08:00] this is the final ask. So the other two eyes retention and revenue, now we get to referral and referral is all about your viral coefficient, the best companies on the planet take Revolut. You're probably seen them close to every customer.
They acquire those customers, acquire refer an advocate to another customer. So. Six big concepts, awareness, acquisition, and activation at the top of the full marketing funnel, retention revenue and referral at the bottom half of the funnel. If you focus on maximizing your conversion rates between all of these steps, you'll have a great thriving business.
You'll be on your way to some. Really good times and viability. Now, if you want to learn not only about viability, feasibility, or making your product extremely desirable, you can go to bottom-up God IO and you'll find everything you need as a product person, whether it's free courses on lean [00:09:00] design, thinking agile so much, we've made it all open source.
So jump into bottom up. You'll get everything you need to build a great product. All right. That's it for the bottom up skills podcast. That's a wrap.
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Using 5 Dysfunctions Pyramid for better product strategy
14 Haz 2021· BottomUp - Skills for Innovators
Hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance and we continue the journey into my favorite product strategy tools. Today we're getting into the five dysfunction. Other team pyramid, a bit of a mouthful, but this tool, I, I cannot tell you, I come back to this day after day, no matter whether I'm working with a big enterprise or a startup, the five dysfunctions of a team is some groundbreaking work from Patrick Lindsay.
Yeah. And it is the perfect guide on how your team should behave when they're going about creating an idea or whether they're building a product or anywhere in between. This tool is in dispensable. Now you might be thinking to your mind to yourself like Mike, you know, we've talked about growth, marketing funnel, great product to been talking about the lean hypothesis, the [00:01:00] value proposition, canvas, you know, that teamwork.
How is that so relevant to product? Well, what I would propose to you is that if you don't have a great team, if you don't have a tool that you can look at. That can provoke you and nudge you to think about the best design of your team. Not only on the work that they do, but how they do it, then it doesn't matter.
What other great design thinking or agile or lean frameworks they use. It doesn't matter if the team is no good. So this has been the huge breakthrough in the work that I've done over the last. Year or so is that you cannot really entertain product development, product discovery without looking at team design simultaneously the way in which we collaborate is a huge dependency of any good thinking.
You must have the right alignment connection. Trust [00:02:00] you must be cohesive. You have to be like a dream team. If you want to tackle big problems in the world and create solutions to it. So this is why we're going to look at the pyramid of the five dysfunctions of a team. Now, this is groundbreaking work that you can jump over to bottom-up dot IO and get a free copy of this.
Have a look at our agility in the digital age course, it's totally free. You can get a complete breakdown of the five dysfunctions of a team pyramid. I'm so. Delighted to share with you right now on the podcast, this tool, because I think it's informed not only how I build teams, but how I lead a company of over 250 people.
These themes come back time and time again. This is the key go-to tool that I use when I want to crack how to improve a team. When I want to support them to be the best versions of themselves and to do some great work. [00:03:00] All right. So let's do two things together today. We're going to talk about what the problems are and the good news is I've got solutions too.
So I'll give you the antidote as well, but we have to get a little dark here. We have to go into the valley of darkness. We have to look at some of the things that we've all seen throughout our career that happen on teams. All right. So teams that aren't doing well. Teams that are not producing the results.
They will have five common factors. Now this is built around the enterprise, this work frankly, you could easily apply this to sports teams and far beyond, but let's kind of cast our minds to our experience in the office at work. What would be the five things we could commonly use as a checklist, as the likely culprits of an underperforming team?
Well, [00:04:00] the, the first and foremost thing I would say to you is you've probably got an absence of trust. This is when you know, the politics are ruling the business. When it becomes a little dog eat dog, when people feel that there are members of their team. That are being selfish that are looking for personal advancement and putting themselves before the team.
That's what happens when you have an absence of trust, because to use a sporting metaphor. You've got to, you've got to believe that your teammates are going to be there when you're going to make the pass. When you're going to make the tackle, you've got to really just instinctively know, think about Michael Jordan and the bulls.
When they're at their peak, they were so good that Jordan could just pass it off to his teammate. And these teammates would make the shot because he trusted in them. That was the difference. [00:05:00] Well, it's just the same at work. And if there's an absence of trust, if your direct manager. Doesn't have your back.
If your peers are not wholly and heartedly supporting you, if you cannot be open, if you cannot have all of the kind of right conversations, it's often the central problem. Two teams. The one that occurs the most is this app absence of trust people, not being direct people, not being honest people. Not sharing what's really on their mind.
And as a result, they get a little defensive, you know, the ego kicks in. And so it's fight or flight. You see this classically in the tension between departments in companies, particularly large companies. So absence of trust, number one on this pyramid of five dysfunctions of a team. So what [00:06:00] happens if we've got this checklist teams underperforming, there's probably an absence of trust.
What else could there be? Well, for sure. Fear of conflict. That's right. People not saying not people not being able to give constructive feedback. People are not talking about the tough. Issues. So what happens is when there are not tough, but respectful competition conversations, when those conversations are not happening, it's what we call as a fear of conflict.
And the great problem with that is if you're not able to talk about biggest problems of the company, the biggest problems of your product or your team, then how on earth do you expect them to get solved? I mean, it's not magic, doesn't exist. So it's pretty wishful thinking if you're not going to have the conversation about the big problem, there's just [00:07:00] no way it's getting solved.
So that's the checklist. Number one, absence of trust. Number two, also very likely and very common, a fear of conflict, just not having the right conversations. Now let's get up into if those are the two big underlying ones, there's three other characteristics of the low performing teams. And I'll tell you what, they're probably, as a result of the first two, let's look at it.
Lack of commitment, number three. So let's say you've got a trusting team. That's having tough conversations, but they're not really aligned around a common go initiative. Desire outcome result, whatever it is, it's a lack of commitment. And if we don't know what's expected of us, if we don't know what we're trying to get done well, how, I mean, it would be a lottery to think that we're going to hit target if we're not even really committed to it.
Number [00:08:00] four avoidance of accountability. This one really comes if you're not committed to a target, if you're not having the, the, the, the really tough discussions, fear of conflict. If you're not trusting each other, I like, I don't know how anyone can be accountable with any of those underlying, so avoidance of accountability, if people are not prepared to say.
I dropped the ball. I missed that one. That's on me. Here's what I'm doing to fix it. Here's what I need your help to fix it. That would be great accountability. But often we see the fourth part of this pyramid is underperforming teams have an avoidance of accountability. What happens in the sporting field?
Classic blame the referee for a bad call? Well, what a great coach will tell you is if you lost by a point and let's say it was a bad call. It was your fault for letting the score be that close, or if do you use that's a common [00:09:00] mantra from bill Belichick, the coach of the new England Patriots, another great guy.
Charlie Munger talks about accountability saying don't be a victim, take responsibility for everything it's on. You. Because being a victim and saying, oh, it was somebody else. So judging somebody else, nothing good comes of there. And lastly, number five in these reasons teams, underperform and dysfunction is the inattention to results.
And this is a big one because as you can see, it's at the highest form, if you've set a big annual target or a big launch target, Whatever it might be. If you're not obsessed about achieving those results chances are, you're not gonna be totally going in a right direction. It's a bit hit or miss. So they have five big, big dysfunctions of a [00:10:00] team.
Let me give you just briefly what those answers are. How do you solve the absence of trust you as a leader need to be vulnerable. You need to show that it is safe. To be open and to be vulnerable, to say things like I screwed up, I messed up. I don't know the answer. That's vulnerability. That's how you build trust.
Because if you do it then your other teammates will follow with you. Fear of conflict actively go and consider every single idea from everyone do not shy away from inviting everyone to participate in the discussion of problems and solutions. Next one lack of commitment, be clear, set their expectations.
How are you going to reach the results? Be very clear. Get people on board. Number four, avoidance of accountability, have the tough conversations. [00:11:00] Lastly, inattention to results. It's all about talking about communicating the team goals and particularly in these last three. Tough conversations, setting expectations and goals.
Everybody needs to get on board and agree to a challenge to discuss and to finally own those results. Don't just tell people the goals. Don't tell people the expectations, invite them to be part of it too. So there you have it. Patrick, Lencioni's five dysfunctions of a team. It's a beautiful pyramid. You can get a copy of that at bottom-up dot IO.
Just take the agility in the digital age masterclass, and you'll be able to enjoy that. And hopefully like me, you will be able to refer to it all the time and you need to be looking at this from day one. From when you have that original idea, you need to grab it, hold it. Check it go back to this time and time again, and you'll be on your way to making a great [00:12:00] product.
The other thing you can do, if you want to make great products, head of it, a bottom-up dot IO, you can check out all our free courses, design thinking, agile, lean, you name it. It's all there. So you can make the very best products possible. All right, that's a wrap of the bottom-up skills podcast. We'll catch you next time.
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Using Lean Hypothesis for better product strategy
7 Haz 2021· BottomUp - Skills for Innovators
Hello. Hi and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast I'm Mike Parsons. And I'm the CEO of Qualitance and we are starting a brand new series today. We are going to focus on my six favorite product strategy tools. And today we're going to talk about using lean hypothesis for better product strategies. Now the lean hypothesis is one of, many of the goodies that come from the lean up lean startup practice.
So immortalized by Eric Reese. Now the hypothesis that comes with the lean practice is a concise product ideas statement that can actually be separated into individual parts. And those parts can be tested. I find this a great way. To be clear about a product idea. You know, when you're got that famous question from someone, Hey, what's, what's this idea you have for a product.
It's a great [00:01:00] way of being very disciplined and concise about the idea, because, you know, we can tend to rattle on a bit. But furthermore, what the hypothesis actually does is create these very discrete testable factors inside of the statement. So you can actually test each and every one of them. And a great way to kind of populate a lean hypothesis is to use another great tool from the lean startup practice, which is the value proposition canvas.
But because that one is so famous and yet I think the lean hypothesis is not used nearly enough. I would really like to focus on one of my favorite tools, which is this lean hypothesis. I really want to share with you how this is a great way of communicating your productivity, but furthermore, it is an insanely good way to tear it apart to test it, to validate it so that we can actually make a product.
Worth making. We can make a product that is not only desirable to its [00:02:00] uses, but it's technically viable and financially feasible. This is what we can do. So let's break down the universe of the lean hypothesis. So a formal scientific hypothesis. Is a precise testable statement of what you, the entrepreneur, the designer, the researcher predict will be the outcome.
And, you know, it's your best guess. But the real point here is that it's testable. So what you will find is that your hypothesis changes over time and it's the perfect way to enter into product development when you've actually validated your lean hypothesis. But in these early stages, it's like, there are so many possibilities with our products.
They could go many different ways, but for many different things, the hypothesis is a great, simple, [00:03:00] relatable way for us to all, to come back to this underlying premise, to test it and to make sure that it is truly validated wholly completely and totally. So the benefit of having a lean hypothesis is that it minimizes the risk because if you've done it properly, you've not only written your hypothesis, but as you probably starting to realize you've tested it too.
So therefore, if your development and design team start from a validated hypothesis, you've effectively got. Product, well, not product market fit. I would say problem solution fit on the way. So this means that the development can go faster. You can really hone towards product market fit because you've essentially defined problem solution fit, and you can get on with some of that fun stuff, building an MVP for the very first time.
Now, at this point, you're probably thinking. [00:04:00]Mike, what exactly is the hypothesis? Can you give us an example? How's it structured? Well, here's the good news. What I'm going to do is I'm going to break it down for you. And if you are interested to learn more about the lean hypothesis, you can go to bottom-up dot IO and you'll find that we have a whole course on the lean hypothesis, so you can become a master at it too.
All right, let's break it down. Now there's essentially, you know, some variations of a lean hypothesis that different people use. I'm going to take you through what I consider to be my go-to structure of a lean hypothesis. Okay. So. Let's establish the starting point. You have the desire to create a product or service brand new business, and you have an idea, a hunch, a notion about what it's going to be.
Here's a really good way [00:05:00] to structure it. The first part of a venture hypothesis should be to define a persona who is the user, who is the customer. And what problem do they face? That's the second part. Now that's really important because many different types of customers, many different types of problems.
So define a particular type of customer, that particular problem that they experience. I don't worry. I will come back to these, give you examples and some nuances on how you should do this, but let's go through the complete structure first. So we have the persona and we have the problem that they face. I find it very instructive today.
Then on the third point of your hypothesis is to define the current alternative, the current solution that they have to trying to solve this problem. And then the fourth part will be what we are [00:06:00] going to propose. What is our value proposition to that customer who are currently doing it a way, hopefully that way sucks.
We've got a much better way of doing it while our opportunity. And the last part, the fifth part is defining what we'll observe in terms of success metrics. Again, it should be specific. It should be relevant to this type of product. Okay. So we define a persona, a problem that they face current alternative, our value proposition and then success metrics.
So let me hit you with an example of that and we'll break down how you actually validate some of those particular testable items. So I'm just going to come up with an idea of like a lemonade stand and I'll explain it through that metaphor. So here we go. I'll read it all to your first and then we'll break it down.
We believe families are [00:07:00] thirsty when they come to the beach on a summer weekend. Right now they can only get coffee from a cafe. We will offer our refreshing artismal lemonade from our drink track. We expect to sell 500 units per day. That's it? That's the lean hypothesis, but what you will notice is.
Episona is families. Okay. We've even qualified that they have a certain problem in particular on hot weekend, summer days. And right now there's only a cafe offering hot coffee. Okay. Sounds like there's a big opportunity here. So we think that not only are we going to offer a refreshing drink, it's going to be specifically lemonade.
And I even threw in the autism. And will not only go beyond that. We'll say that it's going to be from a big drink truck. We're not going to go for a fixed store. And lastly, we've nominated 500 units. Now, each of these are testable items. You [00:08:00] could do quantum call surveys and interviews to determine where the families are.
In fact, the best segment persona. Is it weekends? Is it summer or testable? Now we say that the current alternative is getting coffee from a cafe. Well, what you would do is you go onsite, do surveys, do some observation to make sure that is in fact, the case, because you would want to go down there on the weekend and just check that there's not an ice cream truck.
That also has refreshments. So now you're starting to see each of these needs to be validated. Okay. Artismal lemonade from a drink truck. Well, what you might do is you might go down there with just a hundred units. From the back of the van and try and sell those. Can you sell regular lemonade or does it have to be artisinal do you, can you use a drink truck or maybe you use a trolley or a car who knows all [00:09:00] of these things can be tested through prototyping.
And lastly, we predict 500 units per day. Well, is that realistic? Is there 500 people? 500 families in this case, even at the beach that day, the point here is this hypothesis is extremely clear in what we hope the product or service or business to do. And what's so great about it is it's specific and then testable.
So you can use all sorts of yeah.
