“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth in the end because once you get there you can move mountains.” How keeping things simple can help build better products. There are simple and powerful ways that can help us to reduce the risk of starting new initiatives and get real feedback quickly. I will share experiences where simple techniques of using a pen and a paper to create a paper prototypes helped us answer complex problems and validate business ideas, quickly. This approach helped in building an innovative and world-class product called Springer Nature Experiments, allowing researchers across life sciences to quickly find and evaluate protocols and methods across life sciences. Springer Nature Experiments combines portfolios across the Springer Nature resources which is the largest in the life sciences, to make searching for experiments easy and effective.

1. From Pen & Paper
To Prototype & Product
Munish Malik
Sr. Product Consultant - Equal Experts
Springer Nature (Alumni)
@munishmalik

2. Product managers, designers,
entrepreneurs, business leaders
Which is the right problem to solve?
Which idea or solution to invest?
Validation can take months, how can we
make the feedback loop rapid, quick and
iterative?

3. Simple and Powerful
#DesignThinking
Validating complex business ideas need not be complex

4. The Challenge

6. Empathy with users & their
problems
User Research
User Personas
Understand and define
the problems and needs
of your users

7. Lots of ideas
Too many starting points
A blurry end
Multiple designs and concepts to test
Conceptualizing the Product

8. Sketching & user flows
Sketches Storyboards
Drawing all steps and screens.
Laying out sketches and screens in user flows.

9. Design Thinking
Empathise
Define
Ideate
Prototype
Test

10. Paper
Prototypes

11. Demo

12. +ves
Cost
effective
Teamwork & fun
High on honesty and
Low on loyalty
Creative
Quick &
Iterative

13. Democratizing Design

14. Democratizing Innovation

15. Springer Nature

16. Less, but Better.
- Dieter Rams
@munishmalik