Launch Big Ideas In Sets
Most of us have tendencies to think big and go big. If you visioning a big project, you still want to get development started early, and get to market as soon as possible. Most such projects never can have well-defined requirements, and usually initiate with the caveat that the project scope statements are “flexible” and not fully defined. So, the key question is how do you start and make the least mistakes?
Commercializing big products in chunks definitely helps monetize value, improve the experience, and save time and money. The overhead cost in terms of process and management is minimal leading to a quicker but leads to lower quality result.
BREAKDOWNS BEFORE BREAKTHROUGHS
HAVE YOU EVER HEARD of the concept of a “breakdown before a breakthrough?” It’s this idea that, sometimes, life gets harder before it gets easier. It’s also a way of reframing our thoughts about what is happening when we are struggling with growth–whether personal or business-related.
Breaking down your deliverables enables projects where the business requirements are easily digestible by the team, and easier to quantify to be successfully developed. Fast-moving, cutting-edge developments should be quickly coded and tested, and any mistakes should be easily rectified.
STRICT BUT LIGHT CONTROLS
Implement a lightly controlled method that insists on frequent updating of the progress in work through regular meetings. Thus there is clear visibility of the project development with an iterative approach. It is easier to deliver a quality product in a scheduled time.
SET CONTINUOUS FEEDBACK
Due to short development cycles and constant feedback, it becomes easier to cope with the changes. Daily meetings make it possible to measure individual productivity. This leads to the improvement in the productivity of each of the team members. Issues are identified well in advance through the daily meetings and hence can be speedily resolved.
GET A CEO OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Project stakeholders are mostly tempted to keep demanding new functionality. Project creep seems to be a formality and far less understood as at times even the smallest change disrupts output. A clear methodology that expresses clear requirements and assignments mitigates scope creep, delays, and costs.
Build the Right Features in the Right Priority Order
As we progress through building products, big or small, we have to manage its priorities. It’s easy to lose track of them costing us time and money. Importantly, we need to take the guesswork out of deciding which feature requests matter most to our customers.
HAVE A CLEAR SENSE OF DIRECTION
Your team and product advocates with the right blend of research, synthesis, imagination, and facilitation to help your organization establish and rally around a direction. Whether you’re designing a product from scratch or trying to figure out your next move, you know it’s critical to have a clear sense of purpose.
DEFINE VALUE AND ITS COST
Before you begin prioritizing, it’s helpful if you understand the customer value for each initiative. The customer value should be rooted in evidence that you’ve gathered from customers rather than your opinions. Rank features based on business value. When you begin, have a rough estimate of the cost. Even T-shirt sizing of “small” “medium” and “large” will be helpful during the process.
INTRODUCE CUSTOMER VOTING
Keep your end-users involved in the process, driving the very best ideas to the top. Prioritize which requests to deliver in future releases and increase customer satisfaction. Giving voice to your customers voices can actively determine the future direction of your products. Close the feedback loop.
GOAL-DIRECTED DESIGNS
Designing a product with goals to evaluate, engage, and evolve brings an opportunity for your audience to fall in love. Goal-directed design granting early experience, clarifying behavior, and enabling agility with product construction. Achieve this by creating prototypes, videos, storyboards, and presentations we allow you to vividly depict the direction you’re heading to your team, customers, investors, and other important audiences.
3 Sillars of Entrepreneurship
Support, Scale and Sell are the three quality pillars that can successfully launch, manage and accelerate any venture. Creatively, we call them Sillars – the three Pillars with ‘S’s’. Executing with a commitment to these values makes climbing any challenge with confidence. And, setting early trends to drive quality within these pillars will set you up for success. Quality of work, quality in integrity, quality in response or reaction.. go forward with courage, and aim for at least A-grade in these and possibly a lower expectation in whatever else surrounds your needs.
FIRST SILLAR – HAVE AND BE
AN INCREDIBLE SUPPORT
Why ‘support’ as a pillar?