Customer interviews, prototyping. Pilot projects to test this before you actually build your big drink truck before you build the factory for autism lemonade. And as you can see that. It's very likely that you'll get different results. You might need to change it from families to young couples. You might need to change it from artisinal lemonade to Coca-Cola.
The point here is that I come [00:10:00] back to the lean hypothesis time. After time, I recently did the huge pot project for a global beverage manufacturer and at the heart of the practice for months and months. We continue to iterate and refine the lean hypothesis. This was the way we could all rally around essential idea.
So hop over to bottom-up dot IO, where you will find everything you need. About the lean hypothesis. We've got a great master class on that. And what I encourage you to do is to explore all the other free courses that we have there too on design thinking and agile and so much more. All right. That's it for the bottom-up skills podcast, that's a wrap.
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Revolut Promotion and Brand in 2021
1 Haz 2021· BottomUp - Skills for Innovators
Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance and we are coming to the fourth installment. Of our Revolut series here on the bottom-up skills podcast. And it is all about the brand Revolut. It's about how they promote and what is happening exactly in 2021.
So what's really fascinating is rivulets. Success in marketing really begins with the product itself. So together we're going to break that down and then they do great stuff throughout the journey. And it's really, uh, an invitation to participate in the Revolut experience. That's what all the customers receive.
It really does feel like a, uh, an invitation. So let's see what's next for the brand. And [00:01:00] let's see if they can conquer the good old us of a. So, as I said, it starts with product. When you think about marketing, when you think about this brand Revolut, it all begins in the product itself, and they have had this huge focus on transparency and speed.
And that's why customers love it. They get the basics right now. It is very hard. To kind of market your way out of the bad product, but if you have a good product, you'll be amazed at the share-ability the advocacy and the referral that you can get and Revolut have worked that out. So they definitely have this, um, Science, which is straddling both product and marketing thinking.
And what they do is every time you have an experience in app, they are using emails, real-time notifications and a whole assortment of [00:02:00] triggers to not only. Confirm what you've just done. So you know exactly your balance, the state of your transfer, but they're also triggering you to come back into the experience.
I mean, sometimes they're even offering you like, uh, games to play. I mean, whatever it takes, they're getting you in out and back into the product regularly and beyond just the digital app. When you go to the card. Particularly the metal card. It's beautiful. But when you go, even beyond that, the unboxing moment in the analog world is even a shareable moment too.
And I think this is the first cluster of ideas, great product. They've got some really good behavioral loops inside of the product and anything that is adjacent to the core digital product. They've really thought about cards, the packaging as being shareable moments. [00:03:00] And I would only challenge you to go, go back in life 10 years ago, and then, and still for many, the receipt of banking cards is a non event.
And Revolut simply challenged this idea and said, let's make it a shareable moment too, because it comes with status and delight and all those good things. What do we do? We get on the old Instagram, get on the Facebook, we share it. And that of course starts the marketing process. Now there's another thing that they've done brilliantly, which is they've created a lot of shared features in the product.
Think there volts split the bill, some of the travel experiences. These are. By default shared experiences. So what happens is you are not only inviting your friends that have the product into the Revolut experience, then naturally you're inviting those that are not customers to come. And [00:04:00] eventually they become customers too.
So once you're in and this is this big, um, sort of. Community experience that they drive for is they really involve the customer in many ways that traditional banks would not have even thought of. For example, you can participate in the naming of a feature. You can actually go to their offices and go to one of these things.
They call a rev rally. You can hear what they're doing. You can actually meet the people behind the company. Now, when was the last time you saw a traditional legacy bank behaving like that? Even better, they actually published their roadmap. So it's quite agile. So they've got like their, their agile roadmap and it's a Trello board.
You can go and view it, comment on it and make suggestions. And throughout your journey as a customer, you can participate in what they call their rev academy. So they are [00:05:00] delighting their customers, entertaining their customers. They're educating their customers. They're saying, come on, help us build this together.
And that's all off the back of a, of a great product. That's ruthlessly quick and transparent. They do this on the back of their great, a metal card on the back of their great packaging. So you can start to see how things compound and we'll talk in a little bit about, um, the kind of network effects that they enjoy.
The other interesting thing is the really recent news just in April. Is it, they launched a particular, uh, metal card with Anthony Joshua famous, uh, world champion heavyweight boxer. So this is a real step into big boy marketing. This is what you'd expect from global brands. This is what you would expect, maybe from some larger traditional banks.
So we'll return to that later in the show, but I want to get to this last. [00:06:00] Notion of how they do their marketing. They are definitely marketing throughout the funnel, because if you think of the top of the funnel is awareness at the bottom of the funnel is referral. And all of those steps in between, they are really optimizing conversion and particularly spending very few paid media dollars to get the job done.
That's what you can do when you have a great product. That's what you can do when your product by design puts the marketing inside. So customers go get more customers for you. So, if you look at one of their successful, um, starts, they actually said in the UK that they spent zero paid media dollars to get their first 1.5 million customers.
I mean, this has got to have anyone in the marketing world drooling and it's because they invite you into the product. And it's because that product is in fact great. That gives them the permission to do this. Now, if you were to use some more formal thinking around this, this [00:07:00] is what we call their viral coefficient.
This means how many customers does your existing customer recruit on your behalf? Now, many customers, um, Would think, man, I won't do this, but what Revolut does is it incentivizes you? So if you want to get a metal card, you can actually get a year for free. If you get five of your friends to sign up, it's a great example of how they incentivize that.
So if you look right now from 2017 to today, we're looking at a company that has generated 15 million customers. And that's a lot. And if you think about how little they pay for paid media, in fact, they've definitely had some times where growth hasn't been that quick. Like if you look from 2017 through to 2019, it's not particularly quick, but after a little bit of a plateau in 2019, things really took [00:08:00] off, then COVID hit and they had a few flat months, but actually this is really interesting.
As per sort of mid to late, uh, 20, 20 things got going and actually coming into 2021, here we are in May, 2021. And their growth is accelerating too. I think it might be the fastest growth they've ever experienced. Naturally big part of that is the fact that they are expanding globally, but this is, um, But they commonly refer to as their viral loops.
This is how they do it. I use all of these, uh, tactics that I mentioned from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel and it compounds. And I think you're going to find that net net, this could be a global company that can say their viral coefficient is one for one, every customer, they win brings a [00:09:00] new customer.
What a fascinating. Study what I mean so much to learn from this approach. Remember it starts with product, but however, there's still work to do, um, this Anthony Joshua Revolut X card, uh, they launched that, uh, well over a month ago now. And you know, I'm looking here at the YouTube channel, it's got 14,000 views, their formal announcement clip.
That same clip has 5,000 views on Instagram. So. I'm thinking those numbers don't look so crash hot and I'm not seeing much conversation about it. So it tells you getting into some of this traditional branding, um, influencer celebrity partnership. Doesn't look like the biggest success for them. So, Hey, look, work to do, but when you've got a great product and you've got marketing baked in, you can afford some time to learn how to get your branding, [00:10:00] right.
So Dave, you've got it. We've broken down the very heart of how Revolut has built a brand, how they are building and marketing a global financial services, super app. That's what they're all about. It starts with that great product. Then inviting the customer to participate the entire journey through, and then you can get some pretty amazing viral coefficients going.
Now, if you want to learn how to build a great product is one place. You can go bottom-up dot AI, and there you're going to learn everything. You need to build a great product to build a great credit team, to learn about design thinking and agile, all of those things. Bottom-up dot IO. And there you'll find.
Every think you could dream of all right. That's it for the bottom-up skills podcast. That's a wrap. [00:11:00]
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Revolut People and Culture in 2021
25 May 2021· BottomUp - Skills for Innovators
Hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance. And today we're continuing with Revolut. Yes, the FinTech giant, the neobank nemesis. We're you going to discuss Revolut people and culture approach here in 2021. Now the people and culture area for Revolut is probably the most significant area.
Of improvement. I'm afraid to say that the key executives keep on leaving and employee satisfaction is not tracking upwards. It's kind of down. So let's see if some of the new hybrid working and remote working and working abroad programs will give that employee culture that much needed [00:01:00] boost. Okay. So the very recent news from Revolut is that they're going to allow its employees to work abroad for up to 60 days.
And they've totally embraced, uh, hybrid working. Um, think about this, uh, over 50% of their staff would like to work in a hybrid way. 36% actually want to work entirely remote and wait for this only 2% want to come into the office every day. And this is getting to be a big deal cause it's over 2000 people worldwide.
And, uh, there's some big things, uh, at stake here for Revolut. I think the working abroad really fits the product and where the company comes from. So I actually love this idea, I think is really, really powerful. Um, they are famous for making travel and international money transfers easy. So it seems only natural that the company would be kind of borderless in how it thinks [00:02:00] about where and how the team can work from.
Not only working from home, but perhaps even working abroad. So I think this is a really interesting thing that could be great for the culture and as well, when you bundle in that hybrid working way, I think there's a chance that this could start to contribute to a higher employee satisfaction, but there's work to do.
Um, so what we have done is. As always, when we do our case studies, we actually dig into glass door and we have a look at seat. Well, what's really happening behind the scenes. Now it's not going to be the. Um, world's best way of reading the pulse and the culture of an organization you'd have to be working inside to truly know, but it's a pretty good indicator.
And I think we can get some directional ideas from this. So I want to take you through the [00:03:00] basic numbers. For Revolut on Glassdoor. This is where all their employees give feedback and to do so I'm actually going to refer to the stats as they are right now. And I'm going to compare them with what they were a year ago.
So we went to glassdoor.com and we had a look at what employees. Past and present. I was saying about the organization and actually it was a pretty decent school. So we got 3.9 out of five stars overall for the company. And 71% would recommend and 81% approved of the CEO Nikolai . Well, let's fast forward to today.
Okay. So those numbers were from a year ago. Let's have a look at today and ouch. It's like all of the numbers are down. So, um, the overall rating of the company is down from 3.9 to 3.3. So that's a 15% drop. [00:04:00] That's pretty big movement. Um, but the movement just gets. Bigger and to the downside recommendations down from 71 to 52%, that's a pretty big decline.
The biggest one is the approval of the CEO has plummeted down to 54% from what was 81% a year ago. This is really, um, surprising and pretty dramatic. Actually, when you think about a company, this size 2000 employees, um, of which there are five, almost 500 reviews. So this is a quarter of the entire sample.
So I think there's some big you're flashing lights here. There's flags, there's smoke signals coming out of here. Um, But let's look at what is it about this culture? That seems so tough. And look, I'm the first to [00:05:00] admit, you know, culture it's really about, um, leadership and vision and how you behave the symbols inside of the company and how you design the systems to serve and empower your people.
That's for sure. I think there's a lot of patterns inside of the data on Glassdoor that reveal what it's like at Revolut super fast paced. This came up in 22 of the reviews and look, lots of smart people, lots of learning. In fact, the reference to smart people came up 18 times in different reviews, but the negative signals are much stronger.
Work-life balance looks really, really. Poor. A lot of people are complaining of working 12 to 15 hour workdays and doing some work on the weekend and these long hours. Um, I think it's starting to create some real doubt in the eyes of the [00:06:00] employees. 20%, sorry, 20 of their reviews in the, um, the current Gusto talk about no one really caring.
And, um, this, this is just. Obviously, um, a call for help. Now you have to think to yourself, well, there were some signals of the pros and cons this time, last year. So nothing really has changed there. The signals are just getting stronger, so that shows a lack of change. So whatever changes have happened thus far I haven't worked.
And what I would offer you is that my deduction is that. With such a particular type of work style, how they think, how they work, the culture. I think their candidate screening is the problem. And what I mean by that is this is a pretty intense workplace and they should screen their candidates.
Accordingly. And so they're obviously [00:07:00] not doing that because people are coming in and turning right back out again. There's a lot of commentary about people staying for a year and then jumping into other jobs. It's sort of a launchpad job. So there's some really big signals here. Um, and, um, whilst no company is perfect, um, it's going to be really interesting to see what Revolut can learn from this employee feedback and whether they can create a more balanced work-life that retains they're good people.
So will this working abroad, will this hybrid working model improve the employee satisfaction? That's what we have to find out. That is the question at hand. And my last thought here is that as the company grows, this challenge will become harder because the group of employees will be larger. The different marketplaces jurisdictions in which people are working will be more so [00:08:00] when you're all, you know, when you're 20, 50 people in one office, ah, that one's pretty straightforward.
You can see everyone, you can just grab everyone and put them in a room. And, and really work on problems, however, this, and this is a great proxy to their overall company challenges. Can they scale, can they go from being really smart, uh, payment solution or really smart, uh, transfer international currency solution to being a proper bank?
Can they go from being big in UK? To being big globally. Can they, uh, have this really strong commitment amongst the founders and can that trickle down throughout the entire organization? Because right now they continue to lose key executives. Their global head of marketing just left their global head of growth, just left.
It keeps on happening. So. Lots of challenges and I'm not betting against Revolut far from it [00:09:00] because we know that they've got a great product. They, we know they're onto something, but if they want to realize their vision, which is to be a global financial app, it's not only the product that needs to be good.
They need to have a viable business model. So they got to make freemium work. They've got to actually have a brand that builds trust and people recognize huge amount of work to do there. And lastly, as we look at all of this, they've got to have a great culture. They've got to nourish their employees and keep that talent, grow that talent.
So. Let's see if they can do it. Meanwhile, if you want to learn how to build great teams or build great products, just head over to bottom-up dot IO, we've got a ton of free masterclasses. Try them, enjoy them. It's all open source. Go for it because we want you to be a better product person. All right.
That's it for the bottom-up skills podcast. That's a wrap. [00:10:00]
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Revolut Product User Experience in 2021
17 May 2021· BottomUp - Skills for Innovators
Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance. And today we continue our journey into the world of Revolut. Yes, the FinTech, the Neo bank that seems to be conquering all. And today we're going to look at the user experience from its product. Are they delighting customers?
I wonder, are they serving each and every user? Are they doing it right? These are the questions we're going to ask. Now, the starting point here. Is that they do indeed provide a user experience, which is super fast, very snappy interface, easy, and boy, the features they just keep on coming. They are adding features at a prolific rate.
So you and I, we're going to dive into what users actually love about the [00:01:00] Revolut product. And we're going to learn what best practices we can take out from. This banking customer experience. We're going to see what we can use when we build products to now, the first thing I want to do is set some context because the Revolut story is quite simple.
When we come to product, it's just doing the basics right now. That's not particularly revolutionary or earth shattering, but in the context of banking, it most certainly is. Let me give you the proof just to compare what people really think about this product, what the customer experience is really like for Revolut.
