How concept sprints can improve customer-experience innovation
The
concept sprint is a fast five-day process for cross-functional teams to
brainstorm, define, and model new approaches to business issues. Here’s how it
works.
Companies don’t have an “idea” problem; most companies have plenty of good ideas. But they
do have a “get the idea to market” problem. That’s because business leaders too
often put too much weight on analysis at a time where they have the least
information, spend time aligning stakeholders rather than moving quickly to
practical evaluation, or don’t pay enough attention to what products can create
real value.
A concept sprint addresses that shortfall
through a set of activities that turn an “idea” into something that has a
greater chance of seeing the light of day and succeeding in the marketplace.
While this might seem like semantic quibbling, we believe that focusing on
concepts over ideas gets to the core of what businesses need to do to improve
their innovation process.
Not unlike Google Ventures’ Design Sprint,
the concept sprint tailors the essence of a start-up’s innovation culture
(agility, speed, and fearlessness) to the business realities of larger, more
complex incumbents. A concept sprint is grounded in a deep understanding of the
relevant business function or sector and is geared to produce an output that is
not only user-centric but vetted for tangible business impact. It is a five-day
process that greatly accelerates what is all too often a laborious process of
building consensus because it results in a workable prototype that has been
tested with real users and in clear requirements for implementation. It’s a
repeatable methodology that works
seamlessly with a well-implemented agile operating model, a
key element in building successful innovation into a core capability of an
organization.
A Fortune-50 consumer healthcare
conglomerate driving a multiyear digital transformation used concept sprints to
launch several new digital products, such as the development of a sales
dashboard. Intense focus on sales reps revealed the need for a mobile
application that dynamically updated data with the most recent client
information from back-end servers. Testing a working prototype in the field
with salespeople helped the team quickly hone in on functionality to address
just the key questions—such as What features do competitors offer?—that
salespeople needed to close a sale.
The concept sprint approach allowed the
team to target the product features with the highest business value. It also
helped kick-start the business’s shift toward an agile, product-oriented
organization. Concept sprints were an instrumental component of a
transformation that drove a 30 percent improvement in productivity and a 25
percent decrease in IT costs.
How a
concept sprint works
The concept sprint is an iterative process
that occurs over five phases.
Phase 1: Understand
In Phase 1, your goals are to discover as
much as you can about your highest-priority users, define and prioritize the
problems they want solved, and align on your core opportunity. To create a
compelling solution, it’s critical to first understand your user’s current
experience,and to empathize with their needs.
With this in hand, you can develop your
core vision for your future solution, which must articulate the problems you
want to solve. This “opportunity statement” becomes your guidepost for the
remainder of the process. Identify how you will define and measure success via
KPIs and other metrics.
Key questions:
·
What is the user’s experience today? Sit with
users to identify their common motivations, goals, and behaviors to build
end-user personas. Understand what is delightful, confusing, or frustrating
about their current experiences. Analyzing usage data and observing customer
behavior is crucial for a complete picture. Create personas based on the
insights you develop. These insights allow your team to identify patterns and
to prioritize the areas for improvement. They will also ground the decisions
you make in the following phases.
·
How else do users solve the problem? It’s
important to examine the different ways users tackle their current problems,
and the different products they choose to do so. By observing any workarounds,
you can unlock possible directions for future products or solutions.
·
What is the business problem we’re
actually solving for? Without a clear vision of the business problem and its
root causes, concept sprinting can actually destroy value. In many cases, we’ve
seen companies leave out important parts of the problem, or worse, miss the
actual problem entirely. A company might try to solve for user pain points in a
particular customer segment, for example, while overlooking meaningful
cost-to-serve challenges for that segment. Or companies might miss an
opportunity to use the same offering to target an additional segment.
Activity checklist:
·
Spend time with your highest-priority
users to create user personas.
·
Map out their current journeys, and identify
their main pain points.
·
Develop your opportunity statement (also
identifying business challenges and opportunities) and your problem statement.
·
Define your measures for success/KPIs.
Common pitfall: Many companies assume they know their customers
and apply past learnings to the present day. This commonly leads to false
understanding of the user. Companies also often don’t spend enough time framing
the key problem to be solved.
Phase 2: Concept
Brainstorming has traditionally been the
way companies generate new ideas, but the outputs tend to be random, limited in
scope, and untethered to the business goals. More modern techniques (such as
“colliding” different points of view, including user, technology, and
business-model lenses) have proven more effective at channeling creativity to
better meet user needs and prioritize overarching themes based on expert facts,
customer insights, and your knowledge of the problem area.
Focus squarely on solving the biggest user
problems you identified in phase 1. Develop concepts individually at first, and
then come together to share and build on the best ideas. The team should select
three to four concepts they’d like to explore further. As a group, consider the
ideal future journey for the user in each of these concepts. Then create a
basic wireframe that maps out the user steps and highlights a few “signature
moments” (or key interactions).
Note that we have seen a myopic focus on
customer journeys backfire because it can lead people to narrow their thinking
to how to improve existing journeys, rather than removing steps in that
journey, adding new ones, or developing completely new approaches.
Key questions:
·
What innovations have inspired you
recently? Discussing how other companies are innovating—inside and outside the
industry you’re directly focused on—opens the door to thinking more creatively.
It’s important to discuss if and how different companies are currently
addressing your problem. Note what they are doing well, doing poorly, and what
they’ve missed.
