Author: Dragana Vulovic

Who are we?

Puzzle Software is a team of passionate and dedicated IT and Agile professionals devoted to deliver excellence in software solutions and services. We provide custom software development services, our teams also work on several start-up projects, developing solutions for our clients, adjusted to their needs.

We change the world and create virtual worlds not only for the clients, because we work on our own projects, startups created by Puzzle Software.

Another tool that we also use to improve software industry and digital products is Agile education and certification, with customized coaching and mentoring programs.

After 14 successful years we would like to boost our projects, nurturing our relations with trusted partners as well as with our great consultants.

That’s why we need a superhero – you!

• You are a people person who can meet new acquaintances anywhere – the office, a local café, or at a professional conference.
• You will anticipate what’s important to the people around you and pleasantly surprise them with a solution.
• You are willing to do something nice for others without expecting something in return.
• Most importantly, you are a person of integrity.

We imagine you as an ambitious and established person, with the entrepreneurial spirit. You should be a graduate from Faculty or have a bachelor’s degree in relevant subject.

Speaking about skills, especially soft, it will be of crucial importance to have excellent communication and negotiation skills. Excellent time management and planning skills, with proactive and problem-solving attitude are additional asset.

By personal characteristics you should be extroverted, communicative and witty. You should have strong presentation skills, the ability to gather and process information related to market research, emerging trends and analysis of successes and failures. Fluent in English, speaking and writing.

Our team member should be a social network influencer, strong in communication with the community. From that perspective you will learn IT trends, to be in line with them, and to have strong interaction with the IT community.

Experience in IT industry with software and agile training sales would be a plus, but it’s not a deal breaker if we recognize each other’s potential.

Position details

You will work closely with our CEO and the rest of the team, to develop a growth strategy focused both on, financial gain and customer satisfaction.

Your role will be more human related, but you should conduct research to identify new Companies and customer needs. Regarding administration part, you should arrange business meetings with prospective clients and take leadership role in negotiating and execution of future agreements, same as keep records of sales, revenue, invoices etc.

You will be the face of our company in our business relations, so, you should promote the company’s values, services addressing or predicting clients’ objectives. Building strong and successful relations, you should provide trustworthy feedback and be trustful to our clients. Also, build long-term relationship with new and existing clients and stakeholders.

Why you should join?

We are aware of your value for our team and future development, so we offer a set of attractive benefits. First of all, a job in a small team released of corporate structure, with half less pressure than in a traditional sales team, and self-organization without micromanagement.

You will have amazing developing opportunities in terms of bonuses and learning, improving your career level and personal skills. Above all, an opportunity for a gain in the profit share in the outsourcing branch, Agile branch or product branch same as the ability to work with Offshore clients from USA and from Europe.

An attractive benefits’ package is part of our deal, modern workplace, friendly team and warm environment as well!

Sounds promising to you? Do not hesitate to contact us, submit your application by email jobs@puzzlesoftware.rs. We are already waiting to meet you! ✅

Author: Predrag Rajković

You have a product, service, any kind of offering to customers, and you are constantly wondering how can I make it better, how to attract more users, will they like the feature that is about to be released, will they use the product as I imagined, and will they use it at all… All these questions fall in the domain of product discovery, and they are all yelling – “Invest your time in product discovery!”.

Let’s briefly set the stage. Looking at the product life cycle we can separate phases that the product goes through during its life. In general those phases could be – Idea, the initial phase where we explore problem to be solved and identify different opportunities that could lead us to achieving the goal that we have set in front of our product. Here we understand the problem which we are solving. First validation happens here, also. We are checking if our hypotheses around the problem are valid, i.e. does the problem exist for our future users and is it worth solving. Next phase would be creating potential solution, and testing through prototyping. After it, comes the phase of product creation (or development), testing and first release. Till now, our product is alive, it is getting traction, user base enlarges and we are considering new features that fuel growth of our product. Finally, as the time passes, our product enters the final phase of its life where we consider either its retirement and withdrawal from the market, or we pivot and try to give it a new life changing its focus, key selling points, problem it is solving, or target audience.

Product life cycle

Ok, so where is a product discovery here?

It happens in all those places where we increase our understanding of our product. It happens through different means – market research, user interviews, data analysis, feedback analysis, understanding of business goals… Therefore it might happen, and it happens in any part of the product life cycle, but we might say that it is the most intensive and crucial at the beginning of the product life.

Why crucial? Isn’t it crucial that we create and deliver a high-quality and technically superior product?