I've gotten competitor to one of the better legacy banks in the United Kingdom. Buckeye spank. And what I did is I thought, well, okay, let's go find a really large number [00:02:00] of reviews for both in the same platform. And so I went to Trustpilot very good, a customer review application, and I compared. What over 5,000 people had to say about Barclays and then over 70,000 people, what they had to say with Revolut and the numbers just don't align.
Barclays can only muster our 1.5 stars out of five. So we're talking about an incredibly seasoned, traditional legacy bank. Huge incise. Yeah, customers rate it so poorly that Trustpilot has these different categories for the number of stars that you have. And Barclays with 1.5 stars out of five, they are in the bad category.
[00:03:00] I mean, what a travesty that a bank of their tenure, a bank. That is so institutionalized in the United Kingdom and abroad. Yeah. They can only muster at 1.5 out of five Revolut. On the other hand, I mean, huge number of reviews, 79,000 that already tells you something 4.3 average category. Excellent. And I think I've, I've chosen two reviews that I think expose the story behind, after sifting through them all.
This is what I want to share with you. Here's one. This is by a reviewer in the United Kingdom. His name is Chris packer. He gives Barclays one star out of five and his headline. Is avoid Barclays, if you can. I mean, this is when your customers go into what we call [00:04:00] detract mode. They're not neutral and they're certainly not advocates.
They are detractors. They're advocating against you. He says in his review, avoid Barclays. If you can, I've had numerous problems with Barclays, including having posts sent to the wrong address, access being denied, online banking and infuriating telephone banking system. Well, I mean, sending posts doesn't sound like too, how to thing, sorting out access denials to online banking, you know, with all the passwords and security procedures, that's kind of cost of entry for any bank these days and a telephone banking system.
Like, come on guys, telephone's been around a century now think we might be able to get that right. But on the other hand, Here's a review that I got from this, this person's called G fan 2015. And he says in his review of Revolut, [00:05:00] of course, Revolut is a great product, as long as you don't hit a snag. Hmm.
Okay. So this is interesting. The moment you're facing issue, there is no way to resolve it quickly. And he goes on to explain some of that. So it's interesting. Isn't it? Just the difference there, even though, I mean, I deliberately chose this Revolut one, which wasn't all strawberries and cream, but what it did say is I'll take you back to this.
Of course, Revolut is a great product and that's why we can learn so very, very much. What is astounding to me? The actually Barclays isn't the worst customer experience in the United Kingdom because we have done a lot of work studying the UX of banking report by Peter Ramsey, where in the UK, he studied the experience and measured the customer experience throughout the UK banking system.
And barcodes actually was kind of one of the better. So I [00:06:00] really don't want to experience the worst there. So this is the context of why getting the basics is so innovative. It's so new in an existing category. So the story here is that legacy banks just get the basics wrong. It's not fast, they're not transparent about fees.
And some of their basic features like hello, telephone calls. They can't get those touch points. Right. And the truth is that Revolut gets the basics, right? Super fast product, very transparent about fees, and they just continue to add more features. But if we step back, there's still so much opportunity.
Whether it's for Revolut, Barclays or some other neobank or FinTech, you can see that it seems like everyone stumbles, when you have a particular what we call in the industry, like an edge case where there's some unusual characteristic that blocks our user journey. Both banks seem [00:07:00] to struggle with that.
So there's the opportunity. So Revolut has got even further to grow and I think the gap for Barclays and other legacy banks becomes larger. Okay. So let's take now a snapshot and a check-in on what are the features that they actually include in their product? Well, money transfers. They seem to be the gods of, and.
What's really important on the back of a transfer or a payment is that you get instant, real time notifications and analytics. It's really important that if you study the customer experience, people hate the fact that they have to sometimes reload, close their account and reopen it to get the new balance.
Okay. So that's really good. Essential again. Revolut does it. Well, many others do not. And of course they've Done a great job on bill splitting. They've opened up into cryptocurrencies and they're doing this now across many markets, such as [00:08:00] Japan, India, and the U S they're really charging for some global expansion there.
I'm talking about being overseas. I mean, handling currencies and transfers in different currency seems to be one of their great strengths. It's it really is exceptional when compared to the. Rest of the market. And of course there's lots of other features that help you manage your money. I want to focus on one feature in their product.
I think it tells a little bit the story of Revolut and why their customer experience is so good. So the way back in April, 2018, they launched volts. Volts are a special little area that you have. It's a, it's a little envelope where you can put your savings into. And these little volts are really interesting.
It's a beautifully, simple idea. It's like a, a little savings area and here's the interesting thing. The [00:09:00] saving features are personal. All four groups. So you can chip in with your friends and check this out. Since they launched it, there have been over 4.5 million volts created by users. There is 6,000 new volts created each day and into those volts, the Revolut global user base has saved over $2.5 billion.
How good is this? This is a great example of not just being someone that holds onto your money. What Revolut is showing us with volts is by understanding the user and their end goals, a trip to Japan, to Mexico, maybe saving for a wedding, or just paying the bills. They will help you get it done. And this is where they can build so much trust.
And imagine if they get a charter and licensed to be a [00:10:00] full fledged bank across these markets, it would be incredibly powerful because their user experience is far. Better than the industry. And that's why they've grown to over 15 million customers. And it's not only with consumers, the Aleuts product is rolling out.
Those features, they're getting into the business side of things. So just. In less than the last six months, they have launched a bunch of new features. They're allowing businesses to, to run on Revolut. Of course, they've now got QR codes for socially distance payments. They've got a new expenses product they've got, and this is really interesting.
Two other things I want to talk about the ultimate freelancer plants. So usually. Going from this, this kind of mass growth freemium model. This is one of the most successful models for fintechs neobanks, usually these [00:11:00] which is a complimented by a different way of thinking where you kind of go after just a local market or perhaps a segment of customers.
What Revolut are doing is they have built the ultimate freelance plant, which serves. The growing number of freelances who are perhaps working from home or they're digital nomads. So they are not only going for the mass freemium model, but they're also starting to cater to particular segments such as business, such as freelances.
They have even built a plugin for the very. Popular WordPress till called WooCommerce WooCommerce commerce helps you create an easy shop, do E business to retail on your WordPress website. And the reason this matters is WordPress makes up well over a quarter of all websites on the internet and built with WordPress.
And so Revolut have created this gateway that enables you to use Revolut as your payments engine. [00:12:00] Really interesting stuff. So no doubt. They're innovating. I will say the one word of caution here is. That they are becoming bigger and bigger, and they're doing more things than just focusing on international money transfer.
This could be their opportunity, but it could also be their greatest challenge. And coupled with the fact that they are going to have to move more customers to paid, can they sustain their growth? Can they achieve a viable business? Because they've given a lot of way to their customers and that's afforded them the growth.
The real question is can they actually convert. I mean to premium. So I want to talk about some of the homework I want to give to the team at Revolut. They are definitely going to have to find a balance as they transition more of their value into their premium features. This is really, really important.
They're going to have to really think about how they're going to operate, whether it's going to be as a full stack or whether it's going to be as a front [00:13:00] end bank. They are going to need a banking license and charter. If they want to have the most viable customer relationships, if they want to increase total revenue per user, they're going to need that because then they'll be able to offer the full deposit guarantee and offer a full range of credit and debit services across all currencies.
And without a doubt a lot of people do complain when little snags hit. So taking you back to that review that I started at the beginning of this episode, when people get frozen out due to security reasons in their app, this seems to be a bit of a nightmare for the user. So. Homework for Revolut to do there and all in all.
When we do see users having errors that go outside of the normal, we are seeing a lot of negative feedback about customer support. Sometimes the chat takes too long. Maybe the chat doesn't get answered so [00:14:00] homework to do, but wow. When we look at this product, we can see. At Revolut truly has done the basics.
Right. And they have been able to grow by just doing the basics. Right? What a powerful lesson that we can take from Revolut. And I hope all of you are now with a little bit of inspiration and some practical advice on how you can build great products, too. Now talking about building great products, you can go to bottom-up dot IO and we have a ton of free courses.
We have design thinking, agile lean case studies and Revolut. Lots of FinTech presentations. Get on over to bottom-up dot IO. It's all free too. Open source so you can learn to make better products. All right. That's it for the bottom upskills podcast. That's right.
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Revolut Growth Strategy in 2021
10 May 2021· BottomUp - Skills for Innovators
Hello and welcome to the bottomup skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance. And today we're talking about the growth strategy of none other than Revolut. I mean the guys at Revolut, they are a pretty clear leader in the Neo bank slash FinTech market. So we've done a lot of work stuff, being how they build product, how they build teams.
Got a great study, uh, on our website at bottom-up dot IO. So check that out. But today, We're going to revisit their growth strategy. We're going to do a 20, 21 update. We're going to get the latest and we're going to see what we can learn from their journey. We're going to dig into some of the new product features.
They have, how they're expanding in different markets. And we're going to ask ourselves, are they up for the [00:01:00] challenge? Can they transition into doing more than one thing? In the face of really fierce competition. I mean, it's getting hot in here, so let's dig into it. Okay. So quick snapshot on the growth of Revolut and boy, I got to say, I gotta hand it to these guys.
They've got some pretty serious growth going on. Let's start with customers. Now, uh, proceeding, uh, 2020 and all things that are COVID, we saw them ramping up pretty nicely. So from about early 2017, up until early 2019, they went from zero to about 6 million customers, not bad and, um, good growth. Um, and you know, did that across a couple of markets too.
So. They didn't kind of line for a while, um, in 2019 and then kind of go going again [00:02:00] and then they hit another flatline, um, which was, uh, obviously no surprise there. February, March 20, 20, things really slowed down. Sort of at about the, um, roughly about the nine, eight or 9 million Mark, but all credit to these guys because, um, as things kind of calm down a little bit at the back end of 2020, and as we look right now in April, 2021, they have hit 15 million customers.
So if we step back just a little bit, that's 5 million customers, um, Since that six Mark and well beyond. And actually they've done this only since 2017, so it's not even funny five years. So, you know, they've roughly been growing at about 3 million plus customers a year. Um, so the growth is pretty exceptional.
[00:03:00] Now, if we now kind of move across to their evaluation, this is what they're worth to investors. They have previously raised, um, 5.5 valuation that's $5.5 billion in their series D round. So you're getting pretty late in the investing game year. You're not too far off IPO and, um, their last and most recent round, they came in at 5.5 billion, which, uh, Is interesting.
Cause that was probably, uh, somewhere in the space of, uh, eight to 9 million customers. So you can do the math there to kind of work out the value per customer. The interesting thing is because they've grown so much since that D series round of investment, the rumor is, and it's, this is hot off the press.
This is literally just a few days old is that they are talking. Uh, two investors again, and they are looking at more than a 10 billion valuation that's [00:04:00] post-money valuation. So if you want to look at growth, you know, it's the classic startup gain, lots of customer growth, lots of growth in the valuation.
So as a snapshot, 50 million customers, Roughly 10 billion valuation. That's solid. That's really, really solid. So good on them. Now the question is, you know, they started off being brilliant at like sending money to your friends, maybe, um, you know, currency when you're on holiday. That was certainly the kind of.
Early adopter, innovator segment. They went after they got that growth. But now, uh, it's really interesting. Um, next Darren AUSkey, uh, CEO and co-founder of overload recently kind of shared the, what they think their, their mission is right now. And they're gonna, this is according to him and I quote. We're on a mission to build the world's first global financial super app.
[00:05:00] And, uh, that's pretty bold and heavy stuff. And a big tactic in that strategy is going to be getting a banking license in the U S and we're going to talk about that in a little bit. Another thing. That they've seen as they think about the U S and we think about their growth strategy, how they're going to grow the business.
Here's another interesting insight that they've shared, and it's about going after a new segment, the small business. So you got to remember, well, it's pretty famous for being a very consumer focused offering. So now they're going to stop moving across into small and medium businesses. Um, you know, the fascinating thing about that is that not only goes to.
Helping them with their banking. I think, um, I think you're going to see them, uh, do a full play here. Think about zero or QuickBooks, uh, for small business. I think they're going to, uh, I think there's a lot of clues that that's the way [00:06:00] they're going to play this. Uh, I've got, I've managed to do some research here and I've got another quote, uh, from Starsky that I want to share with you.
Uh, not only about small business, but how they're going to do it. He says small and medium-sized businesses are massively underserved in the U S and we want to empower them with tools to grow and scale globally. So this is sounding like Neo bank plus FinTech, plus I dunno, turbo boost. And then here is a really good thing.
He identifies. Um, some of the challenges that they face as tackling fragmented processes, high fees, and other banking, pain points, uh, we've built an end to end solution that saves business owners time and resources to focus on what really matters running their business. Now, nothing revolutionary here, but I always love it when a company is prepared to.
Listen to understand too, they [00:07:00] understand their customers and is really clear about what they face as a challenge. And we'll happily put that up as their mission. So quite clearly, if we want to think about growth, it's all about the U S it's all about small businesses. So let's break this down a little bit because it's not all like sunshine and, uh, balloons and party favorites.
So good news is for Revolut that they've applied for a banking chatter in the U S challenges. This thing takes forever and not everybody gets one. And it might not necessarily even, even if they did get it, if they, if Revolut gets a full banking charter, so they can operate as a licensed bank, that doesn't necessarily mean success.
And we'll come to some reasons why in a moment, but let's just kind of look at where the complexity here starts to come to the fore. And I've got this big [00:08:00] insight that actually. I think Revolut is about to go through its hardest period yet because they grew up being this challenge of brand. They did a couple of things.
One thing, particularly well with currency and money transfer between friends like this little niche, and now they've ballooned into 15 million people. And now they got to do a lot of things, a lot of different offerings from crypto to insurance, to banking, to credit cards, et cetera, et cetera. But they've also got to do that in a number of markets.
So they're obviously revving up in the U S they're they're revving up in India too, but here's an interesting thing. They have already launched, failed and closed in Canada. I just couldn't make any money, too many incumbent constraints, pretty close market, probably very similar to Australia. It's quite hard to shake up the financial market in Australia too.
[00:09:00] So isn't that interesting? Um, like they've already kind of basically said Canada, adios. See you later. So maybe they might have to do that in India, too. The reality here is the game is going to be so different for them in growth. The reality here is that they've got a big play for the U S and small businesses.
They've got a big play here for a banking charter, but here's the thing. They might not get that banking charter. And even if they do, there are plenty others that have one too. And this is a really new paradigm because this becomes very much about product differentiation in a competitive maturing market, which is something they're not used to.
They are competing with traditional incumbent. Banks legacy banks and fintechs. They're now moving into a more and more regulated space [00:10:00] with which they're not really that used to. So there's some pretty interesting things happening. So let's, let's look at this well, let's break down their challenges in the U S um, you know, chime and Vajra are the big leaders.
