5 Key Hacks for Breakthrough Innovation

Editor's Notes

• #2: Thanks for joining me today. We’re going to talk about what it takes to do breakthrough product innovation – and take a peek under the hood of some genre-defining blockbuster hits.
• #3: We’ll start with an introduction – then
• #4: reveal the 5 key Hacks that set you up for Breakthrough Innovation –
• #5: Amd close with three smart shortcuts you can use right away to super-charge your early product development
• #6: If you’re an entrepreneur, an innovator, or a maker– you already know...
• #7: that everything starts with a hunch.... an exciting idea to explore...
• #8: A hot area to pursue, a vision for a product game app or device you’re itching to build.
• #9: But until you’ve developed and tested it, your idea is only a hypothesis. How do you know if today’s idea is the right one to pursue? What markers can guide your way as you explore and shape your ideas?
• #10: I’m Amy Jo Kim game and product designer specializing in early-stage innovation.
• #11: At Shufflebrain, we’ve had the pleasure of working with many great companies and teams – all trying to build something innovative and new. Some were more successful than others.
• #12: A handful of my early-stage clients went on to become massive, genre-defining hits. What set these breakthrough innovations apart?
• #13: Can we identify habits and behaviors that reliably lead to better, faster, and smarter innovation?
• #14: I think we can – and today, I’m going to share with you 5 key Hacks – in focus and outlook– that drive the behavior of teams who create successful breakthrough innovations.
• #15: The first Hack is foundational: Think Like a Scientist. Successful innovations start with small, iterative experiments designed to answer the most important questions.
• #16: This is consistent with a Lean Startup approach – where the path to success involves moving quickly through the build/measure/learn cycle
• #17: The most striking pattern - shared by ALL the breakthrough innovations I’ve worked on – was the ability to ask the hard, important questions upfront, and seek the answers experimentally
• #18: The team behind The Sims – led by Will Wright and Chris Trottier -- spent years experimenting with different approaches to bringing a virtual dollhouse to life, finally settling on a design that became the highest-grossing PC franchises of all time.
• #19: The early team at eBay – led by Pierre Omidyar, Mike Wilson & Mary Lou Song – experimented with a variety of social systems for building trust among buyers and sellers, at a time when online shopping was a niche activity.
• #20: The Rock Band team faced a daunting product challenge: could non-musicians – playing plastic instruments – make music together and FEEL like a band? Answering that question was fundamental: – without a resounding YES, nothing else mattered.
• #21: The Covet Fashion team had created several mobile fashion games – and hit a wall. To create a breakthrough hit, they needed to reach a broader audience of fashion-loving women Using a disciplined, experimental approach –the team iterated their way into Crowdstar’s biggest success to date.
• #22: The second Hack characterizes how successful innovations get started – by focusing on and delighting a small, passionate group of early adopters. They don’t always look like Segway-riding rock stars – your job is to recognize the right early adopters for YOUR project
• #23: Have you ever heard of Crossing the Chasm – by Geoffrey Moore? This influential book talked about the difficulty of marketing innovative products to a mass market - and opened people’s eyes to the key differences between early adopters and early majority.
• #24: Moore’s book was based on work done three decades earlier -- Everett Roger’s Innovation Diffusion Theory is a data-driven model of how new products spread through existing communities.
• #25: If you want to innovate successfully, – you NEED to find & delight your early adopters – These are the people who will put up with cost, inconvenience and and ridicule because they’re LOOKING for what you’re offering – it solves their problem, or meets some real need.
• #26: Your early adopters can add value in many ways. Pierre Omidyar – the founder of eBay - was the original customer support rep for the service – and during a support interaction, an early user came up with the idea for eBay’s reputation system
• #27: Will wright – the genius game designer behind The Sims – cultivated relationships with an active, highly creative group of super-fans who provided a rich source of ideas, user-testing and content creation long before the game ever shipped to paying customers.
• #28: The Rock Band team knew that social dynamics could make or break their ambitious multi-player music game – so we focused on understanding the needs and habits of avid social gamers and non-musicians, which helped to create a massive crossover hit
• #29: The third Hack is about process and attitude. Successful innovators are tinkerers and experimenters – they don’t fall in love with any one idea, but instead they test and refine many ideas – and include their customers in an iterative feedback loop from the start.
• #30: If you embrace lean methods – and want to set your team up for success – one of the most powerful things you can do is to create a culture of quick, iterative, high-learning play-testing in your team and organization.
• #31: Testing can start before you’re designed or built a thing. Early in the Rock Band project, we interviewed dozens of casual gamers, and gained early insights that helped to shape the game.
• #32: The Covet Fashion team was blessed with a savvy in-house researcher who setup weekly interviews with fashionable young women, gamers and non-gamers alike – those weekly sessions morphed into user testing once the game was playable.
• #33: The Sims developed an iterative playtesting culture early among the team – and grew those tests to include an enthusisastic, content-creating fan community.