While it is important that the product we deliver is of a high quality, it is still essential that someone wishes to use it. In other words, creating the highest quality product, built using the latest achievements of technological progress, that no one wants to use is just a wasted effort. We have a spaceship, but no one wants to sail through space.
In other words, while delivery helps us build the product right (with the high quality and in an efficient way), discovery helps us build the right product (i.e. product that people want to use)…

And this is why product delivery is crucial – it is a set of activities helping us find out (discover) what our customers want and need, and helps us communicate those wishes throughout our company.

Before we jump into how we do discovery, let’s see who should be doing it. In general, you need the team to do the job well. The team should consist of people with different backgrounds. The more perspectives, the better as long as the communication can be held under control. As a rule of the thumb there should be 3-5 people as a core team engaged in discovery. Of course, it is possible and desirable to include additional subject matter experts when needed. Quite often there is a reference to 3 people accountable for the product overall and for the discovery also. They are called the 3 amigos, or the product trio. Those 3 people should come with the product management, design & UX, and engineering background.

That being said, let’s see what product discovery consists of. We might break discovery process into following activities:

1. Desk research
2. Empathizing with target user
3. Defining the opportunity space
4. Defining the desired outcome
5. Prioritizing opportunities
6. Solutioning and experimenting
7. Defining the MVP and MMP
8. The visual design

Please note that having said activities doesn’t mean that they are done linearly in successive order. Some of them are intertwined and happen iteratively.
Another thing to consider is time spent in the discovery process overall, and with it in each of these activities. There is a risk to spend too much time on a discovery. It might seem that we have never done enough analysys, that there’s always an angle or piece of information that we haven’t considered, or the stone that has not been turned. The best way to mitigate this risk, and not to reach paralysis by analysis state is to sandbox each activity. Yes, there’s a significant difference depending on the concrete product or a feature we are discovering. Some are obvious and we know a lot about them, while others are just a vague idea of what to create. But with some experience you will be able to estimate time for these activities. After all, if it turns out that you lack vital information to make a decision, you can dedicate more time to it.

1. Desk research

Typically, desk research encompasses reading different reports, studies, analysis, etc. The purpose of this phase is to collect initial information on the product you are considering, and its environment. Internet browsing is a useful way to get needed data, just be cautious of the source you are using. Currently a lot of people are using ChatGPT for this phase. Bear in mind that currently information on which ChatGPT 3 (which is available for free) is trained on, ends with 2021, which means that at the moment of writing this article (May 2023) information is already 2 years old.
Analyzing internally available data on product usage is a very important part of this research. Understanding the stickiness of our users, their behavior with our product, things they visit, where do they spend their time, what are they interested in, what do they buy, at which steps of process do they fall out, makes a cornerstone for further discovery.
During this phase we create the background picture, the scenery of our future product.

2. Empathizing with target user

If we haven’t done it before, here we have to define our target group of users, our customer segment, our user persona. We have to understand who we want to talk to, whose pains we aim to relieve.
Once we create the scenery and we know objective facts on our product and users it is time to get into the mind, into the subjective, emotional part of our users’ behavior. While in the first step, desk research we are talking mainly of quantitative methods, in this step we are predominantly using qualitative research.
In order to feel what customers feel and see our product with their eyes we include, one-to-one customer interviews, my preference goes to the unstructured interview as a format. Observation of users (or contextual observations) while they are using the product is another way. Ethnographic research could, also, be a technique of choice here.
As said, the purpose of this step is to understand our customers well, be as close to them, feel their pain. Only this will give us insight into what they need, and consequently what we should build.

3. Defining the opportunity space

In this part we investigate different opportunities laid in front of us. We are trying to identify problems customers have and formulate them in a form of the opportunity we, i.e. our product, might try to address.
Main source for opportunities is the previous step. There, we get under the skin of our customers and figure out what problems they feel. Now it’s time to reverse those problems in our opportunities and map them so that we have a visual representation. Though it might sound banal, this step is important as it is systematizing our knowledge of customers’ problems, helping us not forget some important opportunity, and, as we will see later, help us decide which opportunity we will put our effort into first.
Another important part of this phase is hypothesis testing. By listing different opportunities, we are actually embedding a lot of assumptions into our discovery. We might suppose users don’t visit our blog because they don’t find the content interesting, while the truth might be that they don’t even know our blog exists (i.e. our marketing is missing them), or vice versa. Assumptions have to be validated.

