DESIGN SPRINTS (Awesome New Way To Develop Products)

in 2001 I worked at Microsoft and I worked on a product called the Encarta encyclopedia for those of you for those of you who don't know what an encyclopedia is it's it's a bunch of books and here's the Encyclopedia Britannica this is what I had when I was a kid and the Encyclopedia Britannica from the 1700s until the 1990s was kind of a state of the art of information now all the information in the world is in these books they could just look through find whatever you need flipped through and then Microsoft came out with the Encarta encyclopedia here's Steve Ballmer CEO of Microsoft at the time talking about this encyclopedia it's amazing what was so amazing was that the Encarta encyclopedia was on not a bunch of books but a cd-rom and for those of you who don't remember what a cd-rom is it's like a little silver frisbee with data stored on it you could put it in your computer anyway there were about six of them to have the Encyclopedia arguably not as convenient as books but it was pretty cool and I worked on the Encarta encyclopedia there were great articles photos videos 3d tours all kinds of awesome stuff in the encyclopedia 2001 we're just dominating the digital encyclopedia market which I mean II feel something something and this product came out that's you know kind of kind of cute and kind of a cute little thing they got there we talked about it around the office this is an interesting idea anybody can write an encyclopedia article it's free it's right online huh it's kind of a novelty pretty interesting time passes we're still feeling pretty good about ourselves 2003 Wikipedia starts looking a little bit more sophisticated and at this point it's got more articles in it than the Encarta encyclopedia and there's another problem because people are going online increasingly they're running a search when they want information and as you know you run a search on Google you get a Wikipedia article and the contents not always great but it's always there it's always free so you can imagine we were alarmed by this we knew this was gonna affect our market share and we had to figure out something to do so we did what you do in these situations we had meetings we brainstormed you know when often my sort of desk and came up with ideas and tried to pitch them and argue for my my way of thinking and I actually was able to convince the team that we should do my idea which was to I'm a designer to redesign the encyclopedia to really showcase how good our content was how much better it was than what you could get for free on Wikipedia so I convinced them I convinced them to do my idea and we built it and it took a while you know we had to design it spec it out build it test it all those things in the end here's the encyclopedia you have to remember this is a long time ago but this was very futuristic it's three-dimensional spinning around grabbing information opening it up you know and and we were we were pretty excited about this so engineering team we finished this and we send it off to be manufactured printed on compact discs and and so we're feeling good but we did have to sell it at this point we still had to sell what we could create it and in those days you may not remember but there was no app store if you wanted to buy an app you had to go to a store and so the software was in boxes on the store and you would you know you'd look at all the boxes and you'd say oh this is interesting and you turn it over and look look at the specs of wall I wonder if I want to take that home and you'd have to decide if it was worth your while so if it was then you know great and the box was important so you you'd think that what we would have put on the box would be well the name of the product would make sense a big picture of it so you'd know all of our hard work you could see what we'd done and some compelling description of it would also be nice something that made it sound great but but that's not what we did we did a slight error in planning where we did all this and then kind of right at the last minute brought in the marketing team and we said hey look at what we built isn't this fantastic and don't you think people were gonna want just to talk about this on the box and they were like oh no if that's what people are gonna want to pay for we do have these few discovery videos that we've added and I think good week so anyway they hired an outside agency to build the box so another sort of layer of communication this was the box as a big picture of president george w bush on the france big discovery channel logo remember when we thought president bush was bad and then if you look really closely if you look really closely you might notice if you have really good vision that it says here high five point five new visual browser which i don't even know what that means anyway so you can tell I'm a little I'm a little a little bitter about this but so I probably don't have to tell you what happened in this story and in fact if you a card has gone today and if you go online if you go to Google and you search for Encarta the first results it says it says Microsoft Encarta was was just one oh man so many years of my life but but I do wonder I do wonder if I could go back in time if I really did have a time machine what could have changed and how it could have changed the course of events with the Encarta encyclopedia and one thing that seems pretty obvious is it might have been a good idea to talk to those folks well sooner maybe we could have convinced them maybe they could have convinced us that probably would have been good one thing that's clear is we were not thinking about the moment in the store we were thinking about the heart of the problem the engineering the design the product once you had it on your computer we were thinking about making that as great as possible but this other key moment was actually in the store that was like the elbow the product