Who, uh, who've been, you know, operating and succeeding and growing in the U S for more than five years, chime, wait for this has 12 million customers in the U S at least they've also said, Hey, you know what? Banking chatter. It'd be pretty interesting. And Varo last August already got a charter. They're the first Neo bank to do so, and check out this Varo.
Doubled its users in 2020, they're there nearly 2 million accounts. And they're like this really early stage company Revolut doesn't even have a quarter of their customers and doesn't have the [00:11:00] charter and chime has 12 million customers. And they're thinking about a charter too. So the real story here is Revolut might be a bit late to the party there.
This strategy, which I talked about in the previous episode, they've played the, what I call the front end. Um, neobank and it B that they have realized that they need to be a full state bank, full stack bank, not working with partner banks. To do the backend of their banking because they don't have a license, but they actually need to go get those license, those charters, but a lot of other people have them already.
So this is a big strategic challenge that they need to do. Not just in the UK, not just in Australia. But in the U S and India, and many, many other markets across 15 million customers. Plus they've got the expectation from their exists, getting investors to make a lot of money when they go [00:12:00] IPO, this is a new paradigm for them.
This is the new challenge. They've shown that they can grow, they can build teams. So they have the capability to perform, to create high-performance teams, to build a great product. Something that customers love. The question is, can they come and have a second chapter here because this will be a more strategic, um, challenge.
And it will be, um, a challenge of the size that they have not seen before. This will be. Massive for them. So it's going to come down to people and culture. It's going to come down to leadership and we break all of that down in our case study that we did on Revolut, which you can get over at bottom-up dot IO.
Now I've just done a growth. I am going to dig into all sorts of other new product features. Things they're doing internally with their people, with their culture, how they're doing [00:13:00] their marketing over the next coming podcast episodes. So I'm really excited to share that with you. So I hope you stick around for this series on neobanks, fintechs and Revolut.
Okay. So if you're really getting into this kind of stuff, make sure you head over to bottom. Uh, bottom up.io. We've got design thinking, agile courses. They're all free or totally open source. So jump over there to bottom-up dot IO. Grab one of those courses. Uh, it's yours to use and enjoy. And of course, um, let us know if you've got any feedback, send us an email at skills at bottom-up dot IO.
I'd love to hear what you're enjoying about the podcast and what you'd like me to cover in the future. Okay. That's it for the bottom-up skills podcast, that's a wrap.
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How Fintech is Shaping the Future of Banking
4 May 2021· BottomUp - Skills for Innovators
Hello, and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance and we are talking FinTech. We are talking neobanks today. That's right. We are starting a brand new series. And in today's show, we're going to ask how FinTech is shaping up. How is it affecting the future of banking and.
You know, this FinTech industry, you know, pioneered and led by those big neobanks that you probably know like Revolut, uh, like Monzo, you know, all of those guys styling, chime. All of those guys, they've reached a really impressive size and they really acquired customers and got pretty impressive valuations.
So join me and let's take a bit of a snapshot of who's [00:01:00] leading this market. How are they doing it? What offerings. Are actually winning. And I think one of the big questions is how can they achieve both growth and profits. All right. So if you look at the global. Neobank and FinTech market. What's really fascinating.
Is this roughly about 26 companies who are leading a global charge? Of course, there's lots and lots of smaller niche or local players, but there's kind of roughly 26 that are shaping up to be the global influences. The ones that are winning in more than one market. And what's really interesting is when you look at the value.
Of all of these Neo banks, it comes to, this is their market valuation. It comes to $27 million. Huge, huge, huge, really, because it's an emerging market. It is, uh, coming into one of the oldest [00:02:00] industries in the planet banking. And the banking has been around since, uh, I think it was 14 hundreds, late 14 hundreds, a little bank started in Italy.
Um, if you think about such an incumbent. Such a locked-in industry. Pretech pre certainly pre-internet that already. We're looking at a $27 billion market and it's pretty impressive. And there's already more than 20 companies that are leading the charge on a global platform. So here's, what's really interesting.
As we study these in 2021, these neobanks, these fintechs what's what we really can benefit from now is that there appears to be sort of three models, um, that are the kind of growth strategies. That are being employed for success. So this is how neobanks are winning number one [00:03:00] and the biggest one and the classic one.
It's the good old freemium model. Um, so you'll, you'll know that, uh, you know, one of my, uh, Favorite neobanks Revolut. They have really led the charge there with this idea of the freemium model. So massively disruptive because you know, traditional banks, legacy banks love the Goodall, a monthly fee, and the neobanks have just thrown that out and said, no, come and get all your basic services for free and all the add-ons will be extra.
So that's the freemium model. So that seems to be a clear winning strategy for growth. The only interesting thing is some of the other players are coming with more multi tier, um, offerings, multi-tiered subscriptions, um, premium accounts. Um, and they're sort of really looking at what we call the upsell for the customer.
So this is really interesting because, um, a little bit different to, to freemium, but [00:04:00] really pushing towards subscription. And it's interesting that sometimes it's just a really beautiful. Credit card, physical credit card is enough to get that subscription. But it's interesting because now you see two very clear routes.
Do we go freemium, give away the basics charged for the addons or do we play for a subscription? That seems to be the two winning models there, but there's also a third and I would probably categorize this as the niche play. Now you either go niche in terms of your, uh, Demographics niche in terms of your geographies, um, or you might try and go for a very particular segment, um, gig workers, SMEs, uh, tradespeople, you know, all that kind of stuff.
So that's the third one. That's the niche play that seems to be playing out. So there you have it. Three models for success. Going freemium multi-tiered subscriptions and niche segment segments. [00:05:00] This is how these Neo banks and fintechs are really disrupting the world. And if you look at those roughly 26 global leaders, global players in, in their banking, they have acquired not only a big valuation, but between them, they have over 39 million users, uh, is a pretty substantial.
User base. Now, this growth that I've been talking about, and when you put it in perspective in just a matter of a decade, this huge marketplace has, has kind of come out of nowhere. Really. Um, the interesting thing though, is that acquisition of that many customers in such a short time, that high growth has come at the cost of low.
If. Zero profits. This is really fascinating because if you look at what a great product takes, customers need to love it, check it next. It needs [00:06:00] to be technically feasible. Well, that seems like a big check, but is the business viable? And I think it's really interesting that we're at the beginning of a process of a, kind of a new chapter where we're starting to see that neobanks have proven they can grow, but they haven't actually proven can they be viable?
And given the fact that so many of these are not publicly listed, we can't have a little peak in their, in their books and their accounts to see how things are really going. But it's. Unquestionable that they have sacrificed their profitability to grow. So they're really breaching the concept. They breaking the idea of viability because they cannot grow profitably.
They can grow like crazy. So this kind of creates a really interesting paradigm for this Neo bank. And I think the larger FinTech space is can they achieve both growth and profitability at the same time? [00:07:00] I think this is going to be a much bigger challenge than they realize, because of course what happens is they all become growth obsessed.
And then when you ask them to be obsessed with profits, that's a, that's a new mindset they've been growing at all costs. And I think if we just take a step back over the last year, we've seen some rather big, uh, high venture capital backed companies like turbo powered, uh, who were all about the growth fallen, a big heap.
I mean, Go no further than we were. They were just growing at all costs. And then when you said to them, Hey, it's time to actually make a dime, like be profitable. Uh, the whole thing fell apart. They lost the CEO. Every like the whole thing was a shambles. It was awfully public as well, but I'm not seeing that, you know, Neo banks and fintechs are about to go through that.
I think it's a bit early for that, but without doubt now, As the market matures, where you're [00:08:00] seeing that they are going to be forced to consider profitability, particularly if they want to go to the public markets in IPO. So if you're building this product, if you're building growth marketing teams, you're now going to have to do it.
Cost-effectively with a wait for it. Return on investment no longer can. They just rely on these huge amounts of cash. Coming from venture capital, coming from private equity. They really now need to. Become viable. And there's kind of two types of banks that are in this race for viability, because remember if customers desire the product, if the technology is feasible, you just need a business model that's viable and you have the Holy Trinity of product.
Right? So you've got full stack banks. Good example is Monzo in 26 styling. They actually went and got a license [00:09:00] and they operate a full, um, platform sometimes even offering, uh, an entire marketplace. That's why, what we call the full stack near banks. Now the front end focus neobanks. Are a bit different.
They don't have banking, charters, they don't have banking licenses, so they need to partner with others. Uh, so a great example of this is Revolut. Um, recently in the U S vAuto, uh, was the first Neo bank to get a charter. And, um, many others are now in a position where they need to choose a path to profitability.
Brutal, I think to prove out that they actually have a business that's not going to be acquired because without that banking license, the real question is, can you survive just being a partner with legacy banks or did they just end up acquiring them? What a fascinating challenge, right? Because if you go full stack, yeah.
Obviously, um, not only is your [00:10:00] tech platform, you've got to own operate, uh, payments as a service banking as a service. But what you also have to do is adhere to, to all of the, uh, fiduciary, uh, compliance responsibilities that you have as being the operating bank. Whereas the front end banks. As of now Revolut, for sure.
They're just partnering with others. So this is, this is really, really interesting. Yeah. Particularly in the bigger markets where it's not quite as easy to get a bank license as it might be in a smaller market. So this is how it's playing out. We've kind of got these full stack banks. We've got these front end banks and it's a race now to not only grow, but to do it viably, to do it with some profits.
So you will run into companies. Like chime like Revolut. Um, there's some other, uh, more interesting, uh, plays like transfer wise. They're fascinating because they're obviously coming at it from a slightly different [00:11:00] perspective. And you've got a few incumbents that are playing there as well. You've got ABN AMRO.
Um, a traditional, uh, Dutch bank that's playing in this neobank industry. And right next to them is Aden, which is a really successful, uh, neobank and payments company as well. So look at that. And then over here in Australia, you've got Commonwealth bank, enormous bank. Uh, you've got national Australia bank and Zed three huge banks, uh, from Australia, plus lots of others, um, that are really bringing the challenges.
Um, To the traditional legacy banks, but also I think with so many active players in the Neo bank and FinTech market. There's going to be a shakeout and it's going to be, the winners are going to be those that found not only desirable and viable products that made feasible products, but they made them viable too.
They could make a dollar, they could create and [00:12:00] capture value, which is really the ultimate test of a product that we need to build for our customers. All right. Well, look, I hope that's a really helpful snapshot of where the hell FinTech, where the whole neobank market is at. If you enjoyed that head over to bottom-up dot IO, where you can get our big, deep dives into design thinking, agile and lean, but we've also got a great case study.
On, um, uh, Revolut, we've got future banking, keynotes, and there's plenty more to come. We're going to do a big push on this journey into the world of Neo banks and FinTech. Alright, that's the bottom-up skills podcast. That's a wrap.
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Trend - Collaboration: With an Agile Mindset
26 Nis 2021· BottomUp - Skills for Innovators
Hello and welcome to the Bottom-up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance, and we're going to do one final deep dive on our trends report. We talked about four really significant trends. Those that really touched upon this notion of collaboration. And for the first time we really went deep in our annual trends report on this idea of collaboration.
What's interesting is we actually. We usually only touch on emerging technology and issues with very specific to technology or usability kind of hardcore product stuff. But this time we went broader because we feel like after 2020, and that whole work from home thing, like collaboration is back on the table, it's ready to be [00:01:00] discussed.
And so what I want to do is a special edition. Of the show for you today. I want to go deep into how we can think about collaboration. Let's take a moment to capture all of those ideas, reflect on them and see how perfecting collaboration is essential for creating an agile mindset in the digital age.
All right. I'm going to do a quick little context here before we look at the actions that we can take on collaboration. Don't forget. Here we are. 2021. We now have customers demanding Omni channel direct to customer experiences, but also on the other side, employees want to be able to work from home and have entertainer hybrid way of working.
So what happens is technology teams plug together all sorts of platforms from CRM, CMS, payments, ERP, you name it, everything's getting pointed together. And it's a little bit of house of cards that leads to complexity. And it's not only complexity from a platform. [00:02:00] Point of view. There's also complexity on the people's side because Hey, who's the systems architect who knows how this whole thing works together.
So what we have is this obligation to get technology into all the different touch points, to be everywhere for everyone. And it's hard, right? That's the pressure that product teams are under right now because they're serving more stakeholders than ever serving more platforms than ever. Stuff just got complex and it's changing real fast.
And that's why the agility mindset is the essential thing to have. If you want to survive in the digital age, in that knowledge worker age, otherwise you're going to get snowed down by all that complexity. So I want to now take a moment now that we kind of set the scene. We've got the complexity conundrum.
We know we have to be agile. We're going to get that tech under control, but equally, if, if you know another word for tech is all the platforms [00:03:00] need to be under control. Then it's also on the other side of things. It's the people who run that. Have to be under control, have to have clarity, have to have a lot of different things.
And one of the biggest secret ingredients for getting your technology and your products under control is to have people working well. And to have people collaborating, you know, for me, collaboration is when one plus one equals three. When two people get together, you get an unexpectedly good result. Like, wow.
Because two heads are better than one. So for me, that's, that's my pitch for collaboration, but let's look at like four key segments. It's almost a little architecture of collaboration. Let's look at what they are and let's look at what we can do in each of them to get our teams collaborating well. So they can be more agile so they can solve complex problems.
And Hey, in the end of the day, they can go out into the world and put a product that's worth building that [00:04:00] social problems for its users. Okay. So there's four things that I mentioned. Here's what they are. So if you want to collaborate, here's the magic four things that make up collaboration, alignment, learning, engagement, and connection.
So I'm going to dig into each of those and give you a quick recap on what you can do to get your team collaborating better. Number one, alignment. Well, for me, the saying here is to get the band singing the same song because actually one of the interesting things is every team, every business has a discreet unique way of working and thinking.
But actually I challenge you. Where is that written down? Just pause for a moment. I want you to think where have we written down in our company? How we think, what models do we use and how do we work? And what you're going to find is invariably, it's never written down. It's [00:05:00] not written down, it's just done.
It's just the culture of the organization. So this is particularly challenging. If you want to get aligned with new people on a team, There's no textbook to read. There's no playbook to pick up that says, this is how we think we use these to three different models and here's how we work. So if it's not written down, if it's through the doing, what are the things we can actually do to help people get aligned?
Well, what we discovered in our trends report is there's two big things you should connect and be with. Your fellow band members, your team members daily, do not enter the estimate, the power of daily connection. It's something that came up a lot in the report, but in surveys and interviews with all these great product experts from around the world, definitely industries daily get together.
So you might think about a standup or a scrum, or even just a sink. This is essential. The frequency [00:06:00] needs to be daily. If you want to particularly help new people. Understand how you think of work, or if you really want to kind of bring people back in the tent, as they say, you need to reconnect with them and to remind them of how we think and work.
