Jack ran into Kim in the hallway outside the CEO’s office. “You too?” he asked. The CEO had requested a meeting to discuss their proposal for investment in the winning team’s innovation challenge. “He said he wanted to do a test, see if we could celebrate a quick win,” said Jack.
Kim frowned. “That’s what he told me,” she said. “But the design thinking approach is more about problem finding, and quickly getting rid of the wrong solutions. I’m afraid that an early test of results will only reveal the duds we discarded, not the real solution, the one that is worth our effort to discover.” This kind of short-term thinking is what had stymied their innovation efforts in the past, and Kim wanted to create a deeper, longer lasting impact.
“Celia is pushing to have her operations team participate. What if we give the team room to focus, removing their day-to-day responsibilities?” Jack said. He was hungry to get started, and he knew from past experience if they presented this project as a huge effort, it would get unwanted scrutiny that would eventually kill it.
“Hmmm, that might work,” Kim replied. “If we create a cross-functional team with the freedom to explore and test their ideas, that could be pretty powerful.”
Focus would be welcomed by the innovation teams – often they were asked to pursue their innovation project in addition to their day jobs. “How long do you think we should give them to discover and prototype a solution?” asked Jack.
Kim knew this was a tricky question to answer. Customer discovery could take a month or a year, depending on what they uncovered. But providing a clear deadline would ensure the team also prototyped some ideas quickly, ensuring a healthy balance between customer exploration and testing of ideas. They could spend a month observing customers and developing empathy, and another three months iterating through design, prototype and test.
“I think by the end of four months the team will have some interesting results,” Kim said. “They may not have the final solution, but they will have the problem clearly defined and some direction for design criteria that could create a simple viable product that resonates with our customers.”
Jack nodded. “That will work,” he said. “But what about new customers? How do we use this methodology to drive new customer value?”
“Once we have the problem defined, we can explore whether there are other customers that share the same pain points,” Kim replied. “Interviewing new customers can help us prioritize solution ideas. It will help us expand our offerings without being constrained to developing only the things that all of our current customers need.”
This was the beauty of having Celia’s operations team involved. They would need to leverage their operational assets for new offerings to ensure their ideas were scalable. And their operations were a competitive advantage, giving them a head start in new markets.
“How do you think our CEO will respond when we tell him we want him to invest in a process that develops and tests … and discards the bad ideas to uncover the good ones?” Kim asked. “Will he object to investing to prototype ideas that just get thrown away?”
“I guess we will find out,” Jack said as the CEO’s door opened and he invited them inside.
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