Minimum Viable Experimentation

Those who work in the digital and agile world should be pretty familiar by now with the implementation of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This is the creation of a working product that doesn’t have to meet all requirements, but allows further testing, feedback & iterative improvements. It is an approach pretty well understood and used across the industry and one that should lead to better products sooner.

So perhaps we need to use this approach, not just in the creation of the initial product, but in the way we release further functionality & features to our products? This would mean focusing less on the usefulness what each new piece of functionality provides (in economic terms the 'utility'), but basing each successive development on what it tells us about the product's overall ability to meet the wider strategic objective?

In other words, rather than add new stuff that simply compliments the overall richness of the experience... shouldn't each new tangible delivery be based upon a hypothesis? And in-turn, shouldn't this hypothesis be derived from insight that is focused on improving the user's needs or outcomes?

For example... if your project aim (which I assume directly linked to your strategic objective) is "to have a better online sign-up process for a new credit card", then each successive sprint or release from the initial product launch should be delivered to address this aim. However you shouldn't just assume that this is the case. 

Firstly make sure that each time you plan your deliverables you are actually answering a question, such as:

"How can we stop [a specific type of customer] exiting the online form before the end of the process?"

Secondly develop a hypothesis that can be tested in a small experiment. Such as:

"We believe that by adding [1: a specific feature] at [2: a specific point] we will create [3: an expected behaviour] by the user and therefore they will reach [4: an outcome] that will improve [5: a goal]."

Where in our new credit card sign-up example this could be:

1	A specific feature	A reassuring statement about financial approval
2	A specific point	The 4th of 5 pages in the process, where the most users drop out
3	An expected behaviour	The user is reassured that they could be approved easily
4	An outcome	The user moves to the 5th (and final) page of the process
5	A goal	Form conversion improves

It is worth stressing the point that these experiments don't have to be huge or complex, and in some cases making changes to a piece of content or image may be sufficient. They just have to be enough to prove or disprove your experiment's hypotheses…. a minimum viable experiment and nothing more.

Behave, Deliver and Grow Like A Digital Company

Delivering digital interfaces to your organisation's customers, partners and employees is no longer optional. It is now essential for long-term effectiveness (and survival).

But this means unlocking the data, systems and functionality your business operates with and exposing this both internally and externally to meet increasingly shifting needs. But it is not easy... hardly any sizeable company has an entirely blank slate to work from. Legacy applications, processes and thinking tie any business down so that it can work well. But it is these very constraints that often limit speed and agility, which are needed to succeed now.

Digitally enabling your business means changing the way you behave, deliver and grow.

Behaviour:
Being customer focused means creating a better customer experience that can win and maintain custom in the competitive digital landscape. It also means understating and controlling your data, so you to make informed decisions quickly based on what you are observing or being told.

Delivery:
Start by using new platforms, tools and methods to build products quickly, plus then to evolve them rapidly over time. If you think your quarterly website functionality is fast now, consider that over 7 years ago Amazon stated it makes changes to production every 11.6 seconds (it may even be faster now) and Facebook releases to production twice a day.

Growth:
Don't be afraid to unleash the creativity and innovation within your boundaries to help you build. Employees must be part of the Digital journey (not observers) and everyone, not just your test manager, must work towards the continuous improvement of products and services.

Forget Agile Development - You Need Agile Marketing

The term agile development is now pretty much established as the way to get web functionality built and launch. Focused on delivery of a minimum viable product it aims to build 'something but not everything' in a given time frame. It is so successful now, that marketing and commercial types have come to expect that their technical team or web agency can create nearly all of what they want in record time.

So now its time for a new term. So forget Agile Development for now, your business needs to adopt the practice of Agile Marketing!

Align your Digital Strategy and Business Architecture

Your Digital Strategy should be a vision and roadmap of how customer-facing online content, functionality and technology initiatives will be implemented and managed across your organisation.

But so far there is no common framework for describing the creation and delivery of a digital strategy. 

Note: I'm not too sure why this is, the discipline of digital is now pretty mature. Perhaps it is because online covers such a wide range of subjects from tactical digital marketing techniques through to programmes that transform businesses and create significant customer channel shift. 

Business Architecture is a description of an organisation's structure, usually in terms of governance, services and information.  The Business Architecture Guild (somewhat nebulously) describes it as "a blueprint of the enterprise that provides a common understanding of the organization and is used to align strategic objectives and tactical demands". The discipline is full of strange terms such as TOGAF, OMG & Zachman and there are a number of approaches used to describe an enterprise / business architecture. Each of them trying to align the technical architecture and practices with the larger organisational strategy. 

However... what is clear to me is that very few organisations align their digital strategy with their business architecture. Which means that the two are possibly working in silo'd isolation or at the very least not joined up in thinking, delivery and (more worryingly) in their representation back to the rest of the business.

Hasn't the time now come to correctly align the two?

Does it matter where anything goes?

I've been meaning to write this post for ages, but never had the chance to pull my collected thoughts together before now. In essence, this article is all about the need to continually optimise your digital presence. But it's also about the bigger concept that change is the only constant in the online world and that anyone not innovating and making mistakes is actually taking a step backwards.

So what do I mean by all this?

Well, as I've mentioned in several posts before, the creation of a website (e.g. an online retailing one) is just the end of the beginning... Not the beginning of the end. Your journey has just started. So if you haven't already begun to use AB tests or Multi Variant Testing tools already, I bet you're at least considering the way you can use them to improve your KPI's.

This does consequently create an interesting debate that you might like to have with your web design / development agency or in-house eCommerce team. Centred around the central premise of "Does it actually matter where you place content and functionality on the web page when you're creating it?"

In other words... if you practice the science of 'user centred optimisation',  then very quickly your iterative process of test & learn will find a better way than you came up with at the beginning of your process.

And yes, if you keep doing it... your site should continue to evolve. Therefore leading to the theory that it might not actually matter how you initially design your website, but that it just matters that you keep evolving it quickly and intelligently.