was the hand and we should have been thinking about the elbow and the other thing we didn't think about you know there's all these other ideas we didn't try out we thought some were too risky one of those ideas was to give the articles away for free online to make them free competitors online peers of the wikipedia articles and they were better the articles were professionally written in they had photos videos that we had paid for they were really excellent so would that have made a difference when people ran a search I don't know I don't know if it would have made a difference in the long run but maybe it would have helped Microsoft at any rate that was actually the elbow of the problem and we should have been watching the elbow the whole time instead we were too focused on the hand well we'll move on from that little sad story the year 2007 I left Microsoft I went to go work at Google because I'm a traitor and I I was really at this point really interested in how products are developed and how people spend their time organize their time and I was really excited to find out how did they do it at Google Google had this reputation for being for a large company very fast and nimble and I really wanted to find out how they went from an idea to launching and so I got inside and it turned out that it was pretty much pretty much the exact same thing actually the engineers would have this idea they would build it build it build it and then they would oh could you explain at the last second to the marketers could jukes we have this Google Wave do you think that people like marketers are like Oh God Oh why did you yeah so anyway this is what happened but there was another kind of project there where people the engineers would have an idea and it would just never launch I'm just never launched they've just kind of tinker on it 20% time kind of tinkering and actually I participated in one of these projects we had an idea in 2007 for this thing that we called Google meeting we thought it'd be really cool if you could have a multi-user video conference right in it right in the web browser and you know at that time you usually give a Skype if I could download an app but we thought right in the browser you could have multiple video channels and we thought we had like all the back in tech to make it work and so me and a couple of you know an engineer and a PM we kind of just tinker on this tinkerer on this and we did this in 2007-2008 and finally in 2009 we got together for a week and he said you know I've visited them they worked in Stockholm and I went to Stockholm in January for for a week I don't know if any of you have been in Stockholm in January but I hope well if you haven't I have a photo of it here it's a joke it's a black folk is it's really dark it's really dark and cold it's fairly miserable outside so you really would you know it's a great time to focus it's a great time to focus so so so we all cleared all the calendar of everything and we got in a room and we just said we're gonna focus on this thing together so so we said like how should this thing look how should it work let's try to make a prototype in one week and we did we kind of mocked up this sort of rough idea of how it should work and if you look carefully you can see me without a beard and then we actually the engineer built a prototype of that very simple thing and it's very you know crude and simple these are just thumbnails down at the bottom not video feeds but it was the fundamental idea worked in the the prototype we actually were able to share with our teammates and we started having video calls using this thing and then we started sharing it around the company and pretty soon all of Google was using this thing because it had it was real it wasn't just us talking on the whiteboard it's pretty cool eventually this thing in 2011 launched as Google Hangouts and and actually just this year in 2017 it launched us what we intended which was software for meetings so in a way that actually took ten years but but what I thought was really cool about it was that we went from this kind of thing to to this somehow we had we had gotten like all of the the work that we needed to do we had focused in a much a different way and we had gotten to the heart of the problem much much faster effectively I looked back on that I thought you know that elbow of that kind of the key moment was was that week and I started to wonder about this idea of design I'm a designer I had historically been designing products I'd worked on Gmail and Google Talk and and then hangouts while I was at Google but I started thinking about how I might design time differently and if there is a way to structure time so that you recreated a moment like we had in Stockholm so if you remember back I want you to think back to when you started your current job and hopefully when you started your job you were excited about it and you know if you're a founder maybe you founded the company and I hope you were excited about it but if you hate your job just imagine but so you imagine this moment you know like really excited about it it's the first day of work you come in you've got a new email address no messages in your inbox you've got a new you know your calendar is totally free and you've got this you're excited and you're like all right let's do this I'm great and you start to meet your new smart insightful funny charming vaguely attractive teammates and you're like all right and you start having like one-on-one meetings with them and you start being invited to projects and you're like all right we are cooking we are doing this thing and like you've got stuff going on you're like I'm in the flow and then you know pretty soon some more stuff on your calendar and then like after a while you've got a lot of stuff on the calendar and then you're like you gotta like color code it to kind of keep track what's going on and there pretty soon you're just like oh god oh my god and it's just