This is the 4th post about how media companies could and should change their mindset and process when it comes to digital innovation. The previous posts have been about my journey towards creating a new digital process and this post is about that process: The Pretzel.
Enter the Pretzel
The Pretzel stands on the shoulders of giants and has been inspired by many great minds, processes and literature. One that deserves extra credit is Inspired: How to create products that customers love by Marty Cagan. In his book, Marty introduces his Product Opportunity Assessment (POA) containing several key questions that need to be answered before we can make a decision to move forward with a new product. I’ve tried to simplify Marty’s POA and blend it with other great processes like Lean UX, Product Discovery, User Story Mapping and Impact Mapping. The result is the Pretzel and “The 8 most important questions” (more on those in the next post).
In the previous post I wrote that media companies have been set up from the start to fail hard and slow in contrast to Lean Startup which is about failing fast and cheap. In that post I claimed that it’s our silo organization that has set us up for such failure but it’s also our processes. Here’s my fourth guideline on digital product development:
#4 – You cannot develop digital products with a Waterfall process
Here’s a popular waterfall process when it comes to IT and development projects:
There are a few problems with this process. For starters; there’s the cost of changing stuff in a digital development process:
Changing a product is cheap in the Requirements phase because the product is just a bunch of lines on a whiteboard or a paper sketch. It’s also cheap to do adjustments in the Design phase in software like Photoshop, inVision, or Balsamiq, but when we enter the Development phase – that’s when changes start to become really expensive. First of all, we have the direct cost of more programming hours, but we also have the hidden cost of bugs and errors that are guaranteed to come later on if we start changing code that was conceived to do one thing and suddenly needs to support something else. And finally, what’s most risky and thus potentially costly is changing a live product that has active users depending on it. Especially if this product is error-prone due to scope creep in the Development phase. Looking at this common process, it’s ironic that most of our projects seem to be a race towards release – the most risky and costly phase. Talk about failing hard and expensive.
Remembering our lessons from post no. 3 that extra features are regarded as Waste, and guideline no. 2 “Your product is a hypothesis”, it’s clear that we need to alter this process in order to discover what the users need and test these assumptions in a cheap way. So here’s another process, enter The Pretzel:
In comparison with the waterfall process, there are three new phases that we need to note: Discovery, Definition, Delivery. The second thing we need to note is that there are new checkpoints between the phases. These checkpoints are necessary to make sure no project goes forward without answering the essential questions of each phase. More on these questions in the next post. So, let’s start our walk through the Pretzel at the light bulb: The idea. Everyone has an idea and it must be easy to ventilate your idea and get feedback but to actually go all the way to the dollar-sign which means you have a project with a budget and things will really start costing money, that’s another thing. Astro Teller who’s Captain of Moonshots at Google (how about that title) has famously stated that “You have to break an idea at least five times”. Another favorite quote about creating stuff people find delighting to use comes from Steve Jobs:
“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains”
You don’t envision the iPod or the iPhone or the iPad, those products are what you end up with if you follow a discovery process and really challenge your idea along the way by exposing it to others. So what we tell all our creative minds in MittMedia is that you should always start with Why? What’s the vision and purpose of this? What’s the story that will enthuse people to spend time thinking about your idea? At Google everyone can work on hobby projects once a week and many successful Google products such as Gmail have started in this way. But to go from “I have a dream” to product launch at Google, you need to attract people along the way. Because that’s the first checkpoint:
Users and team. Okay, so you say you have vision and purpose. But is there good data on end-users and their usage to back your claims, and have you recruited a team of enthusiastic followers ready to help make this happen?
So you have all these things? Fantastic! Then we’ll give you some resources (more specific; The digital hand), now go out into the world and try to break your idea. It’s time to enter the Definition phase or the Prototype phase as it’s also called in other similar processes. Let’s make a quick MEL (Minimum Effort to Learn) prototype to test our assumptions and fail fast and cheap. Let’s see what real end-users do with our prototype (preferably using it in their natural environment). Another benefit of this phase is that it completely kills the feature list documentation. It takes a longer time to create and maintain that feature wish list than it takes to draw a paper prototype where all features are visible and interactive. Also, when we see how people use the prototype we can start envisioning how we could make money from people using this? Will it be B2B or B2C revenue? How will it work, what would it cost, and so on. All our assumptions from the Discovery phase can be easily validated on real users and customers, even price. This is one of the reasons why the second checkpoint is a dollar-sign:
Cost and revenue. Do we have a clearly defined (and several times iterated) product with project budget and business model?
Another reason why there’s a dollar-sign here is that all failures before this checkpoint have been fast and cheap. Shutting down a project in the Discovery phase is not wasted money, it’s our goddamn jobs to learn more about our users so that time can never be labeled as wasted! And as we saw earlier on the “Cost of change curve”, failures in the Definition phase are also relatively cheap. At each checkpoint we could and should ask ourselves: Should we go forward with this? I mean really ask ourselves that question, because it’s not a rhetorical question. Because if we go forward from this checkpoint into the Development phase, then there will be some hours spent programming, there will be some marketing efforts, we might hire people, buy equipment and hardware, train our staff, and so on. In fact, as a decisionmaker you have four aces you can play at each checkpoint:
Right, so we go into an agile Development phase and build our product through sprints, and at the end of each sprint we ask our product owner: Is it good enough to release now? And we repeat this until checkpoint no. 3:
Product offering. Do we have a product offer 
that will satisfy our users and is everyone and everything involved in the release ready? (marketing, customer- support, and so on)
Then we enter yet another new phase: the Delivery phase. Now as you noted, in the waterfall process there was a milestone called Release and after that, an endless phase called product management (or the ugly Swedish word Förvaltning). In the Pretzel we acknowledge that in a digital world, the real work starts when the product is finally released to its end-users. What does our data tell us about their reception? Do they use it like we expected? Even though we’ve done the Discovery and Definition phase, what did we still miss that we now know and need to tweak? Delivery is a phase, not a milestone. We can’t dismantle the project resources the second the product is released, then who will be there to monitor its success and order important changes or talk to real end-users? With that said, this is still an experiment so somewhere we need to say that “okay, we have given this product a fair chance” and thus we arrive at the fourth checkpoint and start our evaluation phase:
Measure and learn. How did everything go, what 
did we learn, and should we go for another round in the Pretzel or shut this product down?
And now we’re back at the dollar sign. Coincidence? Not quite. Now we have all the intel we need to make an informed decision and decide whether to spend more time and money on this or kill it and save money. Whatever we decide, we have learned a lot and most likely we have tons of new ideas and thus we enter the Pretzel once again and ask ourselves: Why should we do this?
That’s it for today, the next post will be the last in this series and is about the 8 essential questions you need to ask yourselves moving from light-bulb to dollar-sign.
Written by: Anders Härén, CTO at MittMedia