Key takeaway.
Although it can be easier to just start developing a product and prioritize features instinctively, this isn’t the right approach.
“There are lots of different practices out there, so you need to know which is most likely to work for your given context,” says Adam Dubé, Product Manager at ShareGate. And the context is substantially different at ShareGate, Officevibe and Lab, even though these teams meet regularly to form communities of practice. For example, since Lab’s core mission is to launch products in under three months, it has a fundamentally different work pace than Officevibe, which has just launched a new version of its work team engagement platform.
Although it can be easier to just start developing a product and prioritize features instinctively, this isn’t the right approach.
At Lab, the challenge is to combine speed with attention to user behaviour and UX issues. According to the members of GSoft’s innovation lab, doing in-depth user research can be difficult and time-consuming. Although it can be easier to just start developing a product and prioritize features instinctively, this isn’t the right approach. When speed is the name of the game, as it is at Lab, the team draws inspiration from two popular approaches: Jobs to be Done and Lean Canvas.
Jobs to be Done methodology involves trying to understand the circumstances that drive certain user behaviours, rather than attributing these behaviours to personas with specific characteristics. By understanding the emotions and social settings that affect users, rather than simply making causal links between profile types, teams can create experiences that offer more value to a wider range of users. In other words, instead of looking at technological functionality, product developers have to analyze the intrinsic reasons that prompt users to make certain decisions. This leads to value creation over the longer term.
Meanwhile, Lean Canvas uses a nine-box table developed by Ash Maurya to quickly summarize the core principles of a business model. However, Guillaume Chalifoux, Director, Innovative Products and Commercialization of the Lab’s, makes the point that even though it only takes 30 minutes to fill out a Lean Canvas, it only becomes valuable when you take the time to go over its contents.