Now, the other big thing that we learned is it needs to be guided. And what I mean by that is you need to do a bit of show and tell. But then you need to start transferring. So don't make the mistake of, Oh, I'll just do it. Cause it's quickest. Maybe you do it once or twice. Maybe you do it once or twice and then give a voice over to your colleague.
And then you might say, Hey, why don't you give it a go, I'll be right here. So if you want people to truly get it, how you think and how you work as a product team, then it should be daily rituals. With a lot of guided practice. There's no shortcuts here. I'm afraid. If you want to have people aligned, if you want to have them connected, there's no magic pill.
They can take it's daily [00:07:00] rituals with guided practice. That's how you get people singing. The same song. Okay. So that's alignment. That was number one, number two, the second part of the world of collaboration. So first of all, you're aligned now you need to engage. That's. The second piece engagement starts with putting your teammates before yourself serve your teammates.
And the first thing you can do there is welcome everyone. And every single idea that they want to bring to the table. Because if you want people to be engaged, this is actually where it starts and I'll show you how it works. So you need to drag, kicking and screaming people into the room and give them a voice, let them share their ideas.
Welcome them. Don't criticize don't judge celebrate the contribution, all people and all ideas are welcome. This is really fundamental. [00:08:00] Then once that has happened. And all the ideas are up on the wall, invite everyone to challenge those ideas, improve those ideas, own those ideas, because here's, here's the real secret with engagement.
If I've had a chance to challenge and improve the ideas about what we're doing, where we're going, how we're doing it. Invariably, because I've been heard, I will accept the direction we are going, even if I don't agree with it. Very important. So if I can challenge improve it, I will accept it. Even if it's not where I think we should go.
I was heard. I was understood. I was acknowledged, Hey, I don't win them all this one. I didn't get it. Hey, the idea is not too bad. I can, I can sign up for that. And if you do that, then your employees are going to be truly engaged because you're not telling them [00:09:00] the company's vision or your vision. You are sharing with them, their vision.
And they own their vision. They will uphold their vision. So that's how we get engagement. That's part two of the world of collaboration. Part three is about how we create real connection. And this is all about celebrating success, whether it's big or small personal shift, Oh, personal or shared, and it can be just the mere act of learning.
Of growth as an individual growth as a team, doesn't have to be always, Hey, we hit a home run, right? Maybe you only got to first base, but you grew together. You learn together. This is really essential. And in fact it's pretty good. Exhausting. If you're always just hanging out for the big wins. Cause sometimes you need a lot of small wins to get to the beach.
Sorry. If you want to celebrate growth, it's all about those learning moments [00:10:00] and share them for each other. And you know what. Celebrate your colleagues, growth and success before your own. And the key thing is to do it publicly. It's always best when it comes from a peer acknowledgement recognition is always best from those who are doing the work with you.
It means the world to them, and that's how you connect to a team. And that's how you create that winning team atmosphere. A fourth part of collaboration is learning. There's so much to learn, because look, think about it. If you're doing something that's worth doing, it's probably some unknowns. There's probably some stretch goals.
So Hey. We are all on a learning journey. Now, the important thing is you must put in the diary time to learn and you must learn to gather if you want to learn. Don't think it's just about you and the textbook and locking yourself in a room. Learn from others, get stimulation [00:11:00] inspiration from others. And remember this, the biggest insight of all was that we are all, both teachers and students.
So sometimes you're a student, even if you're the CEO. Sometimes you're a teacher, even if you're the youngest person on the team, because in the end of the day, we are all teachers. We are all students and we should be learning 24 hours a day, seven days a week is all about the rate of learning will bring you success.
Trust me. All right, this is the universe of collaboration. So let's just recap. Alignment, learning engagement connection are the four foundational activities of collaboration. So get everybody singing together, make sure that sometimes you're the teacher. Sometimes you're the student, embrace your colleagues and embrace their ideas to share the successes along the way.
And you will truly build a great team. And if you still feel like learning after all [00:12:00] that head of it to bottom-up dot IO, you're going to find a lot of free courses. They're all open source. You can learn design thinking, agile lane. So very much you can even get our trends report bottom-up dot AI. That's where you get pulled to fun and games.
All right. That's it for the bottom up skills podcast, that's a wrap.
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Trend - Connection: Sharing Success Builds Team Rapport
21 Nis 2021· BottomUp - Skills for Innovators
Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance and we are finally here at trend number eight, the end of our deep dive into the 2021 emerging trends report. And. The subject of today's show is connection. So the context of this is that if we're going to collaborate together in a team, if we're going to get things done as a team, uh, it all comes down to connecting.
And we discovered in our emerging trends report that sharing success together builds team rapport, builds that connection. So let's dig into it. Celebrating success is really important. It plays a [00:01:00] significant role in how we feel as employees. Uh, so it determines a lot of our employee satisfaction, but also the fulfillment that we have in a team building a product.
So the act of commemorating achievement, forges, a connection between ourselves and the group, and it really serves as a strong validation purpose. Cause if you think about it, if we're all acknowledging our own individual, Progress our own individual success. If we're all celebrating the team's success, then together, that means we're all feeling pretty good about things.
So let's learn how we can create a sort of a flywheel effect with both personal and group success to build connection. So, as I said, we did this very wide range, emerging trends report. We spoke to over a hundred people. Different countries, different industries. And it was really interesting looking at this data.
We [00:02:00] asked them, which of the following activities is the most challenging for you business and trying to create connections with teammates. And there's a whole list. Is it creating transparency amongst each other, checking in with each other, recognizing each other, sharing success or onboarding new people.
And it's the sharing success to feel like you're part of something was the number one response hitting up at 40% of all respondents. So it's a very strong signal. So let's unpack that let's get into this and, and work out what is happening. I think when we are. Going out and building something that really matters.
So let's say it's a brand new product in a brand new area, or perhaps you're in an existing category doing something wildly different. Um, it really to build a team, you really have to invite everyone's contribution. And we talked about that a lot, you know, in terms of [00:03:00] engagement in the previous episode, which was one of our big trends.
So you need to open it up for everyone. And then, you know, obviously learning is a really key part of the process. And we've talked about that as well. And so if you're going about doing something new, there's going to be some unknowns, which means you're going to learn something new, which is great. And this is the cornerstone of the context of this insight.
And what you have to remember is that if learning is so damn essential, This is really a proxy for personal growth for team growth for business growth. Because if you're learning, it means you're doing new things. If you're doing new things, you're growing. And so growing together as a team, learning new skills, learning new technologies, new tools, new frameworks, new methodology, it's all part of this story of growth.
So if we want to build connection within a team, this is where sharing of success. Really plays a role [00:04:00] because success can be something, whether it's really big or really small, it can be personal or it can be something that's shared amongst the group. I think the key thing here when we talk about connection is that if we learning, if we're growing.
Celebrate that, because this is the moment when you see that you have learned a new thing, that's a win, that's a success. When you see that your peer learns something new, that's a win, that's another success, and you should be so keen, so enthusiastic to celebrate their success, set the example so that they will share.
Their personal goals, they will share when they make progress on them and you can celebrate them because it's that moment. Then you, when you say, well done, Bob, well done. Jane, when you say that this [00:05:00] forge is a connection between the two of you, because you're acknowledging them before your own success, before your own learning.
And this, this is almost like. Servant leadership, putting the success of those around you before your self. So when we talk about sharing success, it doesn't have to be the big multi-year multi-billion dollar deal. It can be, Hey, I learned a workaround for this bug. That's really been annoying me about the product and I fixed it.
Good on you. Hey, I learned how to improve conversion on our funnel. Good on you. And you know what? The more that you go out into the world and that you recognize the growth, the learning, the success of your colleagues, the more you do that, the more they'll recognize you. So we start getting into win-win territory here, everybody's winning.
And when everyone is [00:06:00] winning, when you're sharing those success, when you're celebrating that success, You'll find that if you help your colleagues and they achieve something, you will feel some wellbeing in that. And that's connection. That's empathy. That's understanding, Hey, we're growing as individuals, we're growing as a team, we're growing our product, we're growing our business and you know what.
That's a pretty good vibe. That's kind of somewhere. I want to work where it feels good to grow, to learn together, to celebrate the successes. You know, this is, you know, work, shouldn't be a labor. It shouldn't be all doom and gloom and obligation. It should be. Growth abundance opportunity and vibrant and celebrating those success amongst each other, again, to create those long lasting connections.
Right? Think about it in life, the best teams you've been on, you often still [00:07:00] have really good connection with those people. Maybe don't see them so much or chat so much, but when you do see each other, those feelings that shared success, that connection comes back pretty quickly. Doesn't it? So now let's go into another thing that we learned in our emerging trends report.
So we were really digging into this broad area of how we collaborate together. And specifically today, we're talking about this connection and I think we've established growth really important. So when you're building something, you've got to learn new things, and these are things that are wins when you learn those.
And you should share those bigger, small, personal shit. Okay. That's where we're at, but I got two more things for you to really bring home some learnings and insights around connection. One of the most powerful things you can do when you want to recognize your peer is know that peer recognition is the best.
[00:08:00] It is really the most powerful, in fact, it is in not only in our study, but also. Commonly understood that actually, when the boss gives recognition, it's kind of good when your peers right. When they give it, that's kind of great. And I think that's great because the team doing the work with you. So that's why it means the most.
They know what do you put into it to deserve that shared success, that personal growth, that team growth. So please recognize that. You should be actively celebrating the successes of your peers and your colleagues. And here's the big thing, do it publicly. Don't just say to them, Hey, well done. Take the opportunity to recognize the success, the growth, the achievements of others, big or small, personal, or shared.
Recognize them publicly, because if you do this, you're giving them like a secret fuel. You're giving [00:09:00] the capacity to believe in themselves, to believe in them team and to do their very best work. This is why sharing success, personal growth and learning. It's all coming together here. You can see how this whole universe of collaboration is interrelated.
So make sure. That you are sharing the success, make sure that you underpin a total embracing of learning as being a proxy for growth as something that is worth sharing, do that. And you'll bring everybody together and you'll create that, that sense of we're onto something. We really got something and I can guarantee you that team will go on to do great things.
So there you have it. This is our last, our eighth insight, our eighth trend from the 2021 trends report. It has been a huge piece of work [00:10:00] because not only did we tackle the world of technology, but we also tackled collaboration as well. And it's so great that we finish up this eighth trend on connection, the sharing of success, the sharing of personal growth and learning.
And Hey. If learning sounds like a great idea, then you should head to bottom up.io because this is our open source learning platform. You can learn all sorts of goodies there. We've got masterclasses, keynotes on design thinking, agile lean, and so very much more. So if you're a product person and you're trying to be the very best.
Version of yourself, then you should head over to bottom-up dot IO, where you can learn all sorts of bite-size skills that will help you on your way to building something that's truly going to impact users, the communities that you work in. Maybe even put a dent into the world. All right. That's it for the bottom-up skills podcast, that's a wrap. [00:11:00]
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Trend - Engagement: Everyone and Their Ideas are Welcome
19 Nis 2021· BottomUp - Skills for Innovators
Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance, and we are continuing our deep dive into collaboration. And today we're putting the spotlight. On engagement. And if you really think about it, that couldn't be a better topic to be talking about. Then employee engagement, you know, getting our team alive, contributing, listening, learning, discussing.
Contributing to the product, you know, doing something that matters together, not sitting in silos. That's what we mean. When we talk about engagement and boy did we come across a really solid insight and here it is around engagement. If you want to have that thriving, vibrant culture, then the starting point for that [00:01:00] engagement is this everyone and their ideas.
Are welcome. Let's talk about that some more. So the context here is that nothing has killed employee engagement, like forcing everybody to work home for a really sustained period. It's like, come on. When will this end? And as the novelty wore off during quarantine in 2020, the new challenge sort of percolated up to product teams.
When they're, when they're thinking about working together, it's all about getting out of just doing. The essentials, just plodding along and coping with all of this change. It's all about finding out how we can ensure our teams. Our teammates are involved, contributing. They're vibrant. They're feeling satisfied and fulfilled by our work.
And that often comes to contributing and often comes through engagement. And if it's. Contributing to the product, to the product vision, or maybe the company's vision [00:02:00] itself, no matter where you channel that energy, the engagement is essential. If you really want to have a thriving environment. So let's dig into the data that we found from our trends report.
Now here's, what's really interesting. We were. Asking over a hundred survey, respondents and interviewees for all around the world. We said to them, which of the following activities is the most challenging for your business? When you're trying to align with teammates now, you know, a lot of them said actually creating professional and personal boundaries.
That's no problem setting clear goals and objectives. Take getting everyone together for a tricky conversation. No problem now what's interesting is that tricky conversation? I, Hey Houston, we have a problem. That's really interesting about that. It registered very low as a challenge when you're making a product and aligning with teammates, [00:03:00] but here's the big one.
This one got a lot of feedback. In answer to the question of like, okay, what is the biggest challenge when you're trying to align is getting people in engaged in the brainstorm and out of their inboxes. So you've all seen it, that people will be on calls, hardly contribute there. They're looking off to the side because actually they're in their inbox, cleaning stuff out, or maybe better still there on Facebook or what ever.
The point here is that you desk, you, you really want that contribution, particularly in a brainstorm because unlike the tricky conversation, I, cause that's really just reacting to a problem why it's so important to have contributions in brainstorms. As you can bring people into the present that you can really enjoy [00:04:00] sparking ideas thinking about how might we, what if these kinds of really powerful questions and prompts and getting out of the drudgery of the day to day and exploring the potential of the tomorrow.
And what you'll find is that your colleagues are a wealth of knowledge, wisdom, and inspiration. If. Given the chance to engage properly. And this looks to me to be one of the biggest problems we're going to face in 2021, getting people, dusting them, all the cobwebs out and saying, come on, let's think together where we can entertain possibilities and new things.
So let's break this down and see how we might solve this as well. So, what we know is that 51% found getting people engaged is the most challenging practice in team alignment. Huge. If you benchmark that against all the other data in the pot, it's one of the strongest [00:05:00] signals that we got and the way we can unlock this is welcoming.
All people and all of their ideas, this needs to be a deliberate, purposeful, rigorous practice, because we all know that there are certain people in the team who are just not naturally going to speak up. And to be honest, between you and me, they're the ones that probably have the best ideas too. So you've got to go.
And hunt for those. So the first recommendation I have is how you in your role can make that happen. You need to serve your teammates. You need to ask yourself how you can help your colleague contribute. What conditions would they need to contribute? To provide insight, facts, data analysis, recommendations, whatever you need from them.
What do they [00:06:00] need to do that? Because remember, a lot of people are not like me. I'm a bit of a chatterbox, but some super wicked smart people can be sitting there and they could have great ideas, but they just don't feel comfortable contributing, ask yourself how you can make them comfortable in. Setting conditions that they actually would like to share.