4. Defining the desired outcome

A product is a business category. This means its purpose is to bring some economic value to the company that is producing it. Therefore, none is created and led to serve itself. In order for the product management to be purposeful it has to lead the product toward fulfillment of certain goals. Therefore, we have to have clear outcomes that we want to achieve, both from the perspective of business overall, but also from the perspective of the product we are building. Put it differently, if we haven’t formulated where we want to go up to now, now is the last moment to do this.
Beware, here we formulate outcomes, meaning what we want to achieve, not outputs (which would be – what we want to build). For example, outcomes that we want to achieve as a business could be: increase our sales, or increase customer satisfaction, or increase the time our brand is in front of our customers’ eyes. Our product should serve these outcomes, or help in achieving them. Therefore, we formulate product outcomes so that they are inline with the business outcomes. Depending on our business, and role of the product in it, the outcome will be different. In other words, product outcomes will be different if we manage the single product in our company, obviously there will be a more direct relation to business outcomes, than if we manage one of the products in a company’s portfolio. Examples of product outcomes might be: increase time customers spent on our website, or increase sales via our mobile app.
I like how Teresa Torres puts it in a nutshell: “Business outcomes measure the health of the business. Product outcomes measure a change in customer behavior.”

5. Prioritizing opportunities

With outcomes defined, prioritizing becomes easier. Now we have our north star to which we are heading, and some opportunities become obvious to deprioritize. Let’s link it to the previous example. Let’s assume we are running a company website. Business goal is: Increase time potential customers are exposed to our brand. Linked with this, our product (website) goal might be: Increase time visitors spent on our website.
Also, let’s imagine we have identified following opportunities:

1. It is hard for visitors to find customer support page
2. Visitors spend little time on our pages because they are filled with text, and they don’t want to read it through
3. Visitors visit only one page because they don’t see anything interesting that they might continue reading

With our product outcome defined as above it becomes obvious that opportunity number 1 will not have a crucial impact on it. Or put it differently, the impact of opportunity 1 to our outcome would be lower than the impact of opportunities 2 and 3, meaning opportunity 1 is of a lower priority than the other two.
This doesn’t mean that we will never improve the ability of our users to find a support page. It just means that in this concrete case we have things to do that are more important for the company.

6. Solutioning and experimenting

Once we know where we will put our effort at this moment, it’s time to start working on solutions. Each opportunity can have several different solutions. Let’s assume that our top priority opportunity, i.e. opportunity for which we believe will have the biggest impact on the outcome, is opportunity number 3, visitors don’t see anything interesting to read. Here, we might have several solutions, for example: introduce a stripe with featured articles from our site, or introduce a widget showing the most read article, or create a recommended articles stripe, or make tips & tricks widget… In this step we should not only come to a solution, but also test it with end users. We don’t want to build something just based on our gut feeling. Gut feeling is ok, but should be validated in order to minimize the risk of building things that no one would use.

7. Defining the MVP and MMP

Now that we have the solution for the customer’s problem, we are considering the delivery phase, and we want to deliver the smallest meaningful set of features to our users as soon as possible. In other words, we want to define the MMP (Minimal Marketable Product) which is a very important concept. Widely used term is MVP (Minimal Viable Product), however, this term has different descriptions ranging from a literally minimal piece of code that shows that something works and that can help us prove that we can deliver something, to a product that is capable of being accepted on the market. Definition with this wide range of understanding inevitably introduces misunderstanding between product stakeholders.
In order to avoid confusion, I believe it is beneficial to separate things. Minimal Marketable Product is a set of features without which launching of the product would be meaningless. Imagine you are working on a new app for video entertainment. Here, the bar has already been set high by players like Youtube, Disney, Netflix… So launching an app with the mere possibility to play and pause video wouldn’t make any sense on the market. At the same time, there is a need for people working on a product to receive feedback as soon, and as often as possible. Here the MVP jumps into a play. Through MVP, the product manager and the team can decide what is minimal that could be shown to important people to receive feedback.
Defining MMP will be significantly impacted by the estimates of complexity of our product. This assumes that we have to have some, at least, high-level estimates on how much our products will “cost”. With this in mind we will be able to fine tune the MMP, to include only what is really necessary in the first release, while other features will be planned for later releases.

