Why is Innovation important? The last 10 years have seen a number of technology startups transition from small disruptive teams into established global companies with thousands of employees.
2. Why is Innovation
important?
The last 10 years have seen a number
of technology startups transition
from small disruptive teams into
established global companies with
thousands of employees.
3. Companies such as Spotify, Netflix &
Slack have experienced exponential
growth, with the media frequently
charting their progress through
revenue, valuations or head count.
Why is Innovation
important?
4. However, perhaps one of the most
remarkable successes away from the
numbers has been the ability of these
companies to not only grow ‘big’, but to
maintain an enviable cadence of
innovation and iteration whilst doing so.
Why is Innovation
important?
5. This decoupling of size and agility is
particularly interesting for larger
organisations whose size may have
led to corporate inertia.
Bureaucracy and slow process was
seen as the inevitable consequence
of scale and success.
Why is Innovation
important?
6. Speed is the new
currency of business.
Marc Benioff
CEO, Salesforce
7. Over the next hour we will examine:
• Spotify are maintaining their speed and
agility to scale
• How Design Thinking can help you to
build better products faster
• Outline steps you can take to begin the
journey in your own company
Why is Innovation
important?
15. Design thinking is a human-centered
mindset and approach to innovation.
Design
Thinking.
16. Human
Centred Design.
A process that starts with the
people you’re designing for and
ends with new solutions that are
tailor made to suit their needs.
17. Draws from the designer's toolkit to
integrate the needs of people, the
possibilities of technology, and the
requirements for business success.
Users Needs
Business
Requirements
Technical
Constraints
Design
Thinking.
20. Design
Intense, exciting and collaborative
design sprints are perfect for exploring
and solving big challenges and testing
new ideas in a short space of time.
SprintSprintSprint
21. Design
Sprints 101.
Created by ex Google Ventures maverick
Jake Knapp and now used by the most
successful product companies in the world,
Design Sprints allow you to create ideas,
solve problems and test with real users fast.
22.
23. Drawing teams
together.
It’s made up of collaborative exercises
and activities which draw teams together
to create a shared vision for their idea,
innovation, product or service.
31. Back in 2016, Spotify launched a new
aspect of their core Spotify
product specifically designed around
the music needs of runners.
Spotify
32. The new service was explored
and prototyped using an
adapted version of Google’s
five day Design Sprint.
Design Sprint
33. What the data team at Spotify
saw was a sharp uptake in
users discovering new music by
activity — exploring playlists
through topics like ‘dinner’,
‘sleep’ or ‘workout’.
Data
34. By understanding this shift in
behaviour towards ‘activity’
being a good potential entry
point to the music service,
Spotify were keen to explore
what opportunity might exist
around the activity of running.
Data
35. At Spotify, they have developed
an internal model called ‘DIBB’,
which stands for Data, Insights,
Beliefs and Bets.
Using this, the team were able
to identify a specific problem
the sprint team could focus on.
DIBB
36.
37. Working on the ‘bet’ that a
dedicated feature to solve the
problem of running being boring
would be valuable for many
users, Spotify assembled a small
team to prototype a service over
a five day period.
Design Sprint
38. Throughout the week, the team
utilised the Design Sprint
framework side by side with their
DIBB model to iterate their ‘bet’
and determine what feature they
would prototype.
Design Sprint
39. The team started by
experiencing the problem first-
hand, spending lots of time
running.
It was at that point they realised
matching the rhythm of running
to the beat of music would be
appealing.
Design Sprint
40. Their goal was to prototype a service
that would allow runners to ‘feel like
they were dancing’ when running.
• Mechanically monitoring their
running via users’ mobile handsets
• Curating a constant gapless playlist
according to the matched BPM
Design Sprint
41. With a product idea emerging, the five
day process healthily constrained the
team to really focus on what was
achievable in a one day prototype.
Prototyping
42. • Not being restrained by
technology
• Used a selection of varying
BPM tracks
• This allowed users to manually
match their running pattern
Prototyping
43. The feedback from customers was
wholly positive, and so in only five days
Spotify had been able to investigate a
hypothesis and validate user intent for
a new service without writing a line of
code or designing any interface.
Prototyping
44. After the five day sprint, the team then
embarked on a deeper phase of design
and development, conducting further
sprints to build out the technology and
user interface that would power the
final service.
Afterwards
46. Despite being a company with over
2000 employees, Spotify were able to
maintain agility by giving small focused
teams the autonomy to explore an
opportunity within a Design Sprint.
Key Takeouts
1
47. By developing an internal model for
turning opportunities into hypotheses
(DIBB), Spotify share a simple
vocabulary across the company for
identifying and acting on new ideas.
Key Takeouts
2
48. By utilising the Design Sprint at the
outset of a hypothesis, Spotify not only
validated the opportunity quickly, but
minimised the risk of design and build
investment later in the project.
Key Takeouts
3