Support is a powerful word and is the primary pillar that drives emotional attachment, builds superior relations, and constructs social leaders. Exceptional service has unimaginably accelerated companies at shocking speeds. We all are inspired by the great journeys of Zappos, Starbucks, Virgin, Vodafone, etc. These are companies that put customers support as their #1 priority.
Everything about your products or services offered is really in support of others. This is about both giving and receiving support from your customers, employees, or partners. Support is inherently something organizations should start thinking about from the beginning. Your support always starts the contribution of serving others authentically.
BE ORGANIZED AROUND YOUR VISION
How do you become the undisputed support champion? You have to be grounded in your ways of providing support and truly helping others. This starts with a vision – a clear statement that reflects how you can be of service. Always choose the higher purpose that is bigger than ‘you’, and stand in the contribution of ways that makes a difference.
“Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.”
ADJUST, CONFRONT AND CONQUER
Leadership shows up in commitment and quality in your vision that contagiously transforms your success. It empowers and connects opportunities that serve your vision. It’s imperative to have an improvement and requirements collector to define, manage and implement.
The defining mission should be surrounded by high-quality, reliable, and friendly service. This goes with everything you do. We should seek to create solutions to problems, and be completely open to feedback from customers, whether it supports or contradicts what they believe is the right thing to do. When we speak about receiving the support it’s really about opening up to looking from Outside In. Turnover growth and development decisions to your customers. Let that feedback penetrate into your organizational structure. Roots of growth and prosperity lie deep within your company, not just customer-facing resources. Always prioritize a feedback mechanism.
It’s not about what you ask, it’s whom you ask.
SECOND SELLAR – SELL
WHAT GETS MEASURED, GETS MANAGED
Accounting records when personally supervised turn into your ability to easily manage larger operational budgets. The bottom line for your bottom line is “watch the nickels and dimes, and the dollars will take care of themselves.” Take a little time and effort to track and manage your expenses – personal as well as business.
If you want to maximize your profits the best way to do this is to keep track of every single expenditure you make. By doing this you will become aware of how much you are spending in each expense category and, more importantly, whether it is getting out of line or not.
Every business that has customers needs to recognize customer patterns and behaviors. It identifies many cracks that you might not foresee. Which product or issue is causing most issues? When do customers log in online most? What are the usability patterns?
THIRD SELLAR – SCALE
Become Agile – Communicator, Learner, Results.
Scaling is really about designing adaptive organizations, managing change, and innovations. This starts with every person being agile and sophisticated in their delivery techniques. Agility gets enabled in all variations of effective communicator, filtered learner, and provides focused results. Being responsive
Control techniques become more sophisticated as the firm matures. By the success stage, leaders must know what motivates employees or bring in managers who can. This all requires the need for active communication.
You are an intelligent being that can filter your learning. Let’s be real, we are not going to grab the internet full of information in a short time or even a year. That is the beauty of effective search engines – it’s your tool for your own backyard – “The Internet”. Your front porch is your own business.
6 Steps To Drive Product Innovation
Product development has many characteristics and practices. But from a software implementation standpoint, each has its own recipe of practices, terminology, and tactics. There are many online papers that describe and deliberate on various contenders like Scrum, Feature Driven Development, Extreme Programming, etc, and our mission in this paper is to illustrate importance as it matters to our customers from each of the development stages.
Development methodology focuses the team on delivering value to the customer, and on the efficiency of the ‘Value Stream’. Main principles behind product construction in a lightweight agile project management framework with broad applicability for managing and controlling iterative and incremental projects of all types. The main objectives are as follows:
- Eliminating Waste (Time and Effort)
- Amplifying Learning
- Deciding as Late as Possible (Yes, that’s right)
- Delivering as Fast as Possible
IDENTIFY AND FOCUS ON THE BIG OPPORTUNITIES.
Engagement goals identify big opportunities all start with engagement that provides valuable advice on the market, products, technology investment, operations, and portfolio management.
Identification goals concentrate on the understandability of both customers and requirements for the product. The requirements understanding is proven through various visual representations. Get your team to help you think strategically about the key differences between your solution and others in the market and the unique/key business value you are delivering. The goal is to achieve a result and the purpose of the engagement model is to help you remain competitive in today’s market by addressing the changing trends. The role is primarily dealt with by an engagement manager who has broad experience both from a business and technical perspective.
