This article is written by Taylor Wescoatt, Expert in Residence at Seedcamp. Taylor’s background spans 20 years of Product and UX having held key positions at successful startups like Seatwave and CitySearch, and larger brands like eBay and Time Out. This is the accompanying summary of two articles on Roadmaps for Startups; The Vision Roadmap for Startups, and The Behavioural Roadmap for Startups.
Congratulations! You’re starting a business, you’ve got a great vision, and a bit of traction. You’re growing, there are a million things to do. How do you decide what to focus on first? Everyone’s asking for different things. You need a Roadmap.
Typically Roadmaps are typically gantt-chart style diagrams of ‘what we’re going to build’. I’ve put together a lot of these “Feature-led Roadmaps”, and while the final product of long labour is usually appreciated, its pretty much out of date the moment it’s printed. This is confusing for everyone. Features are simply an abstraction between the Business and the needs of your User.
A simple diagram to visualise the steps from your vision to creating your MVP (click to enlarge)
In this series I share a model of roadmapping for Startups specifically. The goal is to get everyone aligned on what is being built and why.
We begin with translating your Vision into a Vision Roadmap full of staged Propositions, or ‘how a segment sees your brand at a given time’.
Each Proposition can then be translated into a full User Journey of Behaviours necessary to achieve that Proposition. Focusing on key Behaviours and only then starting to brainstorm features leads to a far more aligned, well thought through, and persistent plan that a startup can go build Minimum Viable Product tests against in order to validate your thinking and drive your business forward.
If you use these techniques, you’ll find as most startups do that you’ve got a renewed, refined, more accessible plan for delivering your vision.
Good luck!
This article is written by Taylor Wescoatt, Expert in Residence at Seedcamp. Taylor’s background spans 20 years of Product and UX having held key positions at successful startups like Seatwave and CitySearch, and larger brands like eBay and Time Out. This is the second of two articles on Roadmaps for Startups – the first of which can be read here.
Now that you’re clear on your Vision Roadmap, the next step is to figure out what to actually build. A roadmap’s job is to tell you where you’re going, and how to get there. With the Vision Roadmap we have a clearer idea of where we’re going, but that’s too high-level to let us know what to work on tomorrow.
Normally roadmaps look something like the below, that is, a bunch of features listed down the left, with delivery timelines Gantt-charted out.
These types of Roadmaps say what a company is doing, and what a user is getting, but thats where the problems begin;
I believe a roadmap can be built around what the Customer wants and needs. Lets go back to our example of Hogwash which started in the Vision Roadmap piece. One of the initial Propositions we planned to achieve was as follows;
“Hogwash is a convenient way to get the occasional last-minute sparkle on my car” Launch Proposition for the Busy Professional
Now our Product Funnel for a typical ecommerce solution (like Hogwash) might look something like this. These are all key steps we observer on-site, can measure, and reflect our KPIs directly.
Unfortunately this misses out on a lot of things that the Customer is going through, many of which you can use.
Here’s an example of a full Customer Journey for the same situation. Each step is a “Behaviour” that the customer undertakes in their journey. It starts well before they come to the site, and it ends only after they have demonstrated the behaviour that fulfills the company’s goals. In this case, repeat-purchase.
You’ll see that all the key Funnel steps are in there, but there are also steps in there before, after, and between them. The better insight you have into your customer journey, the quicker you can make key decisions like product changes or pivots, and the more advantage you have over your competitors.
Have a look at the step between ‘schedule appointment’ and ‘pay’, a place where there’s a particularly steep funnel drop. The step ‘talk to partner’ is just as important, if not moreso, to the Customer, and introduces an additional persona into the equation. Understanding this creates new opportunities in Product. You might address it directly, “Enter your partner’s email here and we’ll send them a summary”, to which you could solicit the partner’s feedback (eg scale of 1-10). Great new data and insight opportunity from simply recognising that this step exists! (Hogwash isn’t real, of course, but the example is real, from another startup)
Behaviours are “Actions” performed for “Reasons” with expected “Rewards”. I won’t go deeper on these in this post, but the more clearly you identify and validate these with your customers, the greater opportunity you have to compare, influence, and supplant them with the behaviours you want. The work of Nir Eyal, Nathalie Nahai, and Dan Ariely might be really helpful to look at.
