THE AGILE CULTURE: LEADING THROUGH TRUST AND OWNERSHIP (2014)

Chapter 6. Business Alignment Tools

The Big Ideas

To get to Energy and Innovation we must align team ownership to what creates a unique value proposition, in line with the goals of the business.

The team must be clear on the product’s purpose. Is it aligned with the goals of the business?

Get everyone—stakeholders, delivery teams, and business interests—to understand and agree to what generates value for their customers.

Are We Aligned with the Company’s Business Goals?

For a quite a long time now, when research organizations survey to find the top issues and opportunities for IT leaders, misalignment of team goals with the organization is one of the top responses. For quite a long time now, when research organizations survey to find what company presidents believe is the most pressing issue with their IT leaders, alignment with the organization is one of the top responses. It seems alignment just might be a pretty big deal.

Why does alignment matter? Because a critical component of ownership is knowing what to own. Think of the power that comes from an entire organization of people working together, in concert, to achieve the organization’s goals. These are people who understand the unique, compelling value proposition of the organization and who can directly link everything they do to the organization’s goals and value proposition.

When we understand how we align, we make better decisions about which products to develop, which processes to improve, and which features and functions to include. Our focus changes from getting things done to getting the right things done. Without alignment, ownership suffers.

In this chapter, we present three tools you can use to improve alignment. All three work together to cover most of your alignment needs. As you read about these tools, think about how you can apply them to your current projects. Think about how you can use them to help your teams take ownership.

Purpose-Based Alignment Model

In this book, we have talked about the importance of increasing ownership. Ideally, we align our team’s ownership with the purpose and goals of the organization. But how can we, and they, know what those are?

Our Purpose-Based Alignment Model, detailed in our first book, Stand Back and Deliver [1], is a simple (but sometimes not an easy) way for us to define the design goals of our projects, products, processes, and organizations. The tool provides a vocabulary and model that teams can use to build a common, aligned understanding of the business goals.

The model is shown in Figure 6.1.

FIGURE 6.1 Purpose-Based Alignment Model

Using Purpose-Based Alignment, we jointly look at our processes, business rules, plans, et cetera in two dimensions: Market Differentiation and Mission Critical. Because Purpose-Based Alignment is a very useful way to align to organizational goals, let’s take a few moments to describe the resulting categories.

The processes or plans that are both Market Differentiating and Mission Critical are those things that create our competitive advantage and link directly to our strategy. These are the things we must do better than anyone else if we want to win new customers and gain market share. This is what defines our unique value proposition. To ensure the proper degree of focus on the differentiating things, we should limit how many of our activities fall into this category. It is important that we focus on market leadership for only these few things. To be aligned, we focus our innovation and creativity on these products and processes.

The vast majority of our work is Mission Critical and not Market Differentiating. However, we must have it to go to market. The purpose of such activities is to be at parity with the marketplace and customer expectations—to hold our current market share. For example, unless we are in the payroll business, most of us do not create competitive advantage because of our payroll processing excellence. Thus, we should not spend time or resources thinking about how to make our payroll processing better than it has to be. But we cannot be payroll processing laggards. If we cannot pay our employees correctly or on time, they just might decide to take their skills elsewhere. In practice, we want to implement simple, best-practices-based business rules for these parity activities. It is common to misalign to the parity processes, practices, and products. Too often, organizations and teams overinvest in parity. But we also cannot underinvest in parity.

And the gaps could be areas where we are currently better than best practices. Remember, when it comes to parity, we do not want to overinvest or overcomplicate. We should also avoid any parity risks. Because of the mission-critical nature of these parity activities, we don’t want to be taking any chances. Finally, we can generate potentially incredible amounts of capacity from our parity products, systems, and processes as we have typically overinvested in them over the years.

To optimize the business value of parity activities, we use the following parity rules:

Standardize—minimize exception handling.

Simplify—complex parity processes rob us of both resources and agility.

Adopt best practices—we don’t need to invent parity; we just need to learn it.

It might be possible for us to create competitive advantage without having to develop mission-critical capabilities. For such things, we seek and engage partners. For example, we once worked with a publisher that created competitive advantage with its unique content and partnered with a technology company to extend this content advantage by creating its market’s first digital capabilities—capabilities the publisher had no desire to create on its own. But such partnerships to create competitive advantage are rare.

