Steve Neiderhauser

The Ability to Experiment is a Core Skill

14 Essential Links for Understanding the Business Model Canvas

For anyone who yearns to understand the Business Model Canvas, you may want to study these 14 essential links.

Here's one tip for creating a crystal clear canvas.

Use Precise Language

Is every Building Block in your Canvas precise enough? Make sure every building business model block is self explanatory. For example, writing “products” in revenue streams is unclear. More precise would be “product sales” or “margins on product sales”.

10 Prototyping Principles

The authors of Value Proposition Design provide ten prototyping principles. I'll share details for a couple principles.

1. Make it visible and tangible.
2. Embrace a beginner's mind. Prototype what can't be done. Explore with a fresh mind-set.
3. Don't fall in love with first ideas -- Create alternatives.
4. Feel comfortable in a liquid state. Early in the process the right direction is unclear. Don't panic and solidify things too early.
5. Start with low fidelity prototypes.
6. Expose work early and seek feedback.
7. Learn faster by failing early, often and cheaply.
8. Use creativity techniques.
9. Create "Shrek models." Shrek models are extreme or outrageous prototypes you are unlikely to build. Use them to spark debate and learning.
10. Track learnings and progress.

Who Else Wants a Definition of Design Thinking

In The Achievement Habit, author Bernard Roth gives us the design thinking principles.

1. Empathize. Care about the user's experience and figure out how to help.
2. Define the problem. Narrow down the problem you're going to solve.
3. Ideate. Use brainstorming, sketching, and other creative techniques to generate potential solutions.
4. Prototype. Build low fidelity prototypes you will show to customers.
5. Test and get feedback.

I encourage you to read the book and gain a deep understanding of the principles and how they work together.

Prototyping Tips

"A prototype is your idea of what the future might look like."

-- David Kelly

This week, I completed IDEO's Ideas to Action class and learned many great Design Thinking concepts. Here's three related to prototypes.

Prototyping Tips:

Never take things personally. Feedback is in service of the work.

Don't sell your idea. Show your work and listen intently.

Read between the lines and watch for body language.

Prototyping lets you think with your hands so get busy prototyping.

Design Thinking and Prototypes

I'm playing with prototyping techniques and created a prototype using a storyboard.

Design Thinking stole the storyboard idea from screenwriters who use storyboards to lay out their scenes and check for dramatic elements.

Here's what I learned from my storyboard experiment.

First, it's fast and easy to draw a storyboard. All you need to draw is a sharpie and sticky notes.

You don't have to be an artist, stick figures are fine.

The story can use dramatic elements from screenwriting. In fact, I use some of the beats from the Save the Cat Beat Sheet. There's an upset CEO, the catalyst beat. And I use an opening and closing image. The CEO is happy at the end of the story.

In short, Design Thinking has the fastest feedback loop of any of the Agile or Lean approaches. Employ prototyping techniques to get fast feedback from your customers and build products that customers love.

Ideate; Prototype; Iterate

10 Principles to Transform

Barry O'Reilly writes up ten principles to transform your company.

They are excellent principles and you should start acting on them now. Of course, Barry includes the always powerful Minimum Viable Product concept.

I want to focus on this principle --

Build in feedback loops with customers and users

Customer testing should be for breakfast, not dessert. If you’re not testing with customers as soon as possible to understand if their problem really exists and that your solution addresses it, then you’re wasting valuable time, effort and resources.

Guess what? If you create a minimum viable product and don't get feedback from a customer, you're still doing waterfall and wasting lots of time.

So from the start, test with customers and use human-centered design.

Overview of Design Thinking

What is Design Thinking? Tim Brown, president of IDEO gives this definition:

“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”

This two minute IDEO video gives an overview of Design Thinking.

Ten Management Objections to Agile

Steve Denning describes why management refuses to buy into Agile.

One argument is that "Agile doesn't fit our organizational culture." Steve states that Agile is more important than your company's culture.

When the culture doesn’t fit Agile, the solution is not to reject Agile. The solution is to change the organizational culture.

The world and marketplace has changed; everything is moving at a faster pace. So the org's culture needs to align with Agile.

In today’s marketplace, they will need to change their culture or they will die. They need to become Agile.