Now that you’ve got your Customer Behaviours understood, pick the two you want to focus on for the next 90 days. This is your Behavioural Roadmap. Short, sweet, and customer-focused. All those other ideas can be saved for posterity in The Opportunity Cloud, you may get around to them later. Simple, right? I know its not pretty like the ones at the top, but hopefully you’ll find its a lot more relevant. Features don’t drive KPIs, Behaviours do.
Now comes the hardest part… coming up with great ideas! There’s no science to creating delight, but make sure you have your best people in the room. By focusing on Behaviours (action + motivation + reward), you have a better chance of coming up with a great idea than if you’re just focusing on features. IDEO’s work in the “How might we…” practice is worth looking at. The following three-step process (great article about Pandora here) takes you from which Behaviour you want to what Minimum Viable Product tests you want to undertake.
By focusing in on the entire Customer Journey, and understanding the underlying motivations and rewards for the user, you’ve now developed some serious competitive advantage. Your team is far more empowered to develop great ideas with you, and there is a much stronger sense of purpose and direction to all those late nights you’ll be spending delivering your world-changing idea.
Want to hear about it in Taylor’s own words? Listen to the accompanying podcast!
This guest post is written by Hemal Kuntawala from M&S Venture Labs. The Venture Lab uses lean startup techniques to experiment with new business models that evolve retail and ecommerce at M&S.
I recently spent time with some technical and non-technical founders, and nearly all of them commented on how they found it difficult juggling the different disciplines involved in building a product. They’re right, there is a lot to juggle, and the context switching can cause some serious whiplash and brain-drain.
Each phase of product development requires a different perspective, almost a different mindset. At one end of the scale you have a big-picture view of the world, like looking at the market you’re in and hypothesising new value propositions. At the other end you have nitty-gritty details like the pixels and font-sizes of your UI.
I wanted to try and document these differing perspectives and provide some advice on how to manage the constant switching. Here’s a diagram to illustrate this spectrum and how the different activities of product development fall into them. (I should mention that this isn’t a comprehensive description of how to build stuff).
At the top end you’ll find yourself with a big-picture view of the world, and at the bottom you’ll be sweating the small nitty-gritty details. I’ll quickly rattle through what each of these entail, with some context from my team (at M&S Venture Labs):
Big-picture: Value proposition Starting with a broad view of the world, here you’ll be thinking about the market you’re in, your business model and your value proposition – what it is you’re going to offer your customers.
Nitty-gritty: Customer development From there, customer development will take you into research mode to unearth insights on customer drivers, behaviours, and pain points. We’ll conduct guerrilla research in the street, as well as in our stores, to learn as much as we can about our customers.
Big-picture: Product principles Having gathered some insight it’s back to the big picture. Time to think about how a solution to the problem you’re going after might look. Broad principles that span most products will be UX things like effortlessness. In our team we also borrow from the marketing and branding worlds, thinking about things like the tone of communication we’d like to use.
Our designer Pete ponders his product principle post-it.
Nitty-gritty: User flows We go back to the nitty-gritty with user flows, defining the journey we want our customers to take. In our team this artefact is simply boxes and arrows on scrap paper. We’ll refine the flow as we identify points of friction. We’ll also map where data goes in and out, and think about any other moving parts involved in the experience.
Big-picture: Wireframes Happy with our user flow, we head back to a high-level point of view to think about the user interface and interactions. With more boxes on scrap paper, we try to keep things light-weight in favour of iterating in the browser as we bring it to life.
George struggles to decipher Neil’s wireframe, which he’s clearly quite proud of. Nitty-gritty: Code + pixels
Perspective changes again as we start to write code, with the team cracking on with the backend. For the front-end we stick to our mantra of “do it in the browser”. Here we’ll sweat the smaller details of visual design, nudging margins and font-sizes as we go. We’ll continue building and shipping (our current record for deploys to production in a day is currently 31) until we’re ready to traffic and measure.
Big-picture: Core metrics Back up to a high-level view to think about your metrics. With customers using the product you can take a couple of steps back and look at what they’re up to. If you’re not sure what you should be measuring, take a look at Dave Mcclure’s Metrics for Pirates (AARRR!)
Nitty-gritty: Data Back to the nitty-gritty detail of gathering data. Here we’ll be knee-deep in analytics, spreadsheets, and pivot-tables. In our team we’ll make life slightly easier for ourselves with hand-rolled dashboards for key metrics.