Finally, there might be some things that are neither Market Differentiating nor Mission Critical. We should minimize the time and resources spent on these “Who cares?” activities.

Four Questions

Purpose-Based Alignment is a powerful alignment tool if we can correctly define what is differentiating for us. To get that answer, we use the Four Questions. These are

Who do we serve? This defines our target markets and market segments.

What do they need and want most? For each segment we determine what matters to them.

What do we do—better than anyone else—to meet those needs and wants? This is where we align our organization to market needs. This is where we specifically define how we create competitive advantage.

What is the best way for us to deliver our products and services? Sometimes it is our delivery model that creates our competitive advantage.

Accurate alignment increases the likelihood that we will not underinvest in what creates competitive advantage while also not overinvesting in parity activities. The net result is accelerated growth at lower costs and risks.

Anyone can use the Four Questions to identify what creates sustainable competitive advantage. If the senior leadership has done this, the team can align to that. But the local leadership and teams can ask and answer the Four Questions themselves in order to understand and align to the organization’s unique value proposition. With the differentiating defined, our next step is to turn this into decision filters that we can use for all current and future decisions. These decision filters are invaluable. We can share them throughout our team and the organization to ensure that everyone has a common understanding of our priorities. For every product, process, project, feature, or function, we can use our decision filters to ensure that we align the product, process, project, feature, or function to how we create competitive advantage.

If differentiating for us is our “one-stop-shop” product platform, our decision filter might be

Will [this] help us innovate our product platform?

If we are pondering an enhancement to our internal benefits program, we can ask, “Will enhancements to our benefits program help us innovate our product platform?” No. This does not mean that the benefits enhancements are not a priority. This means that we will follow the parity rules and simplify, standardize, and base on best practices our benefits enhancements. There is no need to waste our innovation on our benefits program.

If we create competitive advantage because we have the best market data in the world, our decision filter might be

Will [this] help us gather better data?

If our product backlog includes a project to develop predictive data modeling, we might want to do something truly innovative as we design our predictive modeling tool.

This purpose alignment thing sounds easy but it can sometimes be a challenge. There is a natural desire in all of us to think that what we do is differentiating and deserves innovation. After all, how do we think we ended up with so much complexity in our parity processes? One of the ways to test our decisions about how we create competitive advantage is to use the Billboard Test.

The Billboard Test

If something really is differentiating, we should focus our sales, marketing, and advertising on this product, service, or capability. In other words, would we ever post what we think is differentiating on a billboard?

Looking at the decision filter examples in the previous section, would we ever purchase a billboard to tell the world about our employee benefits program? Hopefully not.

But would we invest in a billboard that describes how we use predictive modeling to improve the quality of our data? You bet we would.

Note that purpose alignment does not define the priority of a product, project, process, feature, or function—just whether or not it deserves innovation. To determine priority we use the Business Value Model (which we describe in the next section).

Using the Purpose-Based Alignment Model with your team, define the differentiators for your project/product and what the parity is. Does it align with the business goals of the organization? Do the differentiators align? Do the parity activities align with business parity?

Along with the decision filters, having a well-known billboard is a powerful way of sharing the vision, which enables our teams to take aligned ownership.

At the risk of either boring you or being completely redundant in our explanation of how to use the Purpose-Based Alignment Model to achieve organization and project alignment, we offer a final example.

Not too long ago, I was asked by the CEO of a medical device company to help that company select a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The company needed to upgrade its systems to improve its margins and throughput. But how could it do this in a market-aligned way?

At that time, the company had gathered the requirements for the new system and compiled these into a very nice software selection spreadsheet. The spreadsheet contained just over 300 rows. Each row described a needed piece of functionality. The spreadsheet also had columns for the functionality, a weighted score for the functionality (between 0.1 and 0.9 depending on the criticality of the functionality), and a score for each of the major software vendors. This score would measure the excellence of that vendor’s handling of the required functionality. A piece of the spreadsheet looked like what is shown in Figure 6.2.

FIGURE 6.2 Example of the Software Selection Scoring Spreadsheet

During the software selection, the company would send a request for information to each of the vendors and then, using the vendors’ responses, fill in the vendor scores and make their decision.

