The Confluence of Core Three Frameworks for Building Data Products
By: Andrew Wong
Tags: Data Products, Agile Development, Data Science, Design Thinking, Design Sprint

Today there are start-ups, Fortune 500, and local small businesses all asking the same kind of questions:

What’s the value of our upcoming service to our current (or potential) customers?

What’s our Lifetime Customer Value in the next 3 years?

What do our customers spending this month tell us about where to apply more attention and resources?

Who might be at risk of churning?

If you are able to answer some of the questions above, these kind of insights are basically magic in fast-changing, ever-changing customer-first world. We got to flip the script. We got to move beyond thinking about customer as standing still. We will need to widen our lens (looking at customer collectively) and narrowing our lens (finding ways to personalize our product).

Once we accept and move on to greater plasticity, the way we see our customers will becoming unstuck. This is pretty exciting.

In Part 1 of this series, we have started to introduce The Better Science Team WoW, as the New Geometry of Building Data Products. In this Part 2, we would like to elaborate further.

The Better Science Team Way of Work (WoW) creates a new space to think, discuss, and act. Based on the confluence of Design Thinking, Design Sprinting, and Agile Development, it will change the way you think, and re-think about product design and development.

Now, we have the flexibility to shift to the left (more space to think) or right (more space to act) depending on whether …

We need more thinking time to find the right character for your product. We need more discussion with others to build concerted effort as One Team. We need to act now to understand the market, and pivot quickly if needed.

A Case Study: The Witty Travel Magazine

In this hypothetical case study — The Witty Travel Magazine has been smart to take advantage of pivoting their subscription strategy i.e. in the case of being able to pivot fast when a big event break. The Witty Travel Magazine knew they will be a surge of traffic of next 3 weeks due to new movie in New Zealand about the Middle Earth, and they have the full inside, exclusive scope. So what can they do? They dropped the pay wall (and worked on a few backend engine upgrade to cater for the increase server load), and allow potential subscribers to read and get a sense of the value they can get. As a result, they get a 300 percent surge in their digital subscription.

This is truly leaning towards acting fast. The iterative, increment Agile Development works well because engineering and marketing team can work together in rapid cycle of prioritize feature-build-test-deploy to get to the targeted outcome.

What if The Witty Travel Magazine wanting to do more than just dropping the paywall temporary. What if they want to continue Growth Hacking their way to increase lifetime value of their customers, and build stronger sense of community among their ever diverse members around the world (increasing coming from the booming Asia countries)

These are hard questions.

It will be harder if they know only one way to act: prioritize feature-build-test-deploy.

What if The Witty Travel Magazine teams use the confluence of Design Sprint and Agile Development i.e. Problem-Solution Iteration, and Product Development Increment and Iteration. A case in point, prior to prioritizing product feature, the teams can shift-left to work in the problem-solution space to discuss different ways to tackle their problem in hand.

Now what if The Witty Travel Magazine teams want to widen their lens to connect the unconnected potential customers (you know those customers wanting to read this amazing magazine!). This is where the team can shift to the left further to connect to the human side of their. A case in point, The Witty Travel Magazine teams can run a Design Thinking exercise covering human behavioral research, and run human-centred design of a new service for movie-theme travel.