Byte is our regular meet-up of people from across different sectors and organisations to talk product, innovation and changing customer behaviour. For this breakfast we discussed the principles, processes and practices behind delivering innovative new products and services within complex organisations. Although there is great value in looking far ahead and considering the effect future technologies will have on what we do, this Byte looked at a more immediate kind of innovation. We talked about the thinking and practical tools that organisations need to embrace to make the most of the opportunities available to them right now, as well as the role of the internal intrapreneurs who can make this happen.

1. I’m Tom, Strategy Lead at digital product studio 383.
I work as a strategist and previously I lead the UX team. In the past I was a developer, actually writing code and creating products, so hopefull
You can view me delivering this talk on the 383 vimeo channel - vimeo.com/383project

2. So I want to start by talking about a product which was recently acquired by Microsoft.
It’s called Sunrise and it’s a smart calendar, for those of you who aren’t yet using it, it’s a amazing app which allows you to pull
This is a video of their latest feature called Meet which allows you to easily schedule a meetup just by sending a link - you can
When the company got acquired earlier this year, there was a lot of headlines about how this app had come from nowhere, tha
But only part of this story was true.
Sunrise had actually been working on this problem for almost 4 years.
The first version started as a hack, a side project away from the co-founders day jobs.
The first version wasn’t even an app
It was a daily email which gave you summary of events from your calendars formatted for mobile. The first version didn’t even
Two co-founders decided to launch with an email because it was the easiest way of articulating the idea for the product. They d

3. The co-founder describes it as a simple way to see your daily meetings and events.
You would receive a quick digest every morning in your inbox around sunrise with your events for the day. This agenda included pic
It was the slow growth of the email newsletter which made them thing they were on to something, that there might actually be an ide

4. Looking side by side at the what they build in 2012 and the what they build in 2015.
It’s clear that things has moved on. Sunrise now offers a mobile, desktop and even watch app.
But what hasn’t changed since 2012 is it’s core purpose as a product. Sunrise still shows you a daily digest of your most import
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Time might have technically improved the product, but the core purpose remains the same.
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It’s this process were interesting in, how do we build the right products, how do we take an idea, boil it down to the simplest ver

5. This is a slide Spotify used to describe their development process, they are big believers in agile and shipping quickly.
The analogy here is that it’s really hard to get where you’re going, building a skateboard lets you validate that you’re go

6. I think there are 3 really important ‘can’t do without’ aspects to creating the right product.
- Solving the right problems
- Figuring out the smallest possible solution
- Measuring and learning
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7. We need to start by solving the right problems, well where do we find them?
Well we think that talking to users is a great way to start this conversations, we use two main techniques, firstly user testing and
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8. Quite early on a new wifi product decided to dive into a whole series user testing. We started looking at all kinds of wifi portals w
So the way it works is pretty simple, we set a task, in this case try to login to the wifi. We also as the users a bunch of interestin
We actually use a service called user testing.com to do. All the participants are based in the UK, but there’re remote, so you ca
As the users progress through the task they speak out loud and try to answer these questions. These tests are great for under
THE OPPORTUNI T Y

9. If you’re curious about how any of your existing sites and apps perform, you can actually try a service called Peek which gives you a f
Super useful for seeing if user testing

10. Sometimes there isn’t an existing digital product or service to test, we’ve been doing some work with the camping and caravanning club, using su
This was build using Typeform, which easily allows you to quickly make and distribute surveys to your audiences.
Once of the most interesting things about this survey in particular is that different audiences have been revealing different paint points. We’ve got
This a survey we’ve been doing with Camping and Caravanning, it’s specifically designed to find paint points in the customer journey.
THE OPPORTUNI T Y

11. This is pocket, which is an app to help you save links from around the web. You save full web pages and it neatly saves an offline copy, wi
Pocket have nearly 20 million users is built by a team of only 20 people.

12. They did an interview recently about how they manage to manage customer feedback and what they said was really interesting.
“Users have asked for the ability to have folders as a feature inside pocket, but when we looked into that we found they actually just wanted a pl
This is a great quote which underlines how you can’t take customers feedback too literally. Customers are good at identifying problems, but they

13. Sometimes we can learn a lot about looking at existing user behaviour.
This is a screenshot from a service called IF THIS THEN THAT, it’s a fantastic app which anyone you to connect various bits of the internet to
Here’s a task which a user has created for when they stay in a hotel, it automatically calls them in the morning and reads out the weather fore
Looking at existing user behaviour in your sector is a great way to understand the real problem that customers are trying to solve.

14. Trying to decide what the smallest possible solution to the problem is hard and it’s going
When we talk about figuring out the smallest possible thing to build, we’re talking about defining what goes into our minimum viable produc
There’s a danger here that sometimes we focus too much on the minimum viable product as an excuse to make a terrible product.
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15. If we were trying to understand audience demand for cake, it’s true that this would be a minimum viable cake, this would satisfy the brief and
It’s not going to win any prizes on bake-off

16. It is true that minimum viable products are about learning what you need to build, but we also need to build it properly.
This is a quote from Ryan Singer who works at Basecamp, which many of have probably used.
Creating product prototypes is about creating less, but it’s also about creating something great.

17. This is what we should be aiming for, we’ll not be able to build a whole bakery, but at least the first version of the product

18. So how do we start to prototype and mockup our minimum lovable product?
The two methods we most commonly use to do involves paper then software
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19. Paper prototyping is a great first step in figuring out what product to build.
The purpose is to start to map out the various screens and the contents of the pages. It’s rough, it’s easy to throw away and it’s easy
Once you’ve created a few screens the idea is that you get someone else to step through the screens and see if they make sense.

20. Once you’ve got a rough idea of the flow through your product, you can start to use a more higher fidelity tool like mockingbird.
Mockingbird is a tool we use to do mockups very early on during development. It gives the whole team a chance to think about the contents
This tool isn’t deigned to start thinking about graphics, it’s a tool which allows you to think about structure and navigation.
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21. Another tool we’ve been using recent is Invisionapp.
Invisionapp is great when you want to create really high quality mockups
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22. Now we’ve identified the right problems we’re trying to solve and created our MVP, measuring and learning plays an huge part in how
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24. Once we have a bit of a prototype up and running we need to capture demand.
Online Ads are one way of quickly doing this, Facebook in particular offers some fantastic tools for targeting exactly the right customers
This is a quick video of it’s ad builder, in this instance I’m really interested in sending. It also helps you understand exactly how users ar

25. We absolutely think you can’t build great products without listening and understanding what users want. Surveys & User Research are bot
But remember that they are terrible at suggesting solutions to these problems, that’s why building products and services is hard.

26. - Some of the tools we’ve mentioned here today should illustrate that in 2015, it’s relatively easily to make things quickly
- There is a velocity at which the business can move alongside the prototype and that’s ok.

27. “don’t mistake speed for precosity. The world doesn't need wrong answers in record time” from Twitter’s recent ex-design manager

28. You can drop features and detail from products to get them to market, but you can’t drop things which provide actual functionality.
This might mean that it takes a little longer to get them to market and thats ok, there’s no point trying to find market fit with a product which do
What you can drop it features and detail
What you can’t drop is real.
What you can’t drop is if it actually provides functionality.