With the permission of the CEO, I asked for time with the management team. We met in one of their conference rooms. I explained purpose alignment as I drew it on the whiteboard.

“How do you create competitive advantage? What specifically do you do better than anyone else?” I asked.

I then asked each of the Four Questions, and we dove into the discussion of how this company won in the marketplace. There was a range of answers, but we quickly centered on the design of their products. They made products that were engineered for ease of use. Their products were much simpler for surgeons to use. The focus of their engineering teams was to find ways to shorten the time it took for surgeons to complete a surgery.

With this in mind, we agreed to the company’s decision filter: Will [this] enable surgeons to simplify and shorten surgeries? If so, the company would innovate. If not, it was a parity activity, decision, process, et cetera.

The company could now use this decision filter to align any and all decisions to how the company created its unique value in the marketplace. The next step was to use this decision filter to align the ERP selection and implementation project.

Recall that the company needed to improve its margins and throughput and felt that this project was critical in achieving those goals. But what is the best way to achieve those goals? By aligning the project around how the company created competitive advantage.

Would any of the more than 300 desired pieces of functionality allow surgeons to simplify and shorten surgeries? Would, for example, superior inventory costing simplify and shorten surgeries? No way. Would better lot tracking? Not likely.

In other words, their software selection was a parity decision and as such, should follow the parity rules of

Standardize

Simplify

Adopt best practices

In looking at the desired functionality, we could not see a single item that would simplify and shorten surgeries. And because each of the three vendors’ products supported industry best practices for all of the functionality, we decided to take functionality completely out of the decision. It did not matter who did lot tracking better. All that mattered was that lot tracking was present. Did one of the vendors do inventory costing better? That did not matter because parity is the world of doing things as well as others and “better than” might create complexity.

To select the software, we brainstormed and prioritized considerations (which we describe in the Business Value Model in the next section). The number one consideration was time to benefit followed by licensing and implementation costs. We used these to select the vendor that could come into the project with an existing configuration designed for a medical device company. And because we had agreed that all of the functionality was in the parity category, we also agreed that there would not be any customizations to the software. This approach resulted in a very successful, lower-cost, faster project. This was all because the company recognized the difference between differentiating and parity.

Business Value Model

We want our teams, when they take ownership, to make decisions that align to our business value. But, before they can, we and they need to know the answer to the following question: What is value and how can we define it?

Let me answer this question with a very succinct answer:

We create value when we focus our innovation on what creates our competitive advantage, and then we do almost everything else just well enough.

Stated slightly differently, work does not create value if it does not directly support our competitive advantage. Likewise, we do not create value if we do everything else better than it has to be or if we do it poorly.

This is simple in theory but difficult in practice. Our natural tendency is to attempt to do all important activities in an exceptional way—even if doing so reduces the value we deliver. To help us make decisions that align to our business value, we have developed the Business Value Model (BVM). The BVM is designed to guide every decision we make about what creates value. We can use the model to help teams understand the business priorities. Working with our teams to build a well-understood, common view of the business value priorities of our options provides a powerful guide to our teams, enabling them to take ownership that is well aligned with the organization’s goals.

This section provides an overview of the BVM. If you would like a more detailed explanation, please see our previous book, Stand Back and Deliver [1].

The BVM consists of three drivers of value: (1) Purpose, (2) Costs and Benefits, and (3) Considerations, as shown in Figure 6.3.

FIGURE 6.3 Business Value Model

Purpose

In the previous section, we introduced and showed some examples of purpose alignment. In the context of the BVM, the important distinction is that line between the differentiating and the parity activities. We generate value when we do the differentiating things better than anyone else. We generate value when we do the parity things in a parity way (simplified, streamlined, standardized, and based on best practices).

Costs and Benefits

We are all familiar with traditional cost/benefit analysis. However, cost/benefit analysis only works when we can, with some precision, quantify the costs and the benefits. Because cost/benefit analysis is typically some type of calculation, this calculation fails if we lack cost/benefit precision—and in a world with an uncertain future and where ambiguity is the only certainty, this calculation fails the vast majority of the time. In our experience, while we might be able to reasonably estimate costs, the benefit side of the calculation often comes down to an educated guess—or worse, a really bad guess. Or even worse, a number that we know in advance will meet the investment criteria! If the uncertainty in cost is ±25 percent and the uncertainty in benefit is ±50 percent (both fairly reasonable estimates), then the uncertainty in the cost/benefit ratio is close to ±85 percent! Essentially, a random number! In other words, be careful with how you use cost/benefit calculations in your decision making. If you do not have and cannot acquire reasonably precise numbers, your calculations will be of little value. And if you are depending on uncertain calculations to make your decisions, your decisions might also be of little value. The BVM anticipates these problems with cost/benefit calculations by including considerations. If your uncertainty is on this order, then you will have to make an appropriate judgment call to decide which figures to use while recognizing the significant uncertainty in the estimate.

