When "mini" is good

I’m immersed in the throws of getting Openstudy (@openstudy) out the door and it makes me realize, once again, how important it is to work the smart and effective way with a limited amount of resources – especially, when you’re in major start-up mode. We subscribe to the Agile development methodology for building  a product, which lets us get things done quickly in small bite sized pieces. While this is a good way to get a product out the door quickly, the approach is also remarkably applicable to running a small business.

The essence of this approach, is that your business will develop and grow through an ongoing series of mini-changes, not one big step change or an all in one redesign. Since these changes are driven by your customer requests and involve all your company, marvelous things will start happening.

If you take a blue print for this process – I like the way the guys at Aardvark lay it out – you can easily see how this can be applied more broadly to a small business (you might want to read through the Aardvark blog post on this topic to get a better reference point). Here’s what it looks like . . .

If you overlay this thinking onto the more general aspects of a small business you get the following.

• Learn from users – Choose a part of your business you want to improve. Talk to your customers in a structured and detailed way. Set up an interview time. What do they think? Gather ongoing feedback  from Twitter, blogs, people in your company etc, the key word here is ‘learn’.
• Design – take the what you’ve learned and design a very narrow and well defined response (involve your whole team). This may take the shape of a new twist on an existing product -or improving the way your do something, like adding a new way to respond to customer complaints. Set up a smaller group responsible for working out the details, they should come up with some alternative options and settle on one. Sketch things out, no design agencies needed, this is down and dirty.
• Sanity check with users – time to take your ideas back to your customers. Try and ’simulate’ the solution you have worked out in your Design and see how people react. Make this down and dirty, you’ll still need to refine it so dont spend too much time on ‘making it pretty’ at this stage.
• Design Review with Team – take what you have found back to the team and make refinements.

Now you need to make it happen . . .

• Implementation notes – the team responsible for implementing the new change, prioritizes it in the context of the changes from the last few weeks that are already being worked on and creates some brief implementation notes. Since everyone, had been involved in the process there’s no big surprises or need to ‘educate’ people on what is being done.
• Implement – Push out the changes and let your customers know what you have done. Start gathering their feedback and continue the learning cycle.

Remember, this process is continually happening within your business. Positive change comes from continually making small refinements, derived by listening to your customers and involving everyone in your company.