From 2012 to 2015 I was fortunate enough to help run a product design and development studio called Neo. A studio (or agency of any kind) really only has one asset — it’s people. Those people come to work for you because you promise them fulfilling work that aligns with their values. Our values were clear. We built customer-centric products that met business needs. And we did it through continuous learning, experimentation and iteration. This was the kind of work we sought and took. Needless to say we learned a lot during those years.
Build me an app!
A fast-growing startup CEO reached a few months into our incorporation and asked us to build his company their first mobile app. This was a hotel search engine that specialized in luxury hotels in exotic places. If you can picture those beautiful huts over crystal clear South Pacific waters, you’re getting the idea. Their primary selling tactic was to use gorgeous, high-resolution photography to sell the property. We were excited. Not only was this an interesting challenge, it was high profile. This could put us on the map! And the cherry on top was that the client had $100,000 to spend on this initiative.
The year was 2016 and mobile screen sizes were still pretty small – certainly by today’s standards. We took a look at the project brief and immediately had concerns. Would the primary sales tactic the company was using translate to mobile? Was mobile, still a nascent sales channel, be the right way to drive revenue for the client? How might we best use mobile as a way to drive interest and ultimately sales to these amazing locations?
Let’s test some ideas!
We had some ideas how to best translate this company’s value proposition to mobile. We wanted to test them before committing to a specific set of requirements for the mobile app. The company CEO (and founder) was our main client. We offered to take 10% of the budget – $10,000 – and use it on product discovery. Our proposal was to use this relatively small percentage of the overall budget to de-risk both our and the CEO’s ideas of how the mobile app should be designed and developed. With the remaining $90,000 we would then develop it based on what we learned.
Naturally we loved this approach. Not only was it right in line with our studio’s ways of working, it was what we promised our people. We would work in a ship/sense/respond way and not take work where we were simply developing a stakeholder’s list of requirements. The CEO of the startup, however, did not love this approach. He had built his business to $100MM. He was confident in his decision-making. He wanted a very specific mobile app.
We got fired
When you hire people into your services business you have to live up to the promise of the type of work and process they’ll have. If you don’t, they’ll quit and go work elsewhere. We wouldn’t budge off of our approach to appropriate 10% of the budget to product discovery and learning. The client wasn’t having any of that. He fired us before we had a chance to prove ourselves.
We were disappointed. This initiative had the potential to put us on the map. It also had the potential to disillusion our newly hired staff and send them packing. Finally, it had the potential to devalue our brand. We weren’t just another shop to outsource your development work to. We were a partner — a collaborator — in the success of your business. If that wasn’t what you were looking for you should look elsewhere.
Stick to your guns, win better work
It was so tempting to break our value proposition. We needed the money. The app would have been popular and given us the credibility we needed to grow our business. But it would not have reflected our work nor value proposition. We would have been just another body shop in New York City. That’s not how we saw ourselves. In all likelihood, we would have lost if not at least strained our relationship with our team. Learning the best way to approach a new product is key to its success. We all have strong ideas about how to do that — especially if we launched and built the business to a certain level of success. That doesn’t mean that what got us here will get us to the next level. If you’re working in a situation — in-house or agency — that challenges your values, stick to your guns. You’ll win better work in the future.
Speaking of new ventures with Josh Seiden, we’ve been building a new, global offering of training across the world in various languages, specifically of Lean UX classes.
Over at Sense & Respond Learning we now have 5 classes available this summer and fall in 5 different countries, all teaching Lean UX and Product Discovery for Agile Teams.
Our very first class is taking place in Bogotá, Colombia in Spanish on August 23-24, 2024. You can learn more about that class here.
You can see all currently available Lean UX trainings around the world here.