Hopefully this whirl-wind flow (with its generalisations) illustrates my point about the constant shifts in perspective. Be warned, these can cause dizziness, brain-melt, and/or whiplash. I’ve found having an appreciation of these shifts in focus can help anticipate them, which in turn helps to reduce the pain when jumping around.
If you’re new, having the discipline not to jump around too much in the first place is really important. It’s hard to avoid when you’re in fire-fight mode, but it’s important to only do one thing at a time, and to flow amongst the big-picture and the nitty-gritty detail as you move along. This illustration can also prove as a good sanity check. Every few days take a step back and assess where you are. Ask yourself if you’re working on the right thing, and if your level of focus is right. Is it too much or not enough?
This guest post is written by Nikolaus Sühr (CEO & Founder) and Matthew Wardle (CTO & Co-founder) of Kasko, a digital insurance service provider bringing Insurance as a Service to the market.
You’ll often hear about how brilliant Seedcamp Week is, and we can attest to that – it’s been a really helpful experience for Kasko and we’re in a much stronger position as a company because of it.
One of the reasons the week is such a great experience is down to the incredible mentors and investors you get to speak to. Each one of them has a wealth of experience either leading or guiding startups to success, and they’re all super keen to help provide feedback on your startup.
A mentoring session underway at Seedcamp Week Berlin
But this is where it gets tricky… with so much feedback from so many individuals based on their own varying experiences, you can receive a wide range of answers to the same question.
Here’s some of the feedback we received during Seedcamp Week:
Like reading the news, to form a full picture you sometimes have to listen to several points of view and read between the lines. So here are a few tips on how to filter that information for your startup…
1. Sleep on it. The energy and excitement these visionary, successful people can generate in you is fantastic, but it pays to sleep on it so the next day you can process what was said based on the facts rather than the energy.
2. Discuss it with people you respect. For every major decision we’ve made we’ve probably discussed it with ten people we consider very smart. This is why your board of advisors is key.
3. Discuss with your business partner. If you’re anything like us – where you work, eat, and live together – this is given. But if it’s not, then you should make sure you discuss with them; you decided to work with this person for a reason.
4. Make up your own mind. Listening to advice is important, but remember that most likely you understand more about the intricacies of your own industry/business than them.
5. If you still can’t make a choice, just pick one. The chances are that both opinions are valid. Ultimately a good decision is one you feel comfortable with when you’re making it.
6. Drink a beer. It’s always part of our process!
For us, the feedback we received at Seedcamp Week was the best and most difficult to digest advice we ever received. Thanks to everyone. We might not have liked it at the time, but we certainly needed to hear it!
This guest post is written by Ivan Soto-Wright, Co-Founder & CEO of Oinky, a personal savings companion. This blog post was inspired by feedback Ivan provided to a fellow founder during a Seedcamp Academy session.
The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, Dr. Seuss
As an early stage founder, you will likely find yourself wearing many different hats. These hats come in all shapes and sizes and might be called things like admin, HR, operations, product development, marketing, sales, finance, or partnerships. Without context, wearing all these different hats can become overwhelming and make it difficult for you to achieve focus.
Colour is a powerful way to help contextualise your time. A handy technique that I picked up from working with a business coach at Shirlaws Group is to map weekly activities to Red, Blue, and Black (RBB):
Red = “Admin” activities that support the infrastructure and are non-revenue generating. Red activities are the back-office functions that must be done, but can distract you from the core drivers of your business. They include stuff like organising meetings, drafting employee contracts and updating cap tables.
Blue = “Revenue-generating” activities that deliver value in the form of products or services to the end customer. Blue activities include anything to do with marketing, selling and servicing whatever your customers buy from you. If the business is pre-revenue, most of this time can be classified as product development.
Black = “Strategic” activities that add long-term future value to the business. Black activities include things like developing market positioning, evaluating partnerships and formulating a fundraising strategy. This time can also be used to reflect and improve upon the business’ operational effectiveness (i.e. limiting Red time and increasing Blue time).