like it just feels like like this like you're just like trying to like like he's trying to survive and I can't cross the street and so so it's a lot of times this is how it works eels like you just need know there's an important thing but you can just barely get across the road now I started to wonder if you could design your time rather than just kind of reacting to all of these defaults what could happen so I started to sort of this quest for a perfect week designing a perfect week and in 2010 I started running these experiments around Google I called this a design sprint and I because it sounded appealing to engineers is fast and so the the idea what the design sprint was you know I do it with one team do it with another team I did one with Gmail did one with Google Ads with hangouts Chrome Google acts and it started to sort of work better and better tried to refine the process in 2012 I left Google and went to go work at Google Ventures another alphabet company and Google Ventures invests in startups and so as someone who's you know really like a dork about process I was super excited to learn how startups go from an idea to launch like what happens when they go from you know because they you think really fast turns out pretty much the exact same thing as everybody else now now this is not exactly the way the mental model that people have that startups to some of you know I mean the idea is you get an idea get it out there and get data on and this is a really smart philosophy it's kind of Lean Startup we're going to do a quick loop and it's really smart because then you don't commit to something forever and get stuck with it as we did but what happens is that most people interpret this as we must launch an MVP to get that data we need to build and launch an MVP because then we'll have perfect real-world data that we'll be able to trust and the challenge comes in building things it always takes longer to build a high enough quality product and so you end up with effectively the same thing and at the end you tries tell the marketing team to please explain it so the idea with a sprint at a venture capital firm when we were trying to have our startups be as successful as possible was to give them a shortcut a way to get that data in just a week so we tried to perfect that design of the perfect week so that you could collect data so fraggle for 150 sprints by this point in my time at Google Ventures we really kind of got to what I want what I think is the perfect week and I'm gonna just quickly kind of tell you about it this morning so it all starts with a challenge and hopefully it's like similar to when you start your new job and it's something you're excited about something big but it could be a new feature a new product whatever and you assemble a team that's diverse it's not just the product team just the design team just the engineering team or some special creative team it's the real team with representatives from you know marketing for instance and you take a week of time on the calendar clear all the meetings and then run a specific script during that week and the idea is to get rid of all those defaults and reactions that we normally have and instead follow a system so in some ways it's like giving a high-five it's like the system for the high-five is if you watch the elbow you get better results a little counterintuitive one of the key defaults is that teams are often fragmented we're in all those different meetings we have different projects we have different stand-ups and instead in a sprint everybody gets together in the same room so it it's happens the whole week happens in one room together with me with my eyes closed no but do you all all together in the same room in in the book sprint I've got kind of a step-by-step guide for how to run this process and it's actually it's a checklist at the end of the book it's literally 15 pages it tells you like when to do this when to do that minute by minute when you can go to the bathroom it's very very specific but I won't go through all the details now I just want to tell you about what happens on each day of the sprint there's kind of one key focal point each day on Monday the idea is to make a map of the problem and in the common way that I've experienced approaching products it's it's hard to not think of everything all at once all of the complexity of the product and the Sprint we want a force focus on one key moment so it's that idea of trying to find the spot as we did and didn't do at Encarta of the the moment when the customer is picking up the box or the moment when the customers running a web search it's thinking outside the product so here's an example you can see a very simple map customers on the Left how they move through in this case some software for cancer care clinics and in this case it's choosing one customer and one spot on that map where you're gonna focus for the rest of the week on Tuesday the whole team sketches solutions for that challenge that they've chosen and the default for coming up with solutions as the team is usually a group brainstorm everybody's shouting out ideas but working in this way really biases towards people who are extroverted people who can make a convincing sales pitch for their idea people who other people on the team think of as creative and it does not allow for deep quiet thinking it doesn't allow for you to put a lot of detail behind your ideas often an abstract idea will triumph in a conference room when you're shouting things out and it won't be as high-quality over time so in a sprint and work alone but we're together in the same room is actually it's a little weird I mean if you watch this video of it happening it's everybody's kind of quietly it looks like a you know test in school but the idea is you have enough time to think through how you think the problem ought to be solved but you can actually come up with a very high quality solution and because people are working on