Deliverables: Capture and respond to ideas, discussions, community forums, and questions. Requirements are baselined at a high level early in the project. Requirements are planned and delivered in short, fixed-length time-boxes, also referred to as iterations, and requirements for projects are prioritized using simple rules:
- M – Must have requirements
- S – Should have if at all possible
- C – Could have but not critical
- W – Won’t have this time, but potentially later
PRODUCE INNOVATIVE EXPERIENCES.
Stage Description: Great design goes nowhere without great execution. Our integrated product development approach incorporates aspects of agile and lean product management and development with Goal-Directed Design techniques to plan, test, and refine product ideas.
Goals: Development services are all about working through the details to craft a product or service to deliver to the market. We build off your best ideas, help clarify them, and inject our own fresh thinking. It doesn’t matter how big or small the problem is: The objective is to define and refine planned functions, see around corners, and ensure that the solutions are cohesive, compelling, and perform well.
Deliverables: You get working code and clear visibility throughout the project with early and continuous delivery of working software focused on meeting your business needs and users’ goals.
FALL IN LOVE WITH YOUR PRODUCT.
Stage Description: Application design and development services that cover the entire solution to operationalize this in a production environment covering logical, physical, operational network aspects (like performance, reliability, security, billing, etc).
Goals: With Smartly Built solutions, you can offer seamless designed unique capabilities and end-user experiences across all applications. You want a world-class user experience. We know that crafting one requires up-front planning and execution on countless details. Our design services take a variety of forms depending on what you need.
Deliverables: End-to-end verification of the entire application solution that validates that all components of the application are operating correctly. Eases the transition to new platforms and applications by providing a safe and secure means of pre-populating subscriber data stores while minimizing service disruption and subscriber inconvenience.
ARTICULATE COMPELLING STORY.
Stage Description: Engage your team and even customers with innovative interactive experiences: For a lead to become sales to evolve into mutually beneficial partnerships between you and your customers, it takes more than just getting your message out there. We help start our engagement with interactive action-oriented experiences that customers identify with and they identify you with, yielding both customer satisfaction and retention in a product.
Goals: Our goal is to help you discover the unique value of your offering, connect to your audience with a compelling story, and engage your customers with innovative interactive experiences. We approach all of our engagements with one objective: To help our clients create world-class interactive experiences. The role is primarily dealt with user-experience architects.
Deliverables: We distribute design engagement with various study groups – one that is not involved, one that is heavily involved, and the one that will be the target. We all gain a better understanding of product needs and priorities, empowering the team and building solution integrity.
COLLABORATE TO GROW YOUR BUSINESS.
Stage Description: Helping customers through their business transformation requires the ability to deliver on the full customer business needs. A complete development portfolio across IT combined with managed operations to address major concerns from day 1. With an open-access approach, 3rd parties and Web 2.0 developers can create innovative services for your customers to increase your profitability.
Deliverables: Publish roadmaps using software with an online, read-only format to keep everyone up-to-date and informed of future plans. Great teams benefit from having a broader contextual awareness of their workload. Stakeholders benefit from understanding current priorities and timing, enabling them to provide better feedback into the planning cycles with respect to how their requests stack up against existing priorities.
LISTEN AND EVOLVE WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS.
We travel light in these engagements, making this approach an especially good fit for start-ups, agile development shops, and anyone who needs an injection of new thinking or time-sensitive execution. The building block for any product construction is bringing together different domains of expertise.
Your team should be able to lead ideation activities, provide an expert assessment of current product or design idea, help out with detailed design, create design language studies, sketch concepts to explore alternative approaches or any combination of these activities.
Or take a deep look at the problem and craft something game-changing with a design blueprint. Nevertheless, start by understanding the opportunity space. I suggest exploring a variety of approaches, developing a clear vision, and then diving into the nitty-gritty details to think through every interaction and to refine the visual expression of the product.