• #34: This brings us to the fourth Hack: focusing on testing and tuning the most important part of your customer experience FIRST.
• #35: A Core Loop is a gaming concept that describes the interlocking activities, progress markers and rewards that a player experiences during a gaming session. As game designer Dan Cook says, skill-building and learning are an essential part of what makes games compelling fun.
• #36: When you’re validating your product ideas, be careful not to fall into the trap of testing your marketing message – and thinking you’ve validated your core loop.
• #37: A fake landing page will help you shape your message – but it’s NOT going to help you shape or test your core product experience.
• #38: An operant conditioning loop – such as the Habit Loop (from the Power of Habit book) or the Hooked model – gets you closer to a Core Loop, because it’s based on feedback and rewards.
• #39: What’s missing, though, is any notion of skill-building or personal empowerment. Skinner Boxes and operant conditioning loops can shape behavior – but they won’t lead to player delight or true long-term engagement.
• #40: For that, you need skill-building. People enjoy getting better at something they care about. The process of learning and mastery is deeply, intrinsically motivating.
• #41: To create a robust Core Loop,
• #42: Combine compelling feedback with the skill-building power of games.
• #43: Create repeatable, engaging activities that are triggered by an existing urge or need
• #44: Build a feedback loop that promotes learning and skill-building
• #45: close that loop by giving people compelling and meaningful reasons to return – and cues to remind them
• #46: Breakthrough innovations spend lots of time up-front getting this core experience loop right. The Rock Band tea, for example, created a War Room for protoyping and testing early versions of the game – and didn’t add features or polish until the feel of that early play experience ROCKED.
• #47: The Covet Fashion team experimented with a number of Core Loops – tweaking and iterating until they found the right combination of features and systems to delight and hook their early players.
• #48: The fifth Hack builds on all the previous ones – and is directly connected to building long-term engagement with your customers.
• #49: teams who produce Breakthrough innovations recognize the importance of early adopters – and find ways to co-create with them – empower them - learn from them, and leverage their skills, knowledge and passions to bring the full product vision to life.
• #50: You can engage ALL your customers with progressive skill-building...
• #51: And encourage your best customers – your early adopters, enthusiasts and passionate advocates – to stay involved and contribute by giving them the tools, powers and rewards of mastery.
• #52: In true eBay fashion, the idea for the star system came from a group of early power-sellers who wanted a shorthand way to communicate trustworthiness to potential buyers. Through their actions & feedback, these power-sellers helped tune & shape the overall system.
• #53: The Sims team leveraged their fan community by giving them powerful customization tools early in the development process – and then learning from their experiments and questions.
• #54: For Rock Band, the mastery systems were built around the Rock-N-Roll fantasies of social gamers and non-musicians – something the team absorbed through interviews & early testing.
• #55: And Covet Fashion was created from the ground up around rating systems that naturally bubble true fashion expertise among the players.
• #56: So there you have it –
• #57: 5 key Hacks that lead to breakthrough innovation.
• #58: To maximize YOUR chances of success
• #59: try making these Hacks – in your thinking and practices –
• #60: and see what happens.
• #61: Now let’s switch gears, and take a look at 3 smart shortcuts you can start using TODAY to turbo-charge your customer discovery process.
• #62: Which we’ll bring to life with a deep dive into the early design process behind Covet Fashion, the breakthrough hit from Crowdstar.
• #63: The first shortcut is the MVP Canvas – a 1-page document, similar to the Business Model Canvas, but highly targeted to the needs of early stage product development.
• #64: the MVP Canvas helps you think like a scientist by giving you a clearcut way to generate hypotheses and prioritize your highest-risk assumptiosn,
• #65: First you clarify your product strategy by forming hypotheses about your early customers, unmet needs, solution and value prop.
• #66: You identify your team’s strengths, value and passions – and the early metrics you’ll use to measure success
• #67: You’ll then list and prioritize your most important, high-risk assumptions – and use that list to focus your prototyping and testing efforts.
• #68: The second shortcut is the Speed Interview – a great technique for generating early product insights & excellent testing subjects.
• #69: Speed Interviews help you identify and leverage your early adopters through rapid pattern recognition.
• #70: You conduct 10-15 quick interviews with potential early adopters – who you can find & filter in a variety of ways –spending 5-10 minutes on each interview
• #71: You ask just a few revealing questions - carefully-chosen to surface the needs, habits and ideas of true early adopters
• #72: You can speed things up by using inteviewer/note-taker pairs for better faster pattern recognition
• #73: And once the interviews are complete, you’ll identify 5-7 enthusiastic early adoptees who would make great testing subjects.
• #74: The third shortcut is Habit Stories – a variation on Job Stories, or Jobs-To-Be-Done
• #75: Habit Stories help you harvest the most actionable product insights from your customer interviews and testing sessions
• #76: If you’re looking for shortcuts to customer engagement and satisfaction, piggyback your product experience on to of an existing habit – amd solve a problem or unmet need that goes along with that habit.