After completing the exercise, your iCal, Google, or Outlook Calendar should look something like this:
Unfortunately, there is no golden formula as to what percentage of time you should be spending on Red vs. Blue vs. Black, as it depends on the stage of the business. But here are three helpful tips for founders:
1. Do everything in your power to get Red time under control. If your calendar is unbalanced towards Red, you are sacrificing short-term revenue (Blue) and future revenue (Black). Delegate or consider outsourcing the Red if possible.
2. Schedule regular Black time. This will allow you to pause and reflect on the current state of the business. Are there areas where your team could be working more effectively?
3. Commit to monitoring RBB time. This will help you calibrate realistic targets for Red vs. Blue vs. Black. As the business grows, as a founder/CEO more of your time should be spent in Black.
Do this often and I find you will begin to adopt “RBB thinking”. In my case, it has helped justify decision-making around using a food delivery service for lunch:
Red: Preparing a healthy lunch Blue: Doing focused work at my desk Black: Outsourcing food delivery to Pronto when I need a productivity boost…
Aside from helping you achieve focus, I hope that adopting Red, Blue, Black time will lead you to similar moments of clarity.
This article is written by Taylor Wescoatt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Seedcamp. Taylor’s background spans 20 years of Product and UX having held key positions at successful startups like Seatwave and CitySearch, and larger brands like eBay and Time Out. This is the first of two articles on Roadmaps for Startups.
I speak with a lot of startups and often hear variations on the following;
I have the vision in my head, but I don’t know how to get it into the heads of my growing team so they can execute what and how I want them to — Startup Founder/CEO
This sucks for everyone. It stresses out the Founder, it frustrates the new marketing person, and the newly hired design, product, and UX folks feel at sea because they feel like they’re not delivering what’s expected and they don’t know how to.
Its easy for team members to rally ‘round the grand 5 year Grand Vision, but when they get back to their desk, then what? Work on that list of features, I guess, but they’re not quite clear on how they achieve the Grand Vision they just listened to. Its also frustrating to work on something when they don’t know where its headed.
As a startup, you’re constantly going to have to answer the question, “Who Are We?” By developing a clear, step-by-step, segment-specific answer, you will;
I picked this up at eBay, where we used something like this for our 6-monthly Seller Releases. Each phase of a “Who are we to these people?” is a “Proposition” which is a step toward a full Vision. The format was subsequently very well received at (mid-sized) Time Out and at (small) Emoov as well.
The question “Who Are We?” should to be answered for each Segment (eg early adopters, followers, partners, etc) at each specific stage en-route to your full Vision realisation;
The goal of this format is to allow you to render the roadmap between now and fully realising your vision. You recognise that your business will transform in stages over time, and this helps you focus on achieving those stages.
This works nicely in an agile world where the lighthouse stays the same, but the tactics evolve as we build, test, and iterate toward the vision — Bill Watt, Product Director, GoDaddy
So, for example, let’s say you’re building a mobile app for at-home car-washes & services, “Hogwash”, and your Vision is “Car washing, servicing, and overall management all on your phone”
How does this help?
I liked the proposition approach to (1) diverge vision from product development, and an evolving sales strategy, and (2) a way to manage customers’ expectations — Didier Vermeiren, Founder, Rial.to
This doesn’t take long to do; You and your Co-Founder can rip it out in an hour or so. If it takes longer than that, all the better because you’ve identified what must be a serious hurdle in realising your Vision. Your team will thank you as they dive back to work re-energised with a clearer sense of purpose and stronger connection to the Vision. Follow it up by asking them to give you a revised execution plan against this clearer vision. Drop it into your deck, it will be a nice touch to drive that next investor meeting in the right direction. Let me know if you have any questions, taylor[at]seedcamp[dot]com.
NOW READ PART 2: Building the 90-day Behavioural Roadmap for what to execute against
…or listen to the accompanying podcast!
This guest post is written by Andy Vale, Content Manager of SocialBro – an advanced Twitter marketing platform that offers end-to-end campaign management. SocialBro joined Seedcamp in November 2011. In this article, Andy looks at the role Twitter can play in helping rapid-growth startups.
As a lightning fast, public communication channel, Twitter in the hands of a smart startup can be an awe-inspiring force. With over 300 million active users, you can tap into large communities relevant to your business who can spread your message across the internet, and beyond.
Twitter also levels the playing field, giving you the opportunity to connect with an audience just as large as that of more established competitors.