their own those solutions stay separate this is what one of the sketches might look like a lot of detail behind it and by the end of the day there's like 10 of them to choose from 10 different approaches so on Wednesday you've got to decide which of those approaches you're gonna go with and which one you think has the best chance of solving the problem often discussions and these kinds of decisions can be endless we can probably talk for an unlimited amount of time to try to decide which way our team should go especially if we know we're gonna then commit weeks or months or a public launch or a lot of money to whatever decision we make but in a sprint we make those decisions fast and decisive by making them structured and a bit unnatural actually so we're following a bunch of steps starting off by reviewing things in silence so that nobody's making a sales pitch for their idea doing a structured critique that's very fast it's not literally this fast but it's quite fast everybody goes through talks about the ideas and again with no sales pitch from the Creator tries to understand how they work and then finally rather than have the team collectively vote or have some kind of an arguments about what's gonna happen the decision maker one decision maker makes the call about which idea will be tested this is really helpful because it sure as the product stays opinionated it ensures that the product choice reflects what the the decision-maker the leader wants and it also makes that decision-making process totally transparent everybody can see how we got there and on Thursday the team's going to build a prototype so they've got only eight hours and they want to make a realistic prototype so that they can then test it on Friday with target customers and this sort of runs in the same philosophy lafa coal vein as building an MVP we want to build something as quickly as possible so we can get data the change in definition is we're just gonna build something fake that we can get reactions to and a one-on-one conversation we're not gonna worry about launching so the idea with the sprint is you just faking things not actually building a full product the team splits up the work so they can create as much surface area as possible in the prototype and stitches it back together they're gonna use simple tools like you might use keynote or PowerPoint to build a prototype of you know a web app a mobile app and iPad app and you can quite quickly stitch together screens that you've exported from a tool like keynote into a tool like Flint Oh Marvel or envision and stitch those together with hotspots and make something that appears in just a few hours to look like a real app so here's is that same prototype on a phone and you know looks like a real app it's very convincing when you show customers this they'll react to it as though it were something real there's a prototype of an iPad app it appears to be in the App Store it looks like they're installing it from the app store but this app hasn't launched yet those are faked screens this is just keynote running fullscreen on an iPad it appears to be real it's possible to me prototypes of all kinds of things I'll show you a few kind of weird examples packaging so here's a company who prototype the the way they might deliver coffee in different sized boxes with different brands each each package there actually has a different fake brand they've printed out stickers to make it look real it's possible to in many cases prototype something that's extremely complicated like maybe a hardware or in this case it's a software that's actually for hedge funds to help them predict company performance instead of figuring out exactly how the product should work they figured out what the specs might be and what they might charge for it and then they built a very realistic sales deck tested that instead service prototype so you can also essentially create a play a theater of your product and in this case this is a company who it's a series of healthcare clinics and they wanted to experiment with opening their clinics for pediatricians for families with children are coming in they protect it by setting up a stage effectively putting props out things that they thought they would need if they had families coming in to the clinics and they had a script they had actors you know basically people from the clinic from the office who would follow a specific set of steps when people came in the doctors would behave in a certain way when they came back to examine the patients and talk to the families and all this is something they could plan out in one day and then execute the next day and he can even he can even prototype snacks so one company actually wanted to create a new kind of snack bar it takes a long time to actually like manufacture a snack bar in the way that you know large scale so what they did was bought a bunch of different snack bars opened him up and painstakingly like cut them apart and sort of glued them back together with I don't know honey or something and it sort of created what might look like a snack bar and then prototype the packaging and wrapped those with very realistic high quality packaging so Friday you've got your prototype whatever it might be it might be software might be hardware device that you faked it might be a snack bar of some kind and the default that we usually have to follow when we're building products is to wait for perfect data and so even if we're moving fast we're often thinking I've got to watch in order to get that perfect data but in a sprint you can get quick and dirty data right away and we do that with something that's really usually very low status in most organizations is it's usually something we don't think of as being the way we find out if we're on track for product market fit just a one on one interview just talking one on one to a customer with no sales pitch showing them the prototype asking them to think aloud seeing if they can figure