Tag : customer development

For the last few months, we've been working with Skype to create a new service proposition for small businesses. Today, we're launching in private beta. If you’re an entrepreneur, or working in a small business that’s looking to grow, Skype in the workspace is a place to meet potential partners, suppliers, or customers anywhere in the world. You can promote your service, send messages, talk, or meet face-to-face over Skype. And it's free. 

In all honesty I must log onto the BBC website and my local news website at least 20 times a day mostly through my smartphone or work computer, and I can honestly admit that I learnt more about today's events by logging onto this 3 times today

A while ago, Nicki was preparing a presentation for SheSays and she asked me for my take on where good ideas come from.

Working with potential users introduces an element of chaos into the creative process. By bringing in this foreign element you set the scene for serendipitous discovery.

This week Made by Many put on an event for the D&AD New Blood festival. As New Blood is designed to welcome graduates to the creative industry, we thought it best to hand over the floor to two of our most recently-graduated members of staff, Conor and Cath. 

Yesterday Cath Richardson and I spoke at the SheSays conference on digital anthropology and user research. If you haven't been to SheSays before, go. Bright people, interesting ideas, friendly conversation and wine – what more does one need? (Men are welcome, by the way.)

Cath and I did a sort of tandem presentation: I spoke about new ways of making products and services, and Cath spoke about Skype in the classroom, a service we built using Lean and Agile principles. Cath is going to introduce Skype in the classroom in a separate post, so below is what I had to say about new ways of making, customer development, and a few tips we might take out of the anthropological handbook.

Last weekend I went to the second Good for Nothing, a full on 48 hours of tea and booze fuelled thinking, making and doing for three good causes. I've written about my first experience at Good for Nothing and I won't repeat what I covered there. The Pipeline boys put in place a few tools to encourage people to get making faster this time, but the main difference was that this was a two day event rather than just one and the emphasis really was on making something go live by the end of day two - no jacking around.

This time round I worked with GnewtCargo,  a zero-emissions logistics company who use electric vans and cargo cycles to deliver goods in East London. You can read a great round up of what the group overall achieved here but I want to focus on the part that I was working on as it proved to be a great example of what you can do when you apply Lean principles to the hack day mentality. 

As I'm sure you'll have noticed by now, we're pretty cosily ensconced in the lean salon over here at Made by Many. Lean methods help us create awesome services that people want, but they also hit a nerve because they're all about continuous learning and we like nothing better than learning new things. So following on from Nicki's confessions of a lean virgin last week, I thought I'd share a few stories from our experiences of putting lean principles into practice.

Over the past few months we've been working closely with Skype to develop a service for teachers who use Skype in the classroom. Skype started this project after seeing teachers using Skype in innovative ways, for example to carry out cultural exchanges and bring experts into their classrooms.

This week's videos are in keeping with the week's theme, about lean startup methodology and customer development. Enjoy!

Following on from Justin’s post last week on the empty hamburger dilemma, I’ve been doing some research into what tools and resources are out there on customer development, and who’s using them. 

Unsurprisingly, it’s the usual suspects who have been putting this methodology into practice: start ups and the people advising them. As Justin pointed out, it doesn’t look like this approach has been adopted by agency land yet, primarily because their source of dollar is the client not the customer, which tends to derail their priorities.

But how can we take some of the lessons that have been learned and implemented by the start up community and apply them to the agency worldview? Here’s a few thoughts pulled together from what other people are already doing.

(or How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Obvious)

(also know as ‘The empty hamburger dilemma’)

Most new products and services fail. This is a depressing reality to swallow, however I am amazed by how few people ask why this happens. Or worse still all the people who have an in-built assumption and acceptance that most new things should fail. This shouldn’t be the case.

Here is a sad graph showing total product failures.

Why all this failure?