Considerations

We don’t want to ignore costs, benefits, or any other driver of value just because we cannot quantify it, and so the BVM includes Considerations. Considerations are the drivers or inhibitors of value that we cannot quantify. Depending on the process, project, or activity, Considerations might include

Time to benefit

Market window

Alignment to goals

Compliance

Market uncertainty

Technical uncertainty

Technical complexity

Market complexity

Internal capability

Partner capability

And a whole host of others.

When we define value, we use the BVM as follows:

Be clear on what is the organization’s sustainable competitive advantage. This is what defines our differentiating activities. We then map our projects, processes, products, features, functions, et cetera to differentiating versus parity and establish the design goal. Is this something we should do better than anyone else or as well as everyone else?

With some precision, estimate the quantifiable costs and benefits.

Brainstorm and prioritize the Considerations for our projects, processes, products, features, functions, et cetera.

This combination of Purpose, Costs and Benefits, and Considerations defines the BVM for our specific projects, processes, products, features, functions, et cetera. This is not a number but a market- and strategy-aligned decision framework we can use to make a whole host of decisions. With this model we can determine which actions will generate the highest value. If we do the highest-value things first, we achieve Value-First.

Perhaps an example will help.

We were working with a product team that developed software for the healthcare industry. This company was growing rapidly and building toward a hoped-for initial public offering. The team had a nearly endless backlog of requests and needed to know how to prioritize the backlog. Answer: Value-First. But what defined value for this team?

As a first step, we answered the Four Questions:

1. Who do we serve?

2. What do they want and need most?

3. What do we do—better than anyone else—to meet those needs and wants?

4. What is the best way for us to deliver our products and services?

This company differentiated themselves in the market by offering an integrated portfolio of healthcare software products. The company’s competitors each had point solutions that were better than any of the individual products in the company’s integrated portfolio, but no one could touch them when it came to product integration. From the perspective of purpose alignment, this company needed to constantly innovate in integration and quickly add new, parity products to their portfolio. This meant that everything else the company and team did was parity. At the company level, the parity activities included their internal IT operations, their customer service, their accounting, et cetera. At the product level, the parity activities included the functionality of the individual products in the portfolio (they could approximately mimic the features developed by others). With these design goals established, we next looked at their product backlog.

Their backlog included both differentiating and parity projects. We quickly sorted through the planned functionality of these projects and identified some opportunities for a change in design and focus.

One of the projects in their backlog was a customer-requested product that seemed particularly challenging. This product anticipated using several bleeding-edge technologies to deliver new capabilities for this large and very demanding customer. From the perspective of purpose alignment, this product did not fit. The company did not develop or deliver any bleeding-edge point solutions. Yet, there were other considerations—they wanted to satisfy this customer.

Another project delivered integrations that directly supported their ease-of-use goals. But the bulk of the portfolio consisted of projects that clearly fit in the parity category. For these, the design goal was clear but how should they be prioritized?

We started with the customer-requested product. In terms of business value this project would be a one-off that consumed quite a bit of resources with little direct benefit—except for keeping this large and important customer happy. Logic required that they drop this project. Emotion (and the vice president of sales) demanded they do the project. Before taking this decision any further, we agreed to first brainstorm and prioritize the considerations we would use to rationalize and prioritize the portfolio. After a bit of discussion, we listed, in order:

Aligns to long- and short-term goals. The most important short-term goal being to increase margins in anticipation of our initial public offering.

Improves our customer satisfaction scores.

Improves our ease-of-use competitive advantage.