it out and move through it this happens in one room there's a video feed and then in the next room is those five interviews take place the rest of the team can watch and take notes you can see it all happened in real and this is almost like you fast forwarded into the future and you're like peering through you know of a lens at what might happen when your customers encounter your finished product before you've even started building it for real so by the end of the day there's these really clear patterns that emerge and five people is actually enough to start to see these patterns in a way that it gives you a gut feeling that you could trust about whether you're on track or not in this case you've got five different customers in each column and the same thing shows up again and again and again we know that's something you need to pay attention to here's another example often in the first sprint you'll come across a lot of failures so here again is five different customers each column is a different customer everybody except for the fifth guy who's having a great Friday afternoon everybody else hated the product and that's that's very important for them to know but what typically happens in a sprint is a team will see the gaps between where they are and what their customers are expecting or understanding about the product and they'll then be able to very quickly fix it they starting to understand that gap between their vision and where customers are read sort of the real world is and they can shift so this is quite common again the same team the next week modify their product ran another test and you can see almost everything goes green so the common way that I've heard of teams applying the sprints into their regular process is that at the beginning of a quarter maybe when they do ok ours they're setting aside a week and maybe a couple days of the next week to run one sprint fix the results of that Sprint test it again and then they'll have enough confidence to go all the way through build and launch so I've run a bunch of these sprints and I won't bore you with telling you about all of them but there is one that's pretty interesting that I really like to tell the story of so if you don't mind share it this company is called savvy oak and savvy oak makes a kind of an unusual combination of hardware and service it's a hotel delivery robot so I don't mean it delivers hotels it works in a hotel and it's it's actually about Bell a little shorter than this lectern here and the robot would be near the front desk of the hotel so if I was working at the front desk and it was especially busy and I got a call somebody calls and says they need a toothbrush then I'm gonna be able to open up this hatch on the top of the robot put in a toothbrush close the hatch again and type in you know room 316 and then the robot which is effectively like a little self-driving car can then drive on its own and just kind of like navigate going around people and sort of get to the elevator wirelessly call the elevator so the elevator opens and it gets on and it's writing people you know and then the doors open on the third floor and it knows it's the third floor so it gets off and it's got this map and it knows where the 316 is so it's gonna go down the hall watch out for people and I get there and then when he gets to the room door it triggers a phone call so phone rings in the room and sort of a robotic voice says your delivery is here and then and the person opens the door the robot senses that and the hatch pops up and deliver his babes and the robot goes back you know he's just down the elevator and back to the line plugs itself in so it's it's kind of cool I mean it's kind of cool stuff and the the company who we had invested in savvy oak they had figured out the engineering part of this pretty well they had made actually a prototype of a robot that could do most of that stuff I just described but they were at this point where they had recognized they had recognized an elbow effectively they were wondering how the robot should behave around people you know because you don't encounter robots in hotels every day that's people are not going to be expecting it and these folks had worked in robotics for a long time they knew that there's a problem when people encounter robots they have their expectations are often too high we all expect too much because we've seen too much science fiction and we think that robots have thoughts and plans and hopes and dreams you know if this robot though is not able to carry on a conversation it can't follow a command they can't answer a question it's not gonna be able to talk back to you at all and they were afraid that if they gave the robot any kind of personality that it might frustrate people people might be disappointed they knew that when the robot went out into hotels when they finally launched that there would be some attention people would write stories about it people right Yelp reviews about it and they didn't want that storyline to be negative they didn't want the thing the message the message that people took away to be to be negative because if you're making something as capital intensive as manufacturing a robot and trying to service it and deliver it in hotels if it doesn't go well if people don't buy it right away as a startup they would fail they would go out of business so they had to get the launch right and the safe thing to do was to give it no personality at all just make sure that it delivered on expectations and many deliveries so they that was the plan no personality at all but they still kind of wondered and they had a bunch of ideas for how they might make a personality that that they thought could potentially work could potentially be a bit delightful for users but they they just weren't sure and so they ran a sprint to try it out so they did the typical things on one day they made a map that brought the whole team together and again this is not just the engineering