So a great thing you can do here is always be the last to speak. Let, let your colleagues contribute. Now, if you are interested in this, this is what we call servant leadership. Just Google it. There is a ton of work written about how you can serve your teammates and your colleagues. I think this is the underlying recommendation, serve your teammates.
And then I want to come back to what I was saying. You are like. Show look. So you must go in search out contributions from everyone, not just the usual suspects. Who are confident talking in a group, you must go out and [00:07:00] get everyone, bring them to the conversation. Step one, to ask them for contribution, get contribution, come hell or high water.
However they need to give it. You want to get old people engaging because if you create a safety net where everybody feels comfortable to contribute, something starts to happen. All right, so let's just pause it there. So you have to ask yourself, how do I serve my teammates and you, then you, then you need to go out and be deliberate about getting their contribution, getting them in the room, number one and two, then getting their contribution.
So now what happens when you do that? The ideas, or perhaps they're just real facts, data, maybe do some analysis of the data, whatever it is, it could be the big idea. You want to make sure that your colleagues [00:08:00] challenge it, right. Improve it and then own it. This is what engagement looks like. Challenging ideas, improving ideas, and owning their ideas.
Let's talk about challenging him. We have to find a way, if you want employee engagement, if you want your teammates to be vibrant contributing, they have to be in the room. They have to be giving their thoughts. And when you give yours, give them license to challenge those ideas, because I can tell you not one single idea that I have when I sit by myself is nearly anywhere near as good as an idea that I share, because frankly.
All the super smart people that build challenge on my idea. They improve it. They make it better. They add more context. Maybe they sharpen it up. And here's the other thing. Once an idea is being challenged, maybe the facts of being challenged, maybe improve our understanding of the [00:09:00] facts. Then what happens because you've created this safe environment where these tough discussions can have happened.
Rigorous discussions can happen. Then here's what. The end result looks like even if the idea is not my idea. If I've born witness to an ID being challenged, improved, I can get on board with it. Even if. I don't agree with it because there was due process and Hey, you know, it's a numbers game maybe today.
It's my idea tomorrow to not, Oh, the other way around, but feels safe knowing that there is a fair, almost democratic way, the best ideas to rise to the top. This is what we call meritocracy. So unless you get this contribution from everyone, who's in the room, you'll never get, you'll never get the sort of engagement you're looking for.
Now let's end on a [00:10:00] positive. If you serve your teammates, get everyone in the room, make sure that they contribute, allow them to challenge ideas, improve ideas, and then own those particular ideas. Here's the biggest thing that happens. Your teammates will take overall. Ownership and accountability, not only for the performance of their work, but of the overall product or the overall business itself, because they feel like they had a chance to contribute, to participate.
So it feels like their business to some degree, it feels like they've had a hand in designing. The process and contributing to the destination and the best engaged teams will not only do their jobs, they'll look out for each other, they'll support each other, but they'll actually also look out for the business overall, even though someone might be only the head of HR, they'll [00:11:00] feel true responsibility for the entire business, not just the HR team.
And that's. Watch you want to create that's the upside of engagement to make sure everyone gets to contribute. All right. So that is. A little bit of thinking around employee engagement. It's one of the cornerstones of collaboration, which we have covered in real detail in our emerging trends report. And if you'd like to get a copy of that head over to bottom-up dot IO, where you can do the emerging trends course, in fact, there are like, Over 16, 700 different courses, all free.
That will help you be better. Product person will give you the skills you need in 2022 months. All right, that's it for the bottom-up skills podcast. That's a wrap. [00:12:00]
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Trend - Learning: we are all Teachers and Students
14 Nis 2021· BottomUp - Skills for Innovators
Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance and we continue on our wonderful journey into our very recent hot off the press trends report. And today we're talking about learning and the, we discovered this really big insight. That, when we think about learning, we need to imagine that we are so not only students, but teachers as well.
Now the background to this is it feels like these days we're always confronting new and different questions and learning skills, particularly after a year of working from home. And this idea of upskilling has kind of moved from a once in a while. You know, something you might do once a year, once every half year.
And it's really. Transitioned into a continuous activity because [00:01:00] Hey, the world has changed so much. So it is natural that we need to learn a whole bunch of new things. So let's talk about how we can understand our teammates and how we can learn and grow together. How we can be both student and teacher.
Now the report that I'm referring to, it's our emerging trends report. You can get that at bottom-up dot IO. And the fascinating thing that we discovered is that 45% of the people that participated in the survey and in the interviews, I'm talking about over a hundred product experts, gurus. From all around the world, Europe, U S and Australia.
What we discovered is that 45% of them found that learning a new skill from Alice is the hardest thing. When we talk about learning and proving our skills. Now, if you look at the data, it is crazy to see how much this idea of learning a new skill from somebody else is the hardest thing versus [00:02:00] like researching case studies.
No problem. Rob role-play training. Yeah. That's pretty straightforward. Participating in a group reflections and group discussions. That's all easy. It's really, when it come, it becomes. Two people together going deep. And it was really interesting because here's what we discovered. Uh, the whole thing is that organizations have these, these gurus, these individuals have mastered particular part of the business.
I think it's fair to say that. You kind of can feel a little bit held hostage by these guys because they are the guru. And because the knowledge hasn't been captured, everybody's running to that person who is of this source to get the information. And this is highly inefficient with certainly no scalable.
And then it becomes a question of time. It's really fascinating to [00:03:00] see that this practical idea, this practical act of sitting together and learning together person, a training person, B. Is actually the hardest thing. It's way harder than something that I consider to be hard coaching and mentoring. It's way harder than getting a good group discussion.
It is going deep together at the same time in the same place. This came back really strongly. It was confirmed in the surveys and the interviews. It's fascinating to see that learning particularly the sharing and development of deep skills has become so hard and think about it. If your, a modern knowledge worker, chances are at least half, if not more of your day is being, uh, you know, dealing with zoom and Hangouts and, and teams and jumping from meeting to meeting to meeting.
So where heritage attention is so scarce, [00:04:00] we're trying to block out a few hours for ourselves to do our work, uh, and not just being meetings. So I think this is really, uh, at the heart of the context and the challenge that we face in learning. It's just hard to carve out that time and to talk together.
And to now, the reason why that's such a big deal issue is that there's so much to learn. Think about how much the world has changed in just 16, 18 months. Life was all fine. And then COVID happened in 2020 and the world has really dramatically changed. Some might even say accelerated. So this means that there is going to be a ton of new things to learn.
Think about it. Um, how to do multi-channel omni-channel direct to customer, uh, products. That's now not a nice to have it. We can't kind of do it in our own time. It's a constraint that is now mandatory and it has to be done because people can't go to stores or as we can [00:05:00] come out of COVID now in 2021, people kind of like the convenience of omni-channel direct to customer experiences.
So there's going to be a whole new job to do, to even get people back in the stores and to find a reason for shopping in person in a mall. So with all of that happening, uh, in the world of our users, there's no surprise that we need to learn a lot because if that's changed, we have to learn new techniques.
The same thing goes with employees. So on the backend, on the inside of the organization, all the employees are now working remote or hybrid working or working on different roster days. Everything's changed inside and outside of the company. So therefore lots and lots to learn. So the first insight that I have for you around what we can do, what action can we take is we can synchronize this learning time where we actually make it a mandatory [00:06:00] to come together to exchange knowledge, to share deep knowledge.
Tell me how I can do this. Show me how I can do this. And if you don't do that, it's simply it would from our report, it would seem, it is almost impossible to make happen. So this is the first kind of cornerstone to learning. There is you've got to understand that the volume. Of knowledge that we need to acquire now has increased.
You have to realize that time is scarce. So if you're not deliberate about putting that in the agenda, it just simply won't happen. Okay. I got a couple more thoughts to build on this that will help you understand this idea of teachers and students, and the fact that we're both. So naturally you need to make pointing scalable.
You can't have a single point of failure. You can't have just one person that knows or so your idea would be okay, let's go train the trainer. Now, the interesting thing here is training. The trainers means this, that if you step back, we are all teachers. And we are [00:07:00] all students or just, we go into different modes at different times.
This is the only sensible, scalable way to address this need of learning within the organization. You cannot have these choke points where Jane or bill. No, all there is to know about a certain thing. But if you can't talk to them, then you're stuffed. That cannot be the way we work. It's got to be smarter than that.
So the key thing to acknowledge is that we're all, we're all teachers and we're all students. So let me tell you this little story. We did an interview with the head of retail distribution at BCIS sta it's a large bank in Romania. And what they do is they have a process of learning where they actually vote on the topic and they then nominate somebody in the team to teach that topic.
So depending on the day, you might be a student or a teacher, depending on that day, you might be absorbing a new skill from one [00:08:00] of your colleagues, but here's the key thing. You have chosen, voted for participated in the choice of the, if you will, the curriculum. And so therefore you're much more ready to learn and understand.
And what was really interesting is a lot of people didn't see themselves as teachers. But what we learned from this case study is they actually discovered. Although it's a bit of a stretch goal that are a little bit uncomfortable, of course, who wouldn't be, but they actually learned that they could grow when they saw themselves as not only a student, but as a teacher, too.
So whilst trying to tackle organizational learning, there was the unintended benefit of not only making the team smarter, but also driving engagement because Hey, everyone got to choose co-create. The curriculum, the syllabus of what they were learning in the bank. So the engagement rocketed up within these teams.
So what we're talking about here [00:09:00] is that if we learn together, we get the chance to play both of these roles. We can share in our personal growth, which creates even more engagement and even more connection. And the strong advice that I have for you is to really process this idea of learning and know that it is something that you cannot.
Do as an option, it can not be once a year, twice a year. Learning has to become a continuous process within the organization. I would challenge you to say, are you doing it weekly or at least biweekly? I think monthly feels like you can't keep up with the world around us. So there you have it. When we talk about learning, the big insight is that we are now all teachers and students.
So be prepared to learn and be prepared to share your knowledge. Um, I've no doubt. You'll have a team, an organization that will thrive. Well, that's great stuff, right? [00:10:00] And that you can find much, much more about this idea of learning. In fact, there is eight trends in total, in our emerging trends report, and you can get that for free at bottom-up dot IO, where you can get a ton of free courses.
You can learn how to be a better product person. So head over to bottom-up dot IO and the world will be your ice state. All right. That's it for the bottom-up skills podcast. That's a wrap.
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Trend - Alignment: Get the Band Singing the Same Song
7 Nis 2021· BottomUp - Skills for Innovators
Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons, the CEO of Qualitance and we are entering into the second instalment. Of our trends report. We've studied the first to four tech trends, and now we're about to studying for collaboration trends together. And the key topic of today's episode is alignment.
How do we get everyone on the same page? Or what we learned is it's like, how do we get the band singing the same song? Now upon reflection is really interesting. Like I was expecting that the building part, the technology part of our trends report that we just completed. Well, tell us about all of the complexities and challenges of technology and it did, but here's the thing.
If that's all the [00:01:00] platforms and the tech, then the people stuff is equally as challenging. And we have got a lot of insights and a lot of best practices to share with you. So let's kick it off with alignment. Now here is one of the most interesting things from the entire report. Getting everyone on the same page was ranked almost twice as challenging as delivering the work.
Isn't that interesting. So if you think about, um, you know, getting people together, getting them on the same page, it's generally made up of, um, how we. Produce how we learn, how we connect and how we go. You get on the same page. These are all of the things that make up the bigger collaborations. Sorry.
What's fascinating is that this alignment, this getting everyone on the same page was almost twice as hard as the [00:02:00] doing of the work. So in terms of collaboration producing, like, Hey, let's build this thing together. Was actually way easier in the, what should we build together? Isn't that amazing? So this alignment thing is a real challenge and you know, the, the key thing, you know, that we would, uh, take from this trends report is that you have to work very deliberately on your.
Alignment as a team, you need to really understand and define first of all, and this is the first big insight that I have for you in order to succeed at alignment is you have to know what is. Our way of thinking and our way of working, this is almost always never, uh, written down. It's never taught. It's kind of spoken about at best, or it's just [00:03:00] kind of done and you're meant to kind of work it out on the fly if you're a new member of a team or a company.
So define your way of thinking, define your way of working. And that is the cornerstone to this, uh, uh, um, idea around alignment. If you want everyone singing the same song, everyone being on the same page, having the right attitudes, the right ways of thinking, then you need to understand and agree as a team of like, what are they, what is our way of thinking our way of working number one thing here for alignment, you need to know what those things are before we talk about how we get everyone to do it.
You need to know what they are. Now in going deep on this. I mean our trends report, we had a lot of people giving us feedback from all over the world and from many different industries. So this is really widespread. This challenge of alignment. One of the great things is we found that there were some really good [00:04:00] practices, um, that you can can start with the first one.
Is if you want alignment and you know, your way of thinking and working, then you need to use daily stand-ups daily scrums as a way of reinforcing how we think, how we work daily, daily, daily, daily critical is really, really critical. Because this is the chance to increase the calibration, increase the understanding.
Maybe sometimes unusual challenges come up, which become a chance to explore. How do we think about that? How are we going to work on that? And that needs to be reinforced daily. Unfortunately, I know this is going to sound like hard work and it is, but you've got to do it daily. This is how you reinforce the way of thinking and working, which is alignment.
Getting everyone on the same page. Now, the next thing is. You need. [00:05:00] So if that's the sort of daily reinforcement, you know, the talking about reminding and communicating how we think and how we work, the next thing is you need to guide people in your teams on how they can get aligned with the way of thinking and working within the team within the wider organization.
Here. I want to give a really big call-out, um, to a great partner of ours at ING Romania. It's overdue, Slavonia he's head of marketing and customer experience banking, uh, for business clients all over ING Romania. And he had this really great metaphor that it's like a band when we talk about alignment.
So he. Uh, gave us this great insight that we all need to think, like band leaders were the front man, and you need to invite your teammates to come join the band, play alone, and you might start, you know, imagine you're up there with the lead guitar or you're on [00:06:00] vocals. You might like get everybody going, but here's the key thing.
Once you kind of bring people together as the band leader. What you should do is over time, you sort of drift a little bit into the background and then you can maybe not play quite as much. And then over time, let the band take the song in the direction that they want to take it. So it's this idea of you guide them, but then you're able to reinforce on those daily scrums in stand-ups, but actually.
The key thing is if you want alignment, they need to actually not only think, but do in the way of thinking and working, they need to celebrate right. How you operate as a team. What, what is your purpose? All of that should be reflected not only in the leader, but they should make room for others. So it's got a little bit of a servant leadership, uh, notion to it here.
So [00:07:00] I just want to bring this back. This alignment challenge cannot be. Uh, underestimated. Because what happens is it's proving to be one of the single greatest challenges. It's far harder than actually like building stuff. It's like, what are we going to do is like much trickier than, okay. Let's build now.