·
What could the new journey to solve the
user’s problems look like? Involve a mix of people from different departments,
with different levels of expertise in developing customer journeys to ensure
diversity of thinking.
Checklist:
·
Brainstorm new ways to solve user problems
and meet user needs/desires.
·
Define an ideal future journey.
·
Sketch wireframes for a few concepts that
significantly improve signature moments and call out key interaction problems.
·
Common pitfall: Teams often want to solve every problem for all
their users at once. The real impact comes from meeting the core needs of
high-value users that will alleviate pain points and deliver moments of joy.
Phase 3: Align
The team refines its best ideas until they
arrive at a well-defined user-experience journey they think is most intuitive
and will have the greatest impact. This phase includes assessing technical
feasibility and ROI. From here, the group zeroes in on the most promising
concept or two.
Key questions:
·
Which opportunity is ideal for our
audience, salable to leadership, and technically feasible? This is where a
strong combination of designers, developers, and business leaders can help
assess the best and most viable ideas. The teams should use agreed-on metrics
to guide their decisions. If necessary, the sprint group can vote on which
concept or two to pursue.
·
How can we visualize our favorite
solutions? Use storyboards to outline the high-level user experience you’ve
decided on in a visual way. Be sure to break it into smaller elements, and
storyboard each to eliminate potential misunderstandings.
·
Will this idea generate real value for the
business? It is easy to get swept away by exciting ideas. Unless they generate
value for the business, however, ideas can be a tremendous waste of resources
and energies. The team needs to provide valid estimates of the potential
business value based on a thorough analysis of the marketplace, customer needs,
and relevant trends.
Checklist:
·
Create storyboards and align on what to
design in the prototype.
·
Note assumptions to test and risks to be
aware of going forward.
·
Estimate business impact (expected ROI) of
agreed-upon solution.
Common pitfall: Many teams align on the best idea to satisfy their
users’ needs, but they don’t align it with the organization’s needs. Checking
your solution across user, business, and stakeholder needs will keep you safe
from blind spots.
Phase 4: Building a prototype
The only way to tell if a solution will do
what you want it to do is to build a working prototype. The problem is that
most companies think that’s too expensive or time consuming. But technology has
evolved to such a degree that designers can create prototypes cheaply and
quickly. The goal is to create a low-fidelity, clickable prototype based on the
wireframes and storyboards to help your team develop a clear understanding of
what the end product or service will be.
Key question:
How do we get these concepts quickly into
a format that users can test and react to? Mock up clickable prototypes that
simulate each stage of potential user interaction with the product or service.
Checklist:
·
Complete a simple, testable prototype and
a brief user testing guide (see sidebar, "What to consider before
implementing your roadmap").
·
Write a vision for the MVP, including
high-level product backlog.
·
Outline a plan to kick off development.
·
Common Pitfall: Companies often build out a complicated prototype
with too many features. It’s critical to pinpoint exactly how and where your
user problem is addressed in the flow, and be deliberate about which feature
you are focusing on at each step in the user experience.
Phase 5: Validate
In this phase, you will rapidly test your
prototype with target users, observe their reactions in real time, and adapt
the prototype to see if it solves their problems. Many validation efforts don’t
lead to scalable impact, so it’s crucial for the concept sprint team to make
clear choices about which assumptions have indeed been validated, which new
ones should be tested, and—importantly—how the next concept sprint will
increase fidelity or advance the concept in some meaningful way.
Testing can be done in person or remotely
by phone and screen share, but the goal is to talk one-on-one with your end
users and let them give you raw feedback on your prototype. Aim to conduct
tests with two to three end users who fall into each of the personas identified
on Day 1.
This is also the time to bring leadership
in to provide feedback and give guidance on how to move forward. At the end of
this stage, you should have a workable prototype and a roadmap for the design and development of
the actual digital solution.
Key questions:
·
What do users think about our prototype of
the concept? By watching how users interact with the prototype, you can pick up
on the slightest nuances that will impact the solutions you build to make their
lives easier. Document all your findings, learnings, and ideas to improve your
prototype—whether your testing is filmed, audio recorded, or simply noted on
paper. These insights are the basis of the next iterations of your concept.
·
How do we actually execute our vision?
This phase develops a blueprint for further development and refinement of your
concept. First, figure out the people and skills you need to bring the concept
to life. Technical architects and experts should drive the discussion of which
features to build first, the development team and talent needed to build them,
and what the architecture might look like. They should also set up cost
estimates and a timeline for the build.
Checklist for validation:
·
Specify the assumptions to test.
·
Capture the results of the week and
develop a clear storyline for leadership.
·
Develop clear next steps for further
building out and refining the concept.
·
Involve the right agile practitioners,
designers, developers, and SMEs to bring the concept to market.
Common pitfall: Many teams explain their product up-front and
overprepare their end users, or ask leading questions to get the answers they
want. Keep questions open-ended, and allow the user to organically experience
your product.
A concept sprint may initially appear like
an overwhelming project for one week. But in practice, we’ve seen this approach
radically increase success rates, reduce risk, break orthodoxies, and
accelerate innovation—key capabilities for companies that are looking to thrive
in the digital age.
By Kent Gryskiewicz, Hugo Sarrazin, Conrad
Voorsanger, and Hyo Yeon
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/how-concept-sprints-can-improve-customer-experience-innovation?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1803&hlkid=496651db68e948dfae96d894bcfc122f&hctky=1627601&hdpid=111869fa-b2e4-4964-a865-c60b808d25cf
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