• #77: If you’re looking for shortcuts to customer engagement and satisfaction, piggyback your product experience on to of an existing habit – amd solve a problem or unmet need that goes along with that habit.
• #78: If you’re looking for shortcuts to customer engagement and satisfaction, piggyback your product experience on to of an existing habit – amd solve a problem or unmet need that goes along with that habit.
• #79: A habit story is a special type of job Story – one that’s built around your customer’s existing habits and unmet needs.
• #80: If you’re looking for shortcuts to customer engagement and satisfaction, piggyback your product experience on to of an existing habit – amd solve a problem or unmet need that goes along with that habit.
• #81: Let’s look at how Covet Fashion used these techniques – the MVP Canvas
• #82: Speed Intervierws and
• #83: And Habit Stories – to super-charge their early product development,
• #84: Covet Fashion came about because Crowdstar saw an opportunity to expand the fashion gaming market by integrating with real-world fashion brand, Our initial product strategy involved letting fashion gamers play dress-up with real world brands – and get advice from a well-known celebrity stylist.
• #85: Our initial product vision was a free-to-play co-operative mobile game tied to fashion trends and real-world events. We wanted to offer people a replacement for Vogue” – something beautiful to flip through and play with that keeps you up-to-date on fashion trends.
• #86: Our unfair advantages are 1) extensive F2P experience and 2) an addressible audience for testing and marketing the game. Out early metrics were subjective responses drawn from weekly interviews.
• #87: Our key assumption was the basic premise of blending real-world fashion cycles with a F2P mobile game. We also wanted to understand the value-add – or not – of a celebrity stylist.
• #88: For the speed interviews, we spoke with young fashion-loving women – both gamers and non-gamers
• #89: We did the interviews as phone screening – with paid testing as a followup for the best interviews.
• #90: We completed the first round in 2 weeks, which gave us useful customer insights and testing subjects to work with.
• #91: From these early sessions, three key patterns emerged that corresponded to different types of fashion gamers.
• #92: The first is the Fashion Browser – someone who loves staying up to date on fashion trends, and immersing herself in the beautiful aspirational world of Vogue,
• #93: WE translated these research insights into design decisions by creating a Habit Story around her existing habits and unmet needs
• #94: The second pattern we identified is the Co-creator – someone who likes to dress, shop and primp in co-op mode, with a buddy
• #95: Writing her Habit Story helped us see the need for a Shared Closet – which became a much-loved feature of the finsihed game
• #96: The third pattern we identified is the Armchair Stylist - Someone very opinionated about fashion, who loves to tell other people how to dress
• #97: Her Habit Story helped us get inside the mindset of a wanna-be stylist, and create a in-game rating system to empower and highlight these people
• #98: We updated our MVP Canvas to reflect what we learned. Our hypotheses were largely confirmed – and our age targets tweaked a bit.
• #99: The F2P game we’d envisioned looked like it could be a hit with fashion-loving young women who own smartphones and tablets
• #100: SO we validated our initial assumptions, and generated NEW assumptions to guide our next round of testing.
• #101: And that’s how a solid start in low-fidelity, high-learning playtestiing helped Croiwdstar create their largest hit to date.
• #102: Now that you see how these ideas work together, I encourage you to try our these shortcuts and techniques for yourself –just click anywhere on this slide, or goto MVP DESIGN HACKS DOT COM SLASH SHORTCUTS – or click anywhere on this slide
• #103: If you and your team aspire to create an innovative product
• #104: If you’re working in an entreprenurial organization that supports fast-moving, iterative innovation
• #105: If you’re eager to learn shortcuts, best practices and smart ways to get further – faster
• #106: If you can focus on turbo-charging your customer discovery for a few weeks...
• #107: Check out MVP Design Hacks – our 4-week programs for TEAM and product LEADERS who want to turbo-charge their customer discovery
• #108: ... And get amazing results. We’re proud of the entrepreneurs we’ve helped to succeed – and we’d love to do the same for you.
• #109: ... And get amazing results. We’re proud of the entrepreneurs we’ve helped to succeed – and we’d love to do the same for you.
• #110: ... And get amazing results. We’re proud of the entrepreneurs we’ve helped to succeed – and we’d love to do the same for you.
• #111: ... And get amazing results. We’re proud of the entrepreneurs we’ve helped to succeed – and we’d love to do the same for you.
• #112: ... And get amazing results. We’re proud of the entrepreneurs we’ve helped to succeed – and we’d love to do the same for you.
• #113: If you/re ready to turbo-charge your customer discovery with game design smarts, let’s setup a short, complimentary coaching session. I’ll answer your questions, discuss your project, and together we’ll decide if MVP Design Hacks is right for you. Thanks for listening – I hope to hear from you soon.