Beyond The Prototype: A roadmap for navigating the fuzzy area between ideas and outcomes.

by Douglas Ferguson

“If you want to know where to go after a Design Sprint, Beyond the Prototype shows the way. Douglas’ expert guidance—grounded in his experience as a founder, CTO, startup advisor, and master facilitator—anticipates the challenges teams face when building something new.”
—Jake Knapp, inventor of the Design Sprint and New York Times bestselling author of Sprint

"I work with so many companies excited about their first Design Sprint that then ask: 'Now what?' Douglas' book is the great advice they've been looking for."
—Jeff Patton, Author of User Story Mapping

"Douglas Ferguson has long been a top design sprint facilitator. In Beyond the Prototype, he delivers a practical guide to what comes after. If you've ever experienced the dreaded "post-sprint slump," this is an absolute must read. It will just completely up your game..”
—Greg Satell, Author of Cascades & Mapping Innovation

PRACTICAL ADVICE FOR MOVING YOUR INNOVATION PROJECT FORWARD

Have you ever struggled to move a key innovation project forward at work? Based on his experiences running Design Sprints for top companies, Douglas Ferguson wrote Beyond the Prototype to offer practical advice for people shifting from discovery to realization. Full of stories from companies like Google, Liberty Mutual, and Adobe, this guide outlines six steps that every team should take to launch their vision.

CHAPTER OVERVIEW


Intro & Design Sprint 101: An overview of the process The Post-Sprint Slump: Why teams struggle after a sprint Wrap It Up: Unpack what you learned Share Your Story: Show what you accomplished Chart the Course: Formulate the path forward Expand the Inner Circle: Gather the right perspectives and skills Cultivate the Culture: Inspire the sprint mindset Get Guidance: Know when to reach out to the experts Expert Tips for Planning Superb Sprints: A bonus chapter


Beyond the Prototype will guide you through the road bumps and pitfalls that often follow a Design Sprint or innovation workshop. You’ll know exactly what to do to move your project forward.

VOLTAGE CONTROL

Voltage Control is an innovation workshop agency founded by Douglas Ferguson, an entrepreneur, and technologist with over 20 years of experience. With his unique combination of expertise in technology, product strategy, and design thinking, Douglas offers trusted guidance to companies who want to jumpstart their product or project with an impactful innovation workshop. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads custom innovation workshops and Design Sprints, as developed by Google Ventures.

Genres: Design, Business, Nonfiction, Leadership

181 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 30, 2019

Reviews

[Avolyn Fisher · Rating 2 out of 5]

I work in an IT job, facilitating enterprise data management within our organization. I function as a hybrid developer, data detective, and analytics consultant. Much of my work is synthesizing the business operations and needs into an analytic solution based on our capacity constraints, tools, and available capabilities.

I've been wrestling with this 'gap' that Ferguson says we need to bridge between Ideas and Outcomes for about a year now. I've been trained on Human Centered Design, and BTW there are many great resources from the Stanford d.School(https://dschool.stanford.edu/), free and readily available. I've participated in using the design thinking method in a local workshop here in Sacramento at a hackerlab, attempting to tackle our growing homelessness problem. I've read several books on the topic as well. Additionally I work in an agile environment where we divide our work into 2 week sprints to track progress and contain individual pieces of any given effort.

The issue I've run into is the demand for RTB (run the business tasks) and innovation. The demand for day-to-day business operations and also the demand for ROI expectations as Ferguson also discusses in this book. Since my job isn't really customer facing (unless you count the business as my customer), there isn't an immediate 'return' to every endeavor we undertake. If we want to consider a new analytics platform we can perhaps guess about the long-term efficiency savings if it's a better tool but we can't always predict adoption or get an accurate reading on current efforts to measure the time-savings since we aren't hovered over the shoulders of our nearly 400 analysts every day. Additionally, there are other topics of interest like incorporating Differential Privacy that have no return really whatsoever, but instead allow us to adopt better business practices, protect the privacy of our customers, and help us prepare for a future with a growing uncertainty around privacy. But that's not the easiest sell, when again you can't produce a nice and neat 'ROI' carrot to dangle in front of leadership.