So this is often why. We see products get built that are not right, because there wasn't alignment at the start of the project. We weren't agreeing on our purpose, how we think and how we work. So this is particularly challenging, particularly challenging for teams. Now, without a doubt, what we have seen as a pattern in some of our interviews for the trends report is that we did see that obviously COVID has made this alignment.
Harder it's tricky because sometimes we can leave people out unknowingly. Um, it's really hard, you know, you don't have everybody in the same room, so you can just say right everyone into the war room. [00:08:00] So alignment. It does become trickier. That's why our first recommendation is to know, define, celebrate your way of thinking your way of working and bring it back daily in your scrums, in your stand-ups in your status calls, make sure you bring it back.
And when it comes to really getting things done, Make sure you think of yourself as that band leader, as we learnt from overdue, make sure that you get the band going, but then actively take a little bit of a backseat. Let them take the song that then play, let them make it their own, because that has a lot of benefits beyond alignment.
You see autonomy and ownership will come out of that. And when people are doing that, they will feel like they are thriving in your team, in your business. Okay. Now, if you want to thrive when you're building products and services, if you're struggling with tech and some of the trends [00:09:00] that we saw in our recent trends report, head over to bottom-up dot IO there, are you going to find all the answers we've got master classes on everything from lane agile, design thinking rapid prototyping.
We opened it up. It's all open source. It's free for you to use. It's a bottom-up dot IO. And hopefully today you've got yourself really equipped to go out and be that band leader to align the team, get them singing the same song. All right. That's it for the bottom-up skills podcast. That's a wrap.
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Trend - Emerging Technology: Low-code is top of the List
5 Nis 2021· BottomUp - Skills for Innovators
Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons in this I'm the CEO of Qualitance and we continue without tech trends. That's right. And we are going to talk about low code. Maybe no code. Uh, but you got it. We are talking about the big technology that is clearly everyone's favorite. It was really quite unanimous.
Uh, When we did our recent emerging trends report to find how many people are considering low code. So it really deserves our attention. In this episode, let's get into the world of no code and low code and unpack why this is such a big deal for companies that are looking to build new products and services.
So, as I said, we were doing our emerging trends report recently. [00:01:00] And if you haven't checked that out, just head over to bottom-up dot IO, it's all free. You can go there, download it and enjoy the full report. But today we're just jumping into the idea of no code and it was amazing. 26% of the respondents that did this global survey over a hundred people participated.
They ranked no-code as the highest short term priority, 26%, one single tech. And that was the choice. And it's really fascinating because when you look at the others, you know, in th in the second place was. Cloud-first solutions, which is pretty, pretty natural, but, you know, for example, AR VR, uh, digital health, all of those way back in the pack compared to no-code solutions.
So let's dig into this and ask ourselves, why is no code so popular and how might we leverage it? Without a [00:02:00] doubt. The promise of no code really comes in the fact that when you're launching a new product or service, or even managing a new product, the effort that it takes for business and design folks to get things happening in the technology, in the application, the software and the data in the UX, it's usually a huge effort.
And what the promise of no code is, is to make that process faster and easier and effectively. What it means is that people who do not have engineering technology skills, who are not developers are able to get products to market a lot quicker and to be more continuous and adaptive as the product is launched.
And you start to learn what customers are liking. So this is the promise of it. And without a doubt, it really is transformative because we know how hard it is to find developers it's even harder to find good developers. [00:03:00] So we're really looking at, um, a solution that really speaks to the deficiency of skills in the overall workplace.
There's just not enough good software engineers. So. It's about this speed. It's a, that's achieved through having a less effort, less blockers to get to launch. But I think it's also equally about the agility to be more in line with continuous development, best practices. So if it's less effort goes faster, I mean, it all just sounds so good, doesn't it?
But I think what was interesting about the report is that we actually had a few insights. That put this into context and give us a sense of what we need to do in order to use no code solutions successfully. Now I think the first and most important thing is that we need what we call in the, in the business world, the configurator, um, persona archetype.
So differently. These are people [00:04:00] who might resemble business analysts are super sharp at understanding the business, the rules, the logic of the business, who are able to then also understand the customer. That's quite a rare role. I mean, these would be almost product owners. If you will. And the reason that these roles are really important is that if you're going to go no code or low code, what happens is a lot of the due process between, uh, designers, uh, business, people and engineering, uh, where there are checks and balances, you create user stories and you do all those sort of things.
They can be bypassed in a no-code solution. You can jump straight into the backend and start. Drag and dropping things around, but the question is who's going to do that work. And it's this idea of a configurator, someone who can really drive the dashboard, the admin, who really understands all of the rules that you have, because not only will you [00:05:00] be dragging and dropping changes in the process, the very best no code solutions, um, have an instant deployment mechanic, meaning when you drag drop and save.
That one is going live immediately. So you need to make sure that it's done correctly. Now in speaking to Jaco, FOC at ONB Pedrom, he had this great expert advice. He said, you have to engage and mobilize citizen developers within your company because they will lead the way they will be these configurators.
And they are the people who are really to understand the systems. From a business logic perspective, they're going to understand all of the implications of thinking, doing a new features, updates, and services tweaks to your product. But they're also going to have the background, the history as to what has worked and what hasn't.
[00:06:00] So. Yes, there is this promise of moving with much more agility, which is very central to the theme of how to work in this modern age of digital transformation. But you need to actually make sure that you don't, uh, Have a skills deficiency in another area. If you're trying to skip over the lack of engineers, you're going to need these citizen developers.
You're going to need these configurators who are really driving the business. So you need to make sure you develop those skills. Now there's another big, uh, learning that we had, which is when you want to go to a low code or no code environment, one of the very important, uh, paradigms. Is to understand, truly understand the business rules, the logic and the flows that work with inside of your product.
Now, what is exposed when you have a no code, [00:07:00] uh, set up is you need to actually. Install and configure the application to respect your business rules, your business logic. And what I often find is that that is easily said. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We've got this, we've got all our business rules, but I cannot tell you after decades of doing new products and services, when you say, okay, give me.
The, um, overall systems architecture of your entire business stack. So I can understand where this new product is going to say, give me all for this particular product. I want all of the offline business rules, uh, logic and processes, uh, all the Gates that it needs to go through. All of the dependencies, the human flows, the automation flows.
I can tell you, ladies and gentlemen. It is rare that an organization is able to provide me with all of those things. This is assuming that they're all sitting there saying, yes, we need to build something new. Let's talk to Mike and [00:08:00] his team. And then we asked for this and they don't have them. You know, usually they have half of them do Thurs, but working.
Honor the system rather than just in the system is actually a far greater challenge. And if you're going to employ no code and get the most out of it, here's the catch is you need to understand those business rules in those business logics in order to apply that otherwise you can't drag and drop. You can't operate no code because there's no underlying rules for which it is going to operate.
And the last thought here. Is, this is the perfect time to ask yourself, well, rather than just copy and duplicate what we're doing offline or what's in our existing digital system, let's take this new opportunity that NOCO presents to ask ourselves what would be the best. Approach to our business rules and our best business logic.
How might we reduce complexity? Not only for [00:09:00] our customers, but our employees too. How might we take our learnings from all the data we're getting back on the product today? So we can build a better product tomorrow. So no code a huge promise. Very exciting. Uh, agility speed. I mean, this is, uh, the key formula for success, uh, in digital transformation.
However, you need to make sure that you truly study and optimize your business rules and your business logic. And talking about building great products. There's one place in the world that you can go where you get a bunch of free masterclasses and that's bottom up.io. That's right. We've made all of our internal and client courses totally free to everyone.
So you can learn design thinking, agile lean there's a ton and ton of courses. I think we're almost at 20 courses, absolutely free for everybody. So hit us up at bottom-up. Dot IO. Okay. So that's it for our [00:10:00] study of no code solutions. It's top of the list. If you study no code solutions, if you go to bottom-up do-now, you'll be the top of the class too.
Okay. That's it for the bottom-up skills podcast. That's a wrap.
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Trend - Single Source of Truth: Unlocks Inside and Out
31 Mar 2021· BottomUp - Skills for Innovators
Hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons, the CEO of Qualitance and we are getting deep into. The individual trends that all came out of our trends report. This is the third trend, and it's all about the single source of truth. And for those of you who are new to the world of a single source of truth idea, it's essential.
It's really simple. It's essentially. One place one destination, which has all the information for a product. Be it tech, the it design be the business rules that drive it. It's all there in one place. Now we might often use tools like confluence and JIRA, or maybe Simplicit, it might be like a [00:01:00] great, uh, Word document that has everything in it doesn't have to be too flashy.
It can be quite simple, but if you're working in a larger product organization, you'll find the need to have pretty robust tool as a single source of truth. And what we've discovered is that, Hey, This single source of truth idea is essential to get everybody on the same page, but it's actually comes with a few challenges.
So the fun really starts when you start not only getting people to the two, but then you start asking questions about what they find. There is everything they need to go on with their project. Is it there? Is it adequate in order for them to be autonomous? And the answer is it's red, that the entire package is delivered.
So let's dive into the world of a single source of truth. It was quite interesting, uh, for this part of the report, it was a very strong message. [00:02:00] We asked over a hundred product and business experts around the world, which of the following activities is the most challenging for your business when trying to produce work with teammates.
So right now we're in that sort of producing mode, not so much learning, it's more about the producing. We've got to make a thing. And what was really interesting is. We asked all sorts of, uh, different, uh, activities to right. The one that was the easiest is making an inventory of the worker to be done. So, you know, you've got your to do you know what your individual role is now interesting when you compare how big an issue, finding the critical information for a product or a new service?
A single source of truth said different. This was over 30% of respondents. Nominated. This is the hardest thing about producing work. It is more than double the next option and it is I'm looking at it right now. And I [00:03:00] think it's like 10 times, uh, an issue than that, of making an inventory. So this is a big issue, so let's, let's break it down.
And then there's, there's really two key concepts. We discovered the report that make up this single source of truth idea. The first of which, now it's again saying sound insanely easy, and you got to be thinking, Mike, that's so simple, but actually it's not. And I've got a reason why the first concept is access to this single source of truth.
The problem with the access thing is a lot of organizations have geared if they have a single source of truth. They've gained their access to everyone being in the office. So here's the thing. A lot more people are working from home and significantly we've found. And it would suggest in the data that I think it is unlikely to go back to five days a week in the office.
I think everybody has found the flexibility and the time-saving quite good. That being said, I think everybody does [00:04:00] want to have a little bit more social interaction. So it's not going to be five days a week from home, but it's certainly going to be a hard hybrid way of working. So access is actually a little bit harder.
It might be simply the VAP VPN can't handle the load of users, or maybe it's that the product is, is geared for our local area network, whatever the issue is. Access to the single source of truth is actually really fundamentally important. So making a work from home, mobile friendly access to your single source of truth, I mean, that is your to-do list already.
And we haven't even got to the big, the big bit yet. Okay. So that's access. But as I said earlier, that the fun and games kind of really start to happen here. When we think about the idea of quality. And when you think of a single source of truth, the quality of it is really judged by whether [00:05:00] someone can go to your internet, your, your JIRA, your confluence, your Google docs, and can they find all the information there?
So a good test is if somebody is working from home and let's say, it's an unusual time, let's say it's, I don't know, six in the morning, and they're already standing to work. We know the thing is. A great single source of truth, right. With all the critical information would be. So well-managed that, that person could good.
Come on at six in the morning. They're a little espresso coffee next to them. Yeah. They could log in and find all the information they need to continue with their work. That's good. Here's what's bad. Let's assume they got access, but they get there and. Not everything has been saved to the repository. Not everything is in the single source of truth.
So what do they do? The crime of all crimes? They send an email. Yeah. They send an email. And the problem with that is, first of all, it creates more [00:06:00] email traffic to, they can't continue with their work. And three, what could have been posted once properly to the single source of the truth now? In the future, this person is emailing and sending it to all sorts of different people.
But then what happens is if you ask about the quality of this, what happens when there's version control, and then they forget to share the updated version with everyone via email, and you can start to see how things unravel. Pretty quickly when we talk about single source of truth. So my strong advice to you, what we learned is that it really comes down to attention to not only the access, but the quality of your single source of truth.
We have a saying, um, in our company at quad tense, then if it's not in the single source of truth, then it didn't happen. So if it's not there, if it's not self-service, then it doesn't exist. And it's really takes a lot of time to [00:07:00] get people into that space, but we must as a rule live and die by that single source of truth.
Great access, great quality. And you might be thinking, Oh geez, Mike, it sounds like a lot of work or the good news is I've given, I'm able to give you some incentive. And that incentive comes in the form of, we found out from some of the successful projects, uh, from some of the respondents to our survey, is that there's some things you can do.
And there's some, um, most important thing is that when you have great access and quality to a single source of truth, two things happen. One. You're able to provide a better customer experience. And number two, your employees behave with more autonomy. They take more ownership, they feel empowered. They have the information that they need.
To continue their work. So let's [00:08:00] unpack each of these better customer experience. We found that BCI ouster, one of the leading banks in Romania were able to give better advisory advice to their customers because no matter what touchpoint. They engage with the customer, no matter who had that engagement, they have centralized a single source of truth for all customer experience.
So you can avoid that terrible situation where you talk to the bank yesterday, you call them back the next day you talk to a different person and you have to explain the tire thing again. You don't have to do that with them. So when you remove all of that friction, when you have all of the information, the person.
The assistant from BCA sta when they're there, they're able to get down to the business of giving good advice. There's none of this time. Okay, please. Re-explain to everything you already told my colleague yesterday. No, they have all the information to make it better recommendation to the customer. [00:09:00] They can give better vice to the customer, more insight into the customer.
The other thing that we found from talking to people all around the world, is that a good single source of truth, great access, great quality leads to more employee autonomy, because as I said, they got what they need. They can get on with the business that they're there to do. And it's the removal of these pains really opens up the opportunity for good things to happen.
So. Single source of truth, not the most sexiest topic, but it's critical. In fact, it was a massive signal in the report. It's a really big issue and far bigger than other related work production challenges like agreeing priorities, making a list of all that stuff. No problem. Compared to single source of truth.
Where's the information. Make sure you have. Not only the access, but you provide the quality to your team and you'll get better customer experience. And in the long run, more autonomy from your [00:10:00] team members and employees. All right. Product to owners. That is the end of this trend. Single source of truth. I hope you've enjoyed it.
If the answer is yes, hit bottom up.io, get a bunch of our free courses, design thinking, lean agile, you name it. It's all there. And remember this that if you work hard, On learning these new skills, not only will you be able to build better products, but you'll be able to help your colleagues too. All right.
That's a wrap of the bottom-up skills podcast.