team not just one part of the team everybody's in the same room the chief marketing officer for example who knows everything about the relationships with hotels and what hotels are expecting and how hotels will be talking about the robot to customers they mapped out all of the places where an unsuspecting guests might encounter the robot you know by surprise not knowing that there's gonna be a robot making the delivery for example and in fact that's the moment that Steve Cousins the CEO savvy oak chose as the elbow of the problem it's the key moment when you get to your room and you get to the door and you open it and there's a robot there like that's Joe my god like what's gonna happen that could be either super awkward who knows what you're wearing or it could be it could be really great it could be really great if it goes well because you're gonna have an interaction with the robot as you get your delivery so they decided to focus there and for the rest of the week they they worked on that on Tuesday they sketched solutions and here's what that looks like boring it looks boring looks like you're taking a test but they came up with a bunch of different approaches and they sketched out some of their old ideas that they had thought of before that hadn't had the chance to really be experimented with or thought through all the way so on Wednesday they had to decide from all those different approaches and Steve chose three ideas that he felt were a little bit risky he thought they could work and if they worked they'd be great but they're not something we can we can just go and ship with the first idea was that the robot might be able to play games with you you know so maybe if you really enjoyed the delivery from the robot maybe you could play like follow the leader with the robot or you know hide-and-seek what the robot or something and the the idea was that if that worked and people were delighted by that kind of play with the robot that it could generate really positive reviews guests would be super happy second idea was to give the robot a face and this seems really simple non-controversial but actually if you don't want people to talk to the robot a face is kind of the thing that most says you can talk to me they had some ideas they thought maybe if they gave the robot a not too intelligent face that that might be the way to go but they weren't comfortable launching with that they were not they felt that was too big of a risk to launch with so the try Atmos rent and the third idea was to have the robot do dance do dance after making the delivery and I just go on the record to saying I thought it's a really dumb idea that the robot doesn't have any arms so what you're dealing with here it's got some wheels what you're dealing with is something like this and this is how I dance but I know I know from experience it's not very effective at charming other people so I was I was skeptical anyway on Thursday they had to prototype all of these personality traits on top of their their early prototype robot in just eight hours and so they divided up the work and they've got one person here you can see working on the sound effects for the robot another a couple of folks here are working on the face they're actually just using keynote they're making slides of the face putting hot spots in some animations and putting all that onto an iPad Mini so they pop to the front panel of the robot off and stuck the iPad Mini on and you can see it here it looks like the robot has this little sort of simple face and a little speech bubble so that that implies I can I can sort of put text in here but I can't talk that was the idea they also needed to figure out the dance moves and normally the robots moving completely its autonomous right it's just since and running a program of script but they didn't have time and they didn't need to actually program all of that instead Tesla had the CTO who you just saw she's got basically a PlayStation video game controller and the idea was that Tessa would sort of hide around the corner you know and just sort of like drive from over here and make the deliveries do the dance without people being able to see so finally it's Friday it's time to run the test and in order to make this as realistic as possible they did it in the hotel room and so early that morning my colleague at the time Google Ventures Michael he came to the hotel and this is a picture of him in front of the hotel and he came into the into the room got out all his stuff and and and basically set up like a like lights you know taping wires to the wall and putting dropped cams in the hallway and pretty sure the hotel was cool with this and and so there was cameras kind of all over in the than we could see the the company would be able to watch from different angles how people reacted to the hotel the unsuspecting like like robot delivery so 9:00 a.m. the first person shows up for the test and view were just for a second put yourself in the shoes of someone who well earlier in the week you responded to an ad on Craigslist and you saw there were these for $100 there's like a usability interview you're gonna be in Cupertino that day anyway so you're like great okay you fill out a little survey asking you some questions you get an email back from Michael and the email says hey this is a little unusual but in your life like ah this is you on Wednesday you're like huh I don't know $100 the hotel room not too sure what's going on here but but if you're like me you often commit to things in the future that you know then when it comes you or you regret so at that time you're like oh yeah okay hundred dollars so but now it's it's actually Friday you're actually in the lobby Michael shows up he's like come with me you're in the elevator with Michael you're getting the hotel room with Michael and there's there's cameras everywhere so it sort of illustrates though that actually talking to your customers in this way it's always