8. The visual design

All previously described steps bear tons of dilemmas and confronted opinions on how they should be done and what they should include, but this step has a controversy highly embedded in itself. There are significant differences between product people in approach to when the visual design of the product should be delivered. You might push it as close as possible to the ideation phase, but there are also reasons to push it as much as possible to the later phases of the product discovery.
I would say that this depends, among other things, on how you have organized teams and work processes in your organization. If you don’t have a product trio as a body to drive the product through the discovery (and also through delivery), then it makes sense to postpone development of final visual design (pixel perfect) to later stages. On the other hand, if a designer is incorporated through the whole discovery process, you will have some design drafts from early beginnings.
My view on this is that at the end of discovery, you have to have at least high-level design, on the level of wireframes. The reason for this is that you can discuss the future product with the development team in more detail. Developers don’t need pixel perfect design to understand what should be built, or to give some assumptions on the complexity of the task that should be done. For these purposes, wireframes will do just fine. Yes, it would be better if we would have the final design, so that we know all the details on user interactions, but if this means that, due to organizational or personal reasons, we have to wait too long for the design, then the lost time is not worth this piece of information.

With this we conclude the discovery phase. In a nutshell, the deliverable of product discovery should be clear understanding of what we want to do, described in just enough details that engineers can start wrapping their heads around concrete execution problems, i.e. going into technical details and start providing answers to the “How will we do it?” question.

9. Next steps

So, what comes next? Once the discovery part is finished we are entering the delivery phase. This means that we have to prepare for the development. In order to do that we need to communicate the discovery results (or, the what we are building) to the rest of the organization. Good way to do this, and to include a wider audience, is organizing so-called User Story Writing Workshops. After which we should be engaged in some sort of delivery planning, be it release planning event, or some other, less formal event, after which we are entering in the delivery phase.

As said before, once in delivery it doesn’t mean that we forget about discovery. Firstly, through delivery we constantly receive feedback on what we are building. This comes from the team, system architect, designers, other product people, but also from stakeholders during demos of our work in progress.

Secondly, while in delivery for one feature, we are working on discovery of new features that will come to be delivered in a week, month or a quartal.

Author: Predrag Rajković

You want more customers, the next cool feature, a service tailored to your customers? The Design Sprint can help you address those challenges. Find out what it is, what you need to run it and who can help you do it.

When it comes to product design, one can hear challenges product teams meet: ”My team is stuck in the process and needs help to proceed with feature productization.”, “We are too slow coming from idea to ready-for-development phase.”, “We have a challenge in making the decisions regarding product design. We keep discussing, but reaching the decision is almost impossible!”.

These are just a few examples product teams and product managers meet while managing their products.

A framework, or a collection of applied techniques called The Design Sprint can be used to overcome those predicaments.

The Design Sprint originates from Google Ventures, and has been developed from their work and understanding of start-ups, to help them pass the journey from idea to concrete product validated by end users^[1]. As defined in the book that explains it, the Design Sprint^[2] is a framework used by teams of different sizes to solve and test design challenges in 2-5 days.

Put like this it might sound very broad and doesn’t provide understanding when, how or why it should be used.

Let’s try to answer these basic questions.

What is the Design Sprint?

As indicated above, the Design Sprint is a framework, or a collection of techniques that can help teams in solving business critical issues. It is most often connected to product teams solving product design problems, but it can be successfully used for creating services, marketing campaigns, even processes.

This framework helps teams take the journey from problem definition, setting the long-term goal, ideation, proposing possible solution, its prototyping and finally testing the solution with end users in 2-5 days.

This means that once you face the business challenge, you need to engage your team of 5-7 persons for 5 days to come to a validated solution of the problem.

Sounds great, almost too good to be true, that in just 5 days you can see the possible solution of the most important challenge your company meets today.

But, let’s look at the second question, when does it make sense to use the Design Sprint.

When can it be used?

First of all you need to have a serious challenge in front of you. You won’t engage your team for 5 full consecutive days just to solve whether your call to action button should be positioned slightly left or slightly right. You want to engage people around something significant, something that may impact your business or that requires potential significant investments and something that is surrounded with certain uncertainty. In other words, you’ll want to run the Design Sprint when:

• Your company has to make a decision that will cause significant investments in the future
• You are creating new product
• You want to improve important part of your existing product
• You want to get alignment in the company around something where company is stuck
• You have an idea that you want to pitch to your management

Who is using it?

Although the framework started from working with start-ups it has been adopted by a great number of big companies from different industries. Let’s name a few: Google, Lego, United Nations, Deutsche Telekom, Ikea, H&M, KLM, The New York Times…

It is interesting to mention that McKinsey are offering this framework in a set of their services, but under the name of Concept Sprint.

Does this make sense? Give us a call and schedule a chat with our coach, a certified Design Sprint facilitator to get more details.

What does the process look like?

Before starting running the Design Sprint you have to prepare yourself and the sprint. What you need is:

• Proper and significant problem that should be solved.
• A facilitator to lead the team through the Sprint
• The decider to make important decisions during the Sprint
• The team of 5-7 people to do it
• Space, materials, stationeries…

Originally, by the book, the Design Sprint takes five working days Monday to Friday.