Based on these, the priorities became easier. The highest priority was to complete the several parity projects that improved margins. The customer-requested project would improve the customer satisfaction score—but for just one customer—and so was given a low priority. The vice president of sales agreed to work with that customer to reduce some of their most challenging requirements because those were what created the need for the bleeding-edge technologies. Finally, the project to improve ease of use was given the lowest priority. How can this be? After all, shouldn’t a project that improves competitive advantage always have the highest priority? Not if we remember that both differentiating and parity are equally important. At that point, the company’s focus was on getting ready for an initial public offering, and boosting margins was the highest priority, a business goal. That might change in the future and so the team agreed to review and revise their considerations on a regular basis.

You might have noticed that nowhere in this discussion did the team include known costs or benefits. That’s because they could not precisely determine either of those for any of these projects. Remember, we include—and possibly rely on—considerations to help us analyze costs and benefits that we cannot precisely know.

How about one more example to show how the BVM quickly yields quality decisions? Our company was spending nearly $1 million a year on conference-calling services. As we grew, this amount would only get bigger. I called the team together to talk about what we could do to reduce these costs—while not making anything else worse!

The team used the BVM to create a framework for their ownership of the project. They started with Purpose. Conference calling is a parity service. It is mission critical, but no one does business with us because we are the market leaders in holding conference calls. Thus, we would acquire rather than invent conference-calling technology. Also, we would not make any customizations to that technology but use it “out of the box.” Its mission-critical nature meant that we could not be lousy at providing conference-calling services. Given our need to reduce risk for a mission-critical service, the team limited its choices to market-leading, proven options. On the Considerations side of the BVM, the team considered that one of our goals was to move as many of our IT services to the cloud as possible. This along with considering only market-leading, proven options were our high-priority considerations. With these defined, the team brainstormed the options and mapped them to the BVM they had developed.

From a known cost/benefit view, the best choice was to acquire and bring in-house our own conference bridge technology. For a total cost of around $250,000 we would never again pay for any conference calling. To spend $250,000 to save $1,000,000 (and growing) a year made perfect sense. However, this violated the consideration to move more and more services to the cloud. The team balanced the known costs/benefits with the “cloud” consideration and decided that it still made the most sense to pursue the internal conference bridge. The members had balanced the options against the goals. Best of all, the team owned the results and they ensured that the project was a success. Their ownership included not only the successful installation of the conference bridge but also moving every audio conference user (over 2,000 of them) seamlessly onto the new system.

Value is sometimes hard to define and even harder to deliver. We must remember two things:

It is the customer that defines value.

We create value when we focus our innovation on what creates our competitive advantage, and then we do almost everything else just well enough.

This will help our teams make sound decisions that define and prioritize their actions. They have ownership.

Product/Project Inception Planning

The first time I held a product inception session was to prepare for the second release of a major product. As a starting point, the team presented the screen shots of the previous version of the product and the work they had done to prepare for the second release. As the team reviewed the work, people started asking some hard questions.

“Where did that come from?” Paul asked as he pointed to one of the pages.

There was silence in the room. A major change had been added by the business without collaborating with the development team. This had happened many times and was a major point of conflict between the two groups. According to the development team, these unplanned efforts caused more disruption than value.

How could something sneak into the product without someone noticing and asking why? Or without someone wondering how it happened, because the new feature did not align with any of the goals for the looming product release?

Over the years, we have developed and refined a process that provides tools that align product planning around customer value and that get everyone to agree as to the product customers, the product purpose, and the role each team will play to launch a successful product. This process consists of the following steps:

1. Assemble a cross-functional team with representatives from every major product development and support function.

2. Present and agree as to “why this product?”

3. Build a map of the customer journey, end-to-end.

4. Create a prioritized list of all the things the product could do to touch and improve the customer journey.

5. Write these as stories from the point of view of the customer. These stories include the value the customer should get from the product.

6. Create a billboard for this product—this is the core message and value proposition of the product.

7. Write decision filters for the product—you will use these to filter every and all decisions about product features and priorities.

8. Build high-level wireframes or storyboards—a low-fidelity picture of the product.

9. Identify the features that deliver the minimum viable product.

10. Write and prioritize user stories for the next release.

11. Discuss the required tasks and roles and ask the team which product development elements they will own.

12. Agree on the process for making decisions and how decisions will be communicated—both to the team and to the stakeholders.

13. If there were any issues that could not be resolved in the session, list them as action items and let team members volunteer to define and deliver a plan that resolves the issues.

14. Ask someone to volunteer to write up and distribute all the outputs.

15. Agree as to how the team will hold each other accountable.

Where Do We Start?

The product inception session is a day-and-a-half to two-day process. It involves anyone with an interest in what is going to be built, those who will build it, and those who will support it. This means not just the product manager and the lead developers but customer support, marketing, sales, user experience designers, or anyone whose work will be touched by the creation of this product. In putting an inception session together, we tell everyone that we will be making concrete decisions about the direction and functionality of the product. We remind them that if they choose to delegate these important decisions to someone else, they had better delegate to someone they trust to make these decisions. Otherwise, they should plan on attending with us—after all, what is more important than defining the products that will define the company’s future?

This can be a very intense meeting. The goal of the session is to make lasting decisions about product markets, purpose, direction, and high-level plans. With the goal of finalizing some of these critical, up-front decisions, those who can and should make lasting decisions should attend. This session requires a high level of focus—people participating should plan on being disconnected from their normal lives. They should put away their cell phones and laptops and tell everyone in their lives that they will respond to e-mail later. What you don’t want is to have the group make a decision while someone is texting and have that person say, “When did we decide that? I don’t agree because . . .” If this happens, it likely creates churn, and churn not only wastes time, it frustrates the participants. In many cases, this product vision development is one of the most important activities in the organization—you can afford to be off the grid in order to get this right.

One other way to reduce churn is to observe a rule such as if the product manager leaves the room, the discussion stops and everyone waits for the product manager to return.

The goal of this process is to reduce the churn and the handoffs and potential miscommunication of product development and launch. You need to understand what you are creating and why.

The process beings with . . .

Why Are We Building This Product?

The planning begins with the business presenting the answers to the following questions from Marty Cagan’s book, Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love [2]:

1. Exactly what problem will this solve? (value proposition)

2. For whom are we solving this problem? (target market)

3. How big is the opportunity? (market size)

4. How will we measure success? (metrics/revenue strategy)

5. What alternatives are out there now? (competitive landscape)

6. Why are we best suited to pursue this? (our differentiator)

7. Why now? (market window)

8. How will we get this product to market? (go-to-market strategy)

9. What factors are critical to success? (solution requirements)

10. Given the above, what’s the recommendation? (go or no go)

Customer Experience Journey

The train system in America, Amtrak, wanted to grow their market and attract more people to train transportation. One thought was to redesign and modernize their train cars. However, the actual train ride was only a portion of the broad customer experience. So they took a closer look at the customer experience. This involved the desire to take a trip, finding Amtrak, entering the train station, buying a ticket, waiting, boarding, riding, arriving, and continuing.

This journey looks like the diagram presented in Figure 6.4, using data from Peer Insight, LLC.

FIGURE 6.4 Amtrak customer experience journey

When you consider this entire customer experience journey, you factor in things like entering Grand Central Station in New York City—now that is a great customer experience. It makes a train station a destination.

By mapping the entire experience, we think about how potential customers learn about where the train goes, how frequently, and for how much. How should we do that? A website or travel application? Alliances? What advice can we give them to help in the planning? How do wepersonalize the experience and the planning? What can we do to identify and profile different market segments? How can we streamline the entire process—streamline ticketing, reduce waiting, and improve boarding? What about the actual train ride? What would make dining better? Should there be sightseeing along the way? When you consider the entire experience and how you can touch and influence the experience, it opens up both thinking and the possibilities. As a result of this customer experience journey mapping, Amtrak started to focus on and include a broader range of services for its customers. Amtrak identified where its customer experience gaps existed and how they could fill the gaps. As another example, airlines have certainly taken advantage of the continuing part by asking after you have purchased a ticket if you need a rental car or hotel and how they can help you with that.

In general, the customer experience journey contains the following phases:

Discover needs: Your customer has a need and discovers your product.

Consider the options: Compare with competitors, read reviews.

Engagement: Try before they buy.

Evaluation: Make the buy decision.

Purchase: Set up an account and pay.

Delivery/installation.

Usage: Support, customer service, billing, upgrades.

It looks like the process illustrated in Figure 6.5.

FIGURE 6.5 Customer experience journey

Let’s look at an example. How would you develop a product for buying postage stamps online? The customer experience journey would look like Figure 6.6.

FIGURE 6.6 Customer experience journey example

Now, where does your product touch the customer experience and journey? What do you have to build to ensure a full customer experience? What are the touch points for the online stamps example?

You would need a website, a free trial period, an account setup, a way to accept a credit card, help with setting up a printer, billing options, customer support, and diagnostics. And, you need an easy-to-use interface.

Create your customer experience journey using the labels in Figure 6.6, and ask the attendees, in small groups, to address the customer journey. Have the team use sticky notes, one answer on each sticky note, to give as many answers as they want. For example, for initial consideration you provide a website, ads in print media, TV ads, social media, e-mails, ads on invoices to current customers, and so on. Put the labels on large pages and have each team add their sticky notes. Then, mark which ones you need to build—these are your touch points.

And just to make sure you did not miss anything, validate your map of the journey with several of your customers.

What Will Delight Your Customer?

What does your customer want to be able to do with your product? You need to create a prioritized list of all the things your customer wants the product to do.

Again, using sticky notes and fat pens, write all the things you feel your customers want and would find of value. If you have customers attending the session, you get bonus points because you can get real data in real time! Group the answers and prioritize them based on value to customers.

Write these from the point of view of the customer, including the business value. The stories usually take the form:

As a <type of customer>, I want to <action> so that <business value>.

Make sure no solution is in the action and don’t forget the business value. These should be at a high level and are often referred to as epics.

Which epics will differentiate your product from your competitors’ products? And which epics are what customers must have but all your competitors have in their products? The differentiators help you gain market share. The others are parity and will hold your current market share. Both are mission critical and must be done to go to market. For more on this, see the Purpose-Based Alignment Model at the beginning of this chapter.

Let’s look at our example of online postage. An epic would be something like the following:

As a stamp purchaser, I want to buy stamps online so that I can save time by not going to the post office and waiting in line.

Stay Focused

Let’s say you buy a billboard to advertise your product. (The Billboard Test is described in detail earlier in this chapter.) What would you put on it? Remember, it must be short because someone has limited time to read it. It could start: “Buy our product because . . .” A famous billboard from Southwest, a low-cost airline in America, reads: “The low-cost airline.” For our online postage product, it might read, “Stamps without the wait!” or “Stamps: what you want, any time.”

Think of the billboard that describes your product. Write your product’s concise, compelling value proposition. This decision filter helps you stay focused on the what and why of your product.

Now let’s convert the billboard to a decision filter. Every story, every task must pass the decision filter. With this tool, we will filter out all the tasks that might be way cool but are not needed for this product and will not directly create meaningful value. You can now cascade this decision filter through the entire organization so that everyone knows how your company and your products and services create competitive advantage.

Returning to the example of Southwest Airlines, we can imagine a decision filter such as “Will this help us be the low-cost airline?”

When other airlines start charging passengers for checked baggage, Southwest Airlines could ask, “Will charging for checked baggage help us be the low-cost airline?” Absolutely not. Southwest Airlines decided to find other ways to increase profits but not at the cost of not being the low-cost airline.

When people asked the flight attendants if they could have chicken Caesar salad on the plane, the attendants could ask themselves, “Does that help us be the low-cost airline?” The most expensive thing in the airline business is time on the ground. Putting the salads on board would increase the time on the ground. The attendants could make the decision themselves and explain it to the people making the request.

For online postage, the decision filters would be, “Does this reduce the waiting time for stamps?” and “Does this help customers get stamps when they want them?”

What to Build First

Now that we have an idea what the product will do for a customer, let’s, at a high level, define what your customer sees and/or does. For products with lots of interfaces to the user, develop high-level wireframes using the process that follows. If there is minimal user interface or the wireframes are already done, then you could storyboard the customer’s workflow. You may want to do both.

High-Level Wireframes

A wireframe is often called a screen blueprint. It is what the customer sees on the interface screen.

This part of the workshop is often called a design studio. We want to generate some of the screens for your product at the high level. We want to illuminate, sketch, present, critique, and iterate. You can read more about the process in Will Evans’s articles [3, 4].

Basically, in small groups, pick a design challenge from one of the high-value epics and work in groups to iterate to develop a screen design. Because you might have five or six epics, let each group work on a different epic. We are looking for quantity not quality. During a critique you are only allowed to say “this solves the problem by . . .” and not say things like “I like it” or “I don’t like it.”

Divide the group into small teams. In the first round

Have each individual within the group fold a single sheet of paper into eight sections and sketch up to eight different ideas with text and minimal annotation (10 minutes).

Split each group in half and each individual pitches his ideas for 2 minutes followed by short critique—no longer than 3 minutes (20 minutes total).

In the second round you refine the work.

Each individual uses one sheet of paper to refine one preferred concept by adding more details based on collective feedback (it’s okay to use another’s ideas) (10 minutes).

Each individual presents his concept to the group (2 minutes followed by a 3-minute critique).

In the third round there is more refining.

Each group collaborates on one prototype using one sheet (10 minutes).

Each team presents their concept’s prototype to the entire group (2 minutes) and gets a 3-minute critique.

Storyboarding

There are several kinds of storyboarding. One that was developed at the Walt Disney Studios in the early 1930s is a sequence of images of what your customer might do with your product.

Other people might find a workflow diagram helpful. However, it must be very high level and should not include a lot of detail. You are just looking to see if everyone has a clear understanding of the purpose of the product.

If you are upgrading an existing system, another way to get clarity is to map the movement of the new data through the current system, highlighting what needs to be added.

Minimum Viable Product

What is the minimum set of features to deploy to a subset of customers to get feedback and nothing more? That is the minimum viable product (MVP). Mark on your wireframes or your storyboard what the MVP is for your product. Next, write user stories from the customer’s point of view in the same structure as the epics just for this MVP. Prioritize them by their business value using the Business Value Model (described earlier in this chapter).

Governance

How are you all going to work together? Talk about the roles in the team and what their responsibilities are. Who is your product manager, project leader, architect, resource manager?

New thoughts, ideas, and suggestions are going to come up. Some features on your list of things to do may not be built for one reason or another. Create a process for making these decisions and develop a communication plan to distribute those decisions

Accountability

Any issues that could not be resolved in the meeting need to be listed. These actions need volunteers to take each item and provide a due date. Don’t forget to have a volunteer write up and distribute all the work on the walls.

Finally, ask the team how they will hold each other accountable. With that, the inception planning is done.

Meeting Logistics

Have plenty of the easel-size pads. I like to use the easel-size sticky notes and have blue tape in case they will not stick to the wall. Provide fat Sharpie pens in multiple colors, at least one pen for each attendee. You will need several pads of super sticky notes in multiple colors, at least one for every attendee. You will need some 3 × 5 notes and some slightly larger. You will need several sheets of 8½ × 11 paper for each attendee.

Make sure there are plenty of snacks and beverages. Inception planning can be a grueling, draining process.

Inception Planning Decision Filters

Use the following decision filters in your planning:

Will this help us decide what will delight our customers?

Will this help us understand what the product will do from a customer point of view?

Will this help us to make decisions together?

In Summary

Purpose alignment, decision filters, and the Billboard Test are powerful tools for building ownership in our teams. These tools not only help teams understand where they should focus their innovation, but they also act as guidelines that improve the teams’ decision making.

The starting point for aligned ownership is purpose alignment. Use this tool to quickly gain consensus on where to innovate and where good enough is good enough.

The natural outcome of purpose alignment is a set of decision filters you and your teams can use to align everything they do.

The inception planning process helps everyone understand why and what you are developing, but it also helps move the mindset to a customer viewpoint, what will delight the customer, and what will be valuable to the customer. It also makes clear that the business owns the problem and the delivery team owns the solution. They are not to cross over and take that ownership away, either way. And you can be clear that the purpose of this product aligns with the business goals of the organization.

By using these tools with our teams to explore our options, we help them fully understand the underlying reasons for what they are doing. In doing this we enable them to take ownership and make decisions in line with the overall business goals.

References

[1] Pixton, Pollyanna, Nickolaisen, Niel, Little, Todd, and McDonald, Kent. Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2010.

[2] Cagan, Marty. Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love. Sunnyvale, CA: SVPG Press, 2008.

[3] Evans, Will. “Introduction to Design Studio Methodology.” UX Magazine, August 24, 2011.

[4] Evans, Will. “The Design of a Design Studio.” UX Magazine, September 29, 2011.