uncomfortable it will hopefully for you never be if I literally this uncomfortable but but it will always be uncomfortable to show people something that's not finished it's not ready yet it's not comfortable and most of us if you're a designer you would probably rather be designing things if you're a writer you'd rather be writing things if you're an engineer you'd rather be writing code and if you're a p.m. I don't know meetings or something I'm not sure what you'd rather be doing but but very few of us would would like to be talking to a customer and not giving them a sales pitch for why the product is so good but actually just watching them maybe trip over it asking them to be honest and just talk about it this isn't very comfortable so many teams won't do it and if you do it you can get data before they do now meanwhile while this interview is going on Michael tells this first participant he says hey I want you to where would you if you had just checked into this room where would you put your suitcase and she says I put it you know over here I guess on this little suitcase stand okay so do you unpack right away or later I might I might unpack right away just you know get stuff get stuff going what would you do if you found you had forgotten your toothbrush and she says I guess I'd call the front desk and ask him if they could send a toothbrush shop so Michael says well once you go ahead and just do that let's just see how that works this hotel so so she calls the front desk they say oh we'll send the toothbrush right out so meanwhile we're watching and the team gets to see what happens from all these different it looks like the Situation Room there's all these different camera angles on the hotel room and the hallway and we can watch as the robot here moves into position so it's moving into Tesla's driving it right into position and then someone from Savio calls the room back and says your delivery is here kind of a robotic voice and the person goes over and opens the door and this is like this moment as if we've peeked into the future and can see what happens if the robot has a personality how will people react and respond to it and so it turns out that after five interviews I can just I can just give it all away to you it's five interviews nobody wanted to play games with the robot in hindsight I guess it makes sense that you wouldn't want to play hide and seek in your hotel room with a robot but it was one of those things that in the abstract I could see why it might be you know but didn't know the face actually worked no one tried to talk to the robot they thought it was cute but they it was dumb enough looking I guess and nobody tried to speak to it which was great and the dance actually worked the dance people liked to dance I'll show you this is what the robot looks like now that it's out and in real life and service and you can see the dance there's a simple face there and there's a dance I mean that is me but if it's so much better when he does it so anyway this is kind of a it's kind of a silly story it's a little bit silly but when but when they launched they actually as predicted they did get a lot of press coverage and here they are in the New York Times and not the front page but they are in the New York Times and the story is quite a bit about the personality that turned out to be a big leader in how people saw and started starting to adopt the robot inside a lot of success in hotels kind of all around the United States now and have a first sale in Singapore doing really great but the story here is really not about robots because probably I'm sure less than half of you make robots and your company the story here is really about the default the default is you have to play it safe you have to be careful you have to argue and argue and argue because that launch is gonna be a big deal we all know it's going to take a while to get there even if it's an MVP with a sprint you can take those big risks early on and they're not really that risky to you you're only wasting week if you're wrong the default is to focus on everything it wants to think about how all the engineering and the robot works to think about how all the product Encarta will work once you've got it home on your computer but in a sprint you can focus on that one key moment the one spot that really matters most and it might not even be inside the heart of the engineering or the heart of the part that we want to think about because it's so challenging it might be somewhere else it's effectively like like watching the elbow it's not getting distracted by the hand which seems like it would make sense seems like we are we should put our eyes but it's actually maybe somewhere else and the Sprint gives us a chance to change all the defaults redesign the way we use our time and focus where we really should so if you'd like I encourage you to either try a sprint if you want to try a design sprint check it out but you can also just think about how you might redesign the way you use your time so that your team and yourself aren't always reacting to the defaults the way the calendar happens to be set up the fact that we expect each other to respond to email right away all these things have a cost and sometimes they distract us from what matters the most if you want to check out the book a little bit of self-promotion here it is take a look at it and if you really get into it you can sign up for this newsletter and send out stories about companies who are doing sprints and and events and things that are going on and I'm also writing another book that's about redesigning time and you will even get news about the new book how exciting is that thank you all so much for your attention and I hope you have a great [Applause]

Channel: Coding Tech

Views: 21,067

Keywords: product design, product development, sprints, design sprints, product management, mvp

Id: mMWzVyIhDTk

Length: 39min 23sec (2363 seconds)

Published: Tue May 08 2018