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Trend - Using Technology: Implementation is the Toughest
29 Mar 2021· BottomUp - Skills for Innovators
Hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast I'm Mike Parsons, the CEO of Qualitance. And I want to welcome you to our hundredth episode. Woo. And it is the appropriate that we are discussing our trends report, which we have just released. And the previous episodes, you would have heard a little bit about that, but today we're talking about a huge insight and it is about the implementation.
With new technology into your stack, into your solutions architecture that drives the production, the creation of your new digital product. Maybe it's some software, maybe it's a mobile app. We're talking about how we tackle this crazy difficult issue of implementing new technology. Now to remind you, we went and talked to a lot of people [00:01:00] over a hundred people all around the world, all sorts of product and business experts about the challenges they face with digital products, and simply put the act of bringing outside technology inside the company is the single biggest technology challenge.
It must be said that there are quite a few challenges with technology, but this was the big one, but it's not all doom and gloom because what we also discovered. Is that leadership plays a real key in actually the successful adoption of new technology. So let's jump into our next trend, uh, from our emerging trends report, let's get into implementation.
Now, the curious thing about implementation is we found it was really, really hard, but it has some good company. We also found that the next biggest two challenges was aligning. The organization around a technology technology [00:02:00] solution and making sure that it actually speaks to the goals of the business and not far behind it researching potential technology solutions.
Ain't that easy. But I think if we zoom out here, obviously whenever you're considering something new, You're in sort of foreign territory. You're not really sure. And, uh, the thing that struck me having done so much customer research in my time is that there was just an overall sense of when people were ranking the difficulties, everything kind of came in pretty hard and there was no clear part of the technology adoption process.
That was really easy when compared to the others. So let's talk about why it's so hard. And another thing that we discovered from our report is that. You've got the challenge with a particular technology in itself. So let's just isolate it. You've drawn up a long list of potential [00:03:00] technology solutions for whatever you need to do.
And we discovered that, you know, there's a pretty strong and clear, consistent line from that consideration to choice implementation and then support. Everybody seemed very clear on that. But here is where implementation gets really hard. Yes. There are challenges with every new technology, particularly if it's a pretty emergent, but far greater is the fact.
And this is the big bit is where it becomes part of a larger system inside of the organization. It becomes another product, another platform in the overall solution. Or technology stack. And this is where the complexity is organizations before they know it. They look around and they look at the tech department and they're supporting 10, 12 different technologies.
If you're in banking or finance many, many more, and it's all [00:04:00] glued together. And it's that gluing together does something. It creates interdependency between systems and a lot of, uh, I'm I'm almost going to say they're almost like bandaid fixes get made on this fragile collection, this fragile stack, uh, of technology.
It's all glued together over years and years and years people come and people go and this leads. To the next insight we have from the report around implementation is that the complexity is not only the platform alone, it's the platforms, but it's not just this whole concept of platforms, it's platforms and people.
This is where the real challenges, because what's really fascinating is when you look at the people side of things, getting people like really aligned on the technology people. Finding people that have the skills to design new [00:05:00] solution, architectures really hard, really scarce person to find, making sure that the engineering, the web services, the API APIs and so forth are all integrated in a scalable way, documented way.
This. Is where the challenge really is. There's not only lots of platforms and products all glued together. It's the people that run them. And here's the thing. If you're a designer, developer, creator, engineer, business leader, you come along to your engine and technology team and say, let's do something. I think new and boy, they look at you and go.
Oh, no. And the reason that they're like, Oh, no is because they've built. All of these products and platforms and glued them together in a very sort of precarious stack and it, and it just works. Okay. It's, it's actually working right now. And then you say, let's add something new [00:06:00] and they're like, Oh my gosh, I don't know how to do that.
We'd have to undo a couple of things. Is it going to create some issues? We don't have the people, the bandwidth, the resources, this ladies and gentlemen, this is why implementation is so hard. Because it's not only what you have and keeping that going. As soon as you introduce something new, it reveals deficiencies in the stack in that system, in that multi-platforms, that you've glued together.
This could be gluing, ERP, CRM, CMS, all together, all these sorts of things have been glued together. So you've got very unusual, unexpected relationships between data, applications and interfaces. Oh, my gosh. It is. It's really tough. And then when you want to add something new on that, it's always like, we don't know exactly what's going to happen when we add a whole new product platform or even sometimes just new features can be quite a drama to entertain.
Now don't worry. [00:07:00] There's some light here in the tunnel. And one of the interesting things is that we found that the reality is you will constantly need. To at least entertain new technologies, new products and platforms in order to build out your offering. Particularly as you know, you've got employees that want to work from home.
You've got customers who want omni-channel direct to customer experiences. You're going to have to entertain the new. So here's the thing. We found some successful case studies and it comes down to this simple idea that. This is one of those rare occasions that actually tucked down as essential. If you want to bring a new technology into your organization in order to enable a new product or service, be that for an employee or a customer, it is crucial that leadership truly gets on board.
And that is far beyond just saying, Hey yeah, good idea. Go do it. [00:08:00] There was a very strong case for that. If you want to unblock all those challenges you will have inside the organization, leadership must be all in and they must support throughout the strategy phase, right through, into execution and support because if the leadership of the company doesn't come in and mobilize and open up opportunity, engage the organization, convince people in the organization about the vision behind this new technology.
It will die. So remember that bringing a new technology from the outside, in get top leadership involved and they need to be ready to go the whole journey, the entire ride with you as a product owner, you need to get that support because you won't survive without it because organizations have so many priorities so much to do.
And really when you say, Hey, let's, let's bring in a new technology. [00:09:00] You're really just saying, I want to bring more drama to the technology team who are already dealing with all the challenges on the platforms and the people. So this is essential and it's really important that you understand that tech skills are very rare.
So when you do ask for something new, Make sure that you've got the skills internally to handle it. And you know, the other interesting thing here is keep in mind that very few organizations are retroactively going back and cleaning up their technology, stack, cleaning up their systems, because if it's not broken.
There is no urgency to go and invest into something that is already working. You're only, you know, perceived to be right juicing the, the ongoing returns from the project. So remember that there's often quiet the complexity and drama [00:10:00] in the platform. Everything's a little bit band-aided together, but you can overcome all of these things.
If you go and engage leadership and get them along. For the ride. Now, if you have enjoyed this insight around technology implementation, you can head over to bottom-up dot IO, where you can get an entire masterclass dedicated to our merging trends report. And they're a bottom-up, you're going to learn design thinking, agile lean, and so much more so super free.
There's lots of decks, videos, templates, you name it. And it's all about us helping you being a better product person. So they have from the bottom up skills podcast that Sarek.
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Trend - User Experience: Consistency is Key
24 Mar 2021· BottomUp - Skills for Innovators
Hello and welcome to the BottomUp skills podcast, I'm Mike Parsons, the CEO of Qualitance. And today we're talking about. User experience. That's right. This is the first of our eight trends from our emerging trends, report and masterclass. And when it comes to user experience, there's one thought that rises above all the others.
When you talk to experts in product all around the world, just like we did. In fact, we talked to over a hundred of them. We said, what's the biggest challenge when it comes to user experience, is it providing a chat app or is it device compatibility or error handling? That's not it the real thing that keeps everybody up at night when they're trying to build a great product.
What's the key thing that they [00:01:00] have to deliver here. It is. The key thought when you're building a product and you're thinking about UX, consistency is key. So when we build an end to end experience for our users, it has to be. Consistent right from onboarding and what you see in the app store ride through to that very first user account initiation, right through to using the core products and services to support, to advocacy.
You have to follow the entire journey and it ain't easy. In fact, almost 30% of the people we talked to said, Hey, UX is their number one challenge when building a product. Now, the thing that I noted about this is if we had done this report five, six, seven years ago, do you know the interesting thing would have been, is the report would have [00:02:00] been inverted.
It actually would have been a lot more about device compatibility, making websites work on mobile phones. Um, But it's really fascinating to see now that the product journeys are longer, deeper and richer, but also those journeys are happening over so many different touchpoints. Just think about the difference between your laptop, your tablet.
Your phone, your television, your watch interface. So I have seven for laps that deliver me native experiences on all those platforms that I just mentioned. Let's say Spotify, Netflix to do list and testicle calendar, et cetera, et cetera. They have to try and create consistent on that. Well, that is the crunch.
So, you know, how do, how do we think about this and how might we find a solution here? Well, it's [00:03:00] fascinating because I think what we have to do is we have to use. A couple of really simple models just to know where we are. So if you want to understand your consistency of user experience, there's a really good model that I find myself coming back to, which is called the basic UX framework.
And it's just five questions. And what I want you to imagine, I'm going to ask, I read out these five questions and what you're going to do is I want you to really. Think about each of these questions for the products that you work on. And if you're not working on a product right now, just think about a product you use a lot and ask these questions of that product.
Okay. These are the basic UX framework and I love them because they will help you determine how consistent your user experience really is. Here we go. Number one is the application aesthetically pleasing. Number [00:04:00] two. Can everybody use it? Number three, does the application make life easier for, is it easy to learn?
Five, do use established design. Patents, some really, really good ones there. So let's, let's explore those for a second. Now for me, aesthetically pleasing, uh, generally means like turn down the noise, um, having really elegant color palettes, but also using color appropriately. To suggest priority to suggest flow within the app.
That's when it's really aesthetically pleasing. Of course, it's got to be nice to look at, but it needs to be smarter than that. You know, those colors need to be put to good use. Obviously beautiful type Paul graphy. I like the idea of spacing, like an app [00:05:00] feeling calm and spacious, not all jumbled up. So that's my thoughts on aesthetically pleasing.
I have to be careful here cause I have so many ideas that I'll, I'll go on and on and on and let's go to the next one. Can everyone use it now? The key thing here is, um, can everyone use it? I like to think of the different modes that people work in. So if my user has an at home or at work mode, that's a good way of thinking.
Can they use it? Um, another way of thinking is if you've got a marketplace, say like Uber, you have a rider and a driver, make sure you test both. Or if you're Airbnb. Can a guest in a host use it. That's kind of everyone. So it's very important for a two-sided marketplace because Hey, if only one side of the market can really use the app and it's terrible for the other side of the market.
Well, you haven't been like an economic imbalance as a result of that. So I've given you some thoughts on aesthetically pleasing. [00:06:00] Can everyone use it, like make it democratic, be careful here. Like you can fall victim to trying to solve every edge case as well. But I would look for those fundamental principles of the main segments of users, the main different types of personas you have.
There's a great way to deliver on the question. Can everyone use it now? The third one does lie. Does the application make life easier? I find there's some great ways to test this. Like. Just tell users they have to pay for it. That will soon tell you if it's making a difference in their life. Um, for testers, when you take it away, do they like say, Oh my gosh, no, don't take it away because those are ultimate indicators of making life easier.
If you wanted to get a proxy measure for making life easier, I think you could try the net promoter score. How likely would they be to recommend this? Um, and I would actually just, [00:07:00] um, get as close to your users as possible here. Maybe do some user interviews, record some journeys, see where they click, how they click, um, see if the effort reward equation is working out.
So that's user experience. Is it easy to learn? Well, there's some interesting thoughts here. I would actually. I would actually sort of say, if you need an elaborate, um, introduction, an onboarding into your app, where you have all sorts of. Explanations of what things do in the interface and so forth. I think that might be a little bit of a tell, um, that if the interface doesn't speak for itself, if it's not so intuitive that it doesn't need a manual of sorts, then that might be a signal to you that it's not that easy to learn.
[00:08:00] Now, another thing that you could do here. Beyond user interviews is look at the data. So if you have an events based analytics tool like Mixpanel, um, you could establish where journeys break, uh, where people are falling off. And those would be indications, particularly if you could segment your first time users, um, you could see.
Just how they are, how far they're getting in the journey. If you have a lot of abandonment through the journey, if you have a lot of, uh, attrition of users like deleting your app, if it's a native app, those are all indicators that it might not be so easy to learn. I was looking today at a product that we've launched and looking at average engagement time per session.
It was interesting because, um, you know, When you get into that and roughly mobile apps, decent [00:09:00] mobile apps you want to be at about the four or five minute per session. Obviously some apps are a bit quicker. If they're more utilitarian. If it's gaming, gosh, the numbers were really high. But the interesting thing is to see how many users come back a second time is that's going to be a proxy for some sort of sense of, Hey, it was pretty easy to learn how to use them back again to have a go.
Um, so that's some thinking on how you can answer the question. Is it easy to learn when in doubt, just put it in the hands of a user, ask them to complete a task, and that will pretty soon tell you if it's easy to learn or not. Now the last one here is like, okay, do we use established design patents? Now?
It's really interesting here that. A different way of saying that, um, is that design patterns are like, um, sometimes they're enforced, but other times design patterns are just defacto standards of, [00:10:00] um, uh, where you expect to find things on your app. So what you'll see is without doubt, Android and iOS, um, has very distinct.
Design patents. Um, and, um, it's really interesting because, you know, um, when you look at these different apps, things are meant to be in a certain place like the back button and the menu button has to be some of the most basic things that need to be. Where you would guess them to be if you've never used the app, that's a great test to see if you're adhering to design patent.
And if you're a little bit thinking who might, this is a little bit abstract, I would go and have a look at where everything is on your mobile phone. Have a look at apps and you'll [00:11:00] start to see that the consistent use of color. The consistent use of navigation for back menu, et cetera. How things call upon the share function within your mobile device?
These are all done to defacto standards, ways that are pretty similar throughout all apps that creates familiarity comfort from the user's perspective. So this is it. Five big questions to see if you can tackle the biggest challenge. On the front end, that is, which is all about building a consistent product experience.
The other thing that we learned, um, is that one company had consolidated all of their design patterns and design libraries centrally, and they made a one employee. End to end responsible for their banking app in terms of UX. So they own the entire intent UX experience. And this was a really successful way of [00:12:00] meeting the challenge of consistency.
So there you have it. Consistency is key. Isn't it just such a powerful thought. And if you've had to build a serious product in your life, you'll really feel the size of this challenge. As you tie together, different platforms, different web services. On the front end for customers on the back end for employees, like it starts to get pretty big.
You might be having some web services. Uh, you can, I've had apps that have had up to 15 different web services. So it starts to get pretty complex. But the answer to all of this can be found at bottom-up dot IO. Isn't that great. In fact, What we're talking about today is just one of eight trends that we discovered in our emerging trends report.
And you can get the entire report and you can download it. You get the whole deck, everything you get video, it's all at bottom-up dot IO, where you can get it all for free. When you can learn [00:13:00] about a lot of other stuff as well. Like. Design thinking and agile, and I hope that all of these come together to be vital tools in your product tool belt.
I hope that you can use this thinking about your ex consistency to go out into the world and to build products that matter. All right. That's it for the bottom-up skills podcast that's around.
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