But a good strategy comes from knowing how to cut through the noise, deliver a presence that’s more engaging than your competitors, and how to make a real difference to your bottom line.
If what you’re offering captures the imaginations of people and makes their life easier, they’ll want to tell people about it. Word of mouth is still a highly trusted form of communication, Twitter is a the perfect vehicle for spreading those words.
Slack CEO, Stuart Butterfield, claims that 20% of getting the word out about your product is to do with traditional media, meanwhile, “The other 80% is people posting about that article. I almost never go to news sites — it’s overwhelming how much content is out there. But I will pay attention to what my friends are picking up and sharing.”
Slack’s ‘Wall Of Love’ shows all of the people publicly evangelising about their brand
Create your strategy months in advance of when you want to reach your critical mass of interest. Encourage early adopters to share their experiences online by featuring them on your site or rewarding them in some way for their loyalty. Ensure you’re seen online during important industry events by Tweeting with the hashtag and engaging with attendees. To achieve maximum buzz, it helps if you…
An influencer is a person or publication who speaks and people listen. They might not be famous, or even have a giant number of followers, but they tend to be experts in their field so their opinion is both respected and sought out. Winning them over can unlock a lucrative audience who are clued-up and relevant to your brand.
Twitter’s ability to connect with people who can spread your message is unmatched, you just need to get the attention of those people. The type of organic reach that can be gained with just a couple of high quality influencers Tweeting about you would be worth hundreds of thousands via traditional advertising channels.
Using Twitter Analytics and Marketing can help you discover the influential profiles within specific segments of Twitter users. This could be the difference between your social marketing strategy delivering impressive results or not.
There’s no benefit to having disconnected marketing efforts instead of a connected system of channels. If you’re putting a load of effort into one channel, why not reap some of the rewards elsewhere too? Cross-channel marketing maximises the results of your efforts, which is vital for a team that may not have huge numbers yet.
To get the best results, tie in Twitter with an email integration tool to find out who on your email database is on Twitter and can be targeted with Twitter Ads using a Tailored Audience list. You also need to keep branding consistent across all of your social networks, while remaining optimised for the channels.
Lastly, if people can create an account on your site, download an app, or give details to make a purchase, include a tick-box that lets people automatically follow your account. This will help to rapidly build a relevant following, who are already interested in your brand.
Twitter’s Objective Based Campaigns allow you to customise what you want to pay for, and how much you’re willing to pay for it. This means that Twitter Ads can be a reliable marketing platform which delivers a clear, measurable ROI. A vital factor for any growing company. Not only that, but the ability to tweak Tweets in your campaign means you can experiment with what drives the most conversions.
The Tailored Audience feature also lets you decide who sees your Tweets right down to the individual user, if you’ve invested in Twitter tools to accurately segment users then this can be a particularly powerful asset.
People love a human face, many are interested in getting to know a Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Richard Branson just as much as knowing what Microsoft, Apple, and Virgin are up to. This humanisation of a start-up brand helps people connect with the real people behind the company, making them feel like they’re supporting a likeable group of people on their journey rather than something faceless.
While your CEO doesn’t necessarily need to be a prolific power-user, they are the public face of the company and 64% of people believe that a brand’s CEO being on Twitter helps to improve transparency. Having them on Twitter, delivering insight, interacting with customers, and representing the brand can help to build a stronger image for your company.
As your company grows, it may not be possible to respond to everyone on Twitter unless you’ve hired a customer service team to do so. But it’s still worth looking for opportunities where you can reply to people in a manner that’s helpful, charismatic, and friendly.
Delivering a high level of personalised interaction at this stage is both achievable and beneficial, due to the early adopters you can help win over and the way it can help mould your brand in your early years.
Hopefully you won’t have to use it. But if there’s a crisis, mishap, or accident then you need to have a plan of action to minimise the damage using Twitter and possibly turn the situation to your favour. Create a flow-chart to dictate your plan of action depending on the type and severity of the issue, allowing you to respond as efficiently as possible.
An example of this was when Path was accused of downloading peoples’ phone contacts without permission. It was the fast-growing company’s first major public backlash, but CEO Dave Morin was active on Twitter to answer people’s questions and concerns. It helped to cool down the situation, and meant that the public perception of their brand wasn’t damaged as much as it could’ve been if they were a lot slower to react.
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