Presentation: TweetRapid Product Design in The Wild

How do you know you're developing the right product? This talk will help you think creatively about how to do customer development using Agile and Lean User Experience methods. I'll share what we learnt about using rapid, iterative prototyping techniques to develop a minimum viable product at a software conference.

In August 2012 we attended Kscope, a conference for Oracle developers. Instead of doing the usual product demonstrations, we turned our stand into a "live lab" and took Agile development processes out of the office and in front of our customers. Over 3 days we ran 9 sprints and conducted 25 customer interviews, using a paper prototype to get feedback. We collected invaluable information about our customers' development environments, how they work with their teams, their processes, tasks and pain points. By the end of the conference we'd developed an interactive prototype (using HTML and CSS) for customers to evaluate. The team went through several rapