Conceptualized and led a 5-day Google Design Sprint with the IBM CSC Team and Counter Human Trafficking Experts to develop, test and refine a of a mobile application that helps stop the exploitation of female migrant domestic workers in Asia Pacific.
At this point you might already be feeling a healthy amount of skepticism set in.
“This is wonderful MANAGEMENT MUMBO JUMBO Mike but you need to slow down, because we don’t yet have an idea!”
That’s a good point!
And then you might even say, and even if we have an idea, there is no guarantee that it will be a good one.
And even if it is a good one – even the best ideas face an uncertain path to real-world success!
And I will tell you that on all of these occasions you are ABSOLUTELY 100% right!
The trouble with good ideas is that no matter what you do, whether it is running a program, developing a service teaching a class or working inside a large organization – EXECUTION can be difficult.
There are A LOT of questions that must be answered before we know that WE ARE ONTO SOMETHING!
WHAT’s the most important place to focus our efforts and how shuld we start?
WHAT will our idea look like in real life?
Should we assign one smart person to figuring this out or should the whole team brainstorm?
And HOW do we know hat we have the right solution?
How many meetings does it take before we can be sure?
How many decisions to we need to take before we are certain that this is worth it?
And once ALL OF THIS IS DONE, WILL ANYBODY CARE?
So WHAT is a SPRINT:
A SPRINT is a 5day rapid prototyping framework for solving BIG PROBLEMS.
The methodology was designed by Google Ventures as a shortcut to deliberately cut out the endless debate cycle we USUALLY find in developing ideas by compress months of time into a single week.
Instead of waiting to launch a minimal product to understand if an idea is any good, you’ll get clear data from a realistic prototype. The sprint gives you a superpower: You can fast-forward into the future to see your finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitments. It was designed to help us fast-forward into the future to see your finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitments.
We are not going to finish with a complete ready-to-ship product, but we will have a pretty good idea whether we are onto something with the ideas and solutions we developed. We will make rapid progress and know for sure if we are headed in the right direction and if not we will know what we will have to change.
So how do we do it?
We will focus on the surface! Instead of trying to develop a whole app we will merely develop something that will look and feel like an app.
Human beings are complex and fickle, so it is impossible to predict how they will react to a brand-new solution. When our new ideas fail, it is usually because we are overconfident about how well consumers would understand how much they would care.
If we can get the surface right, we can work backward to figure out the underlying systems or technology.
Focusing on the surface is all we need to do this week. It allows us to be fast and answer big questions before we commit to execution (show videos):
Human beings are complex and fickle, so it is impossible to predict how they will react to a brand-new solution. When our new ideas fail, it is usually because we are overconfident about how well consumers would understand how much they would care.
If we can get the surface right, we can work backward to figure out the underlying systems or technology.
Focusing on the surface is all we need to do this week. It allows us to be fast and answer big questions before we commit to execution (show videos):
This approach has several advantages:
It allows us to answer some of the big questions we asked earlier without having to make any expensive or big commitments:
WHAT’s the most important place to focus our efforts and how should we start?
WHAT will our idea look like in real life?
Should we assign one smart person to figuring this out or should the whole team brainstorm?
And HOW do we know hat we have the right solution?
How many meetings does it take before we can be sure?
How many decisions to we need to take before we are certain that this is worth it?
And once ALL OF THIS IS DONE, WILL ANYBODY CARE?
2. Because we don’t need to make any big commitments - we can be courageous! It allows us to move quickly and address BIG challenges no matter how large.
3. We are also lucky. We have the perfect team that brings together the perfect combination of domain expertise in order to tackle these tough questions. And lastly
4. Lastly, we need to set ourselves a tight deadline. With a little bit of luck everyone in this room chose their work based on a bold vision we want to bring to the world whether it’s a service, an experience or an app – we at IOM X want to STOP Exploitation and Human Trafficking. HOME you want to empower migrant and domestic workers, IOM also want to assist migrants
But bringing those visions to life if difficult. Its too easy to get stuck in the churn of endless emails, slipping deadlines, meetings that burn up our days and pong term projects based on questionable assumptions. The design sprint offers a path to solve big problems, test new ideas and get more done faster. Its also more fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imm6OR605UI
WELCOME TO YOUR HEIST. We have 5 days to pull off the IMPOSSIBLE, develop ideas, execute them into a working prototype and test them with our end-users.
Luckily we have gathered the PERFECT team. Each of us in this room represents a subject matter expert. We have deep expertise about different parts of the problems we are trying to solve and we can use this domain- specific understanding to approach this challenge with creativity. Like with OCEAN’s eleven, I would like to highlight that all of these characters are in the script for a reason, but when you watch the movie you don’t know from the start what they will do. This is exactly the situation we have here now. Everyone of us will make a critical contribution to the overall idea. Exactly what everyone of us will be saying is impossible to predict. As such I would like to ask you to keep an open mind for yourself. Whenever you feel that you have something to contribute, please do so. Whether it’s a fresh idea, background information etc. Every contribution is welcome as long as it helps with progress.
So who did we include. Of course we wanted to have some folks with us who will end up building the product we are making the prototype for – the engineers, designers, product managers and so on. But to make this a success we didn’t want to limit ourselves to merely technical expertise. Sprints are most successful with a mix of people. The core people who work on execution along with a few extra experts with specialized knowledge.
With this in mind, everyone of us has a key role to fill over the next 5 days. This is also where we are introducing ourselves – except for Tara and myself for now. I will do that for you.
Will point to you
And you will tell me your name, your role, organization and explain to me in two sentences or less why you are fitting that role. We will be very strict about this.
THE DECIDER:
This role is very important. The decider is the key decision maker for our team. Whenever we are at am impass Tara will have the last word.
THE FACILITATOR:
Responsible for managing time, conversat6ions and the overall process. If I notice that we are at an impass I will defer to the decision maker. I will occasionally tell you to stop talking and that it is time to move on.
FINANCE EXPERT
MARKETING EXPERT
CUSTOMER EXPERT
TECH/ LOGISTICS EXPERT
DESIGN EXPERT
On DAY 1 we will have a structured discussion to create a path for the sprint week.
We will map out the problem and pick a problem to focus on.
On DAY 2 we will sketch competing solutions on paper.
On DAY 3 we will make difficult decisions and turn our ideas into testable hypothesis.
On DAY 4 we will hammer out a realistic prototype
And on Sunday we will test this prototype with real-life humans.
At the end of this process we will not finish with A FINAL PRODUCT but we will have made rapid progress and know for sure that we are headed in the right direction.
Work starts at 9:30am.
We will have one break in the morning, one longer lunch break and one break in the afternoon.
You can check your phones and emails during those breaks, but do it outside of this room and we would ask you to try and come back again on time.