The source: https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/design-sprint-2/

However, depending on the problem that is to be solved, level of uncertainty around it, how much work has already been done, team experience it can be done in less than that.

As a matter of fact, back in 2018 the Sprint 2.0 was introduced which shortens the time needed for the Sprint to four days, and requires the full sprint team to be available only for 2 days instead of 5. This shortening has been achieved through focusing some of the activities, while at the same time, the implementation in numerous cases has shown that other activities don’t require as much time as it has been initially envisaged.

The source: https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/design-sprint-2/

However, for the purposes of this article and simplicity of explanation, let’s assume a full five days is needed.

Monday – the first day of the sprint is the day where the team gets on the same level of understanding of the problem to be solved. Here everything known about the problem is put in front of the team. The decision on the goal, where we want to be in 1-2 years time is made, and this decision is something that will be our North Star throughout the Sprint.

The map of a user journey through our product is made and the decision upon where in the journey we will focus for this sprint is made.

On Tuesday the creative work happens. Interchanging group and individual activities bring us to different proposals of possible solutions. The solution creation is done individually, even more, all solutions are kept anonymous in order to avoid idea pitching, or choosing the solution because someone in particular made it, not because the team believes it is the best one.

Wednesday is the day for choosing the solution that will be prototyped. The solutions created on Tuesday are all pitched by the facilitator in order to provide the same and unbiased voice that will represent them. The team chooses their favourite, and the decider gives their opinion on what should be prototyped. The fact that a certain solution has not been chosen doesn’t mean it is wasted. All good ideas are being parked, and they can be used later should this be found suitable.

Thursday is a prototyping day. Here the team has to make a rough representation of their idea. The prototype should be quick and ugly. There are at least two good reasons for this:

1. The team should not spend too much time on something that is just a concept that is to be tested;
2. The prototype should clearly show to interviewees that not too much effort has been put into it. This makes it easier for them to give sincere feedback without feeling bad if it is not all sunshine and rainbows.

Finally, Friday is the day when the solution concept is validated with end users, and the day where the energy, tension and team expectations hit their maximum!

One team member is going to lead the interviews with end users, while the others will, via camera, listen, watch and take notes in another room. For this kind of validation 5 interviewees is enough as very quickly the main patterns in user feedback start to show.

Once this is done, what you have is a worked-through idea of a solution, tested with users and a collection of valuable user feedback that clearly points where and how to develop your product further on.

Of course, this is not the end of the product development process, but at this point main issues have been solved and main uncertainties removed.

What are the main benefits of using it?

There are numerous benefits of using the Design Sprint. Let’s name a few.

• Increase speed of discovery and delivery
• Saves money by helping fact-based decisions
• Reduces the risk and uncertainty
• Shorten discussions and alignments in productization phase
• Provides unbiased language for strategic discussions
• Fosters data driven decision making

The Design Sprint also has certain advantages over other techniques used in similar situations (brainstorming or workshops for example). Firstly, as all proposals and ideas are anonymous, the Design Sprint evades situations in which a solution of the loudest, or highest paid person is chosen over solutions that might be better, but the creator is not loud, pushy or influential enough to push them through.

Another thing is that nothing created in the sprint is wasted. If a certain idea is not prototyped and the team finds it interesting, another Design Sprint can be run, and this idea can be prototyped and tested in this new sprint.

How to sell it to your boss?

The crucial thing in running the Design Sprint in your organisation is to “sell” it to your management. Apart from educating them about the Design Sprint and its benefits, there are several things more that you can do.

Prepare main stakeholder (the Boss)

• Position first Design Sprint as an experiment
• Show case studies
• Perform a short version of the Design Sprint to showcase its effectiveness

Prepare other stakeholders

• Workshop to onboard stakeholders

Just run it!

To conclude, should you have a business problem that needs to be solved, or an important decision that has to be made where alignment of different stakeholders has to be achieved, the Design Sprint can help you. Find an experienced facilitator to help you lead you through the process, and start sprinting!

A lot has been said about this framework, but the best way to understand it is to run it. Only through real-life engagement can you feel all challenges and find ways to overcome them. Satisfaction with the result of each sprint personally, but also energy created in the sprint team is something that is really priceless.

^[1] The same term is used in another context by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden in their book Lean UX, Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience, as a sprint during which the visual design of a certain feature is solved. This sprint happens before the development sprint and provides sufficient information on the feature that will be developed during the development sprint.

^[2] Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days,  Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Braden Kowitz, 2016