This book is sort of a love child between Design Thinking (in its original classical sense) and Project Management. If you're familiar with both, you are unlikely to read a lot that is new here. At times the book often felt over-simplified. While I recognize that there isn't one way to do any of the steps outlined in Ferguson's process, it really isn't helpful to simply say, 'make a plan' and not outline a real framework or detailed architecture for a good plan, or 'create a team and there is no one way to create a team' and vaguely discuss that you can have them of various sizes. It's not helpful to simply say, 'tell a compelling story' and not really highlight the anatomy of a compelling story, WHAT makes a story compelling, how do you know if your story is compelling? Or obtain 'buy-in' ok, HOW does one most effectively go about obtaining buy-in. I know it's not always easy to get specific when something isn't strictly formulaic, but platitudes are not helpful for anyone and at times this book borders on common sense or nothing that is insightful in any real way. In one part they talk about building consensus but it's only devoted 1 sentence and the methods mentioned by name are not discussed, what a missed opportunity.

Governance received 1.5 pages and was very simplified, and was basically defined as 'figure out who will be in charge' which is a key thing to clarify, but governance is so much more. Governance is managing business definitions and finding a home for the project permanently within the budget and within the goal planning done by the executive office. Governance is managing change and creating a framework for how this project will be allowed to evolve and what it isn't allowed to evolve into (scope management). Governance is compliance. Governance is such a hindrance in so many situations and it is much more than who is owning something. Yes, maybe you'd argue that owner will answer all of the subsequent governance concerns I've outlined, but I think as a creator of something you'll have an easier time establishing these things before handing it off, to make it less of a burden on that new owner.

Then there were the cliches. The advice to go offsite and get out of the office to avoid being sucked into the daily grind of the status quo. Well that makes sense. And that sounds fun, where is my invite? The problem is that in practice I have found these off-site workshops/brainstorm sessions are rarely effective. They have the tendency to feel like summer camp. Oh golly gee, wasn't that fun, well so sad it's over, back to reality tomorrow when we return to the office. Rarely have I attended one of these meetings where the energy/excitement/momentum continues once we are back in the office. Instead it's, ok back to reality. My suggestion is that you need to find a way to modify your existing workspace so that it isn't a status quo chamber but instead it integrates innovation and weaves innovation into the new status quo, so that it's embedded in the day-to-day office setting.

Whiteboards, Sticky Notes, and Sharpies.
Who doesn't love them? Unfortunately they've become a bit of a proxy for innovation. Leading participants to believe that they're successfully innovating if they have a sharpie in hand a sticky note at their fingertips, or a whiteboard in their immediate 10 ft radius. I am not suggesting they don't serve their purpose but they tend to have a 'look mom, no hands' effect. We need to stop defining innovation in this way, we need to stop performing innovation theater. Innovation can also look like: email chains full of exciting iterations on an idea between you and a peer or mentor, collaborating on a OneNote document or sharing a data python notebook, grabbing a beer with a few key people and beginning a 'think tank' unofficial group where you work monthly to meet and discuss problems or test out ideas. To name three ideas like I have is not nearly comprehensive, but it's just so much more than whiteboards, sticky notes, and sharpies.

[Anthony]

Looking at navigating the post-sprint landscape to achieve relevant outcomes. He combines years of experience at Google and IBM, among other stories of examples, to frame the importance of concrete action toward building - not talking of building. It's also a great exercise in focus - from who deals with what, who is doing, who is responsible for next steps and going forward.

[Madhu Ganesh · Rating 4 out of 5]

short, direct points

With examples that ground the theory into reality, this read gives helpful advice on how to move forward after a sprint. It's directed for those who are new to sprints and work at small to medium companies.

[Bryan Guzman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful book for design sprint facilitators. It gives you a clear map of how to deal with implementing the outcomes of your design sprint, the obstacles you might encounter in doing so, and how to overcome them.

[Liran Markin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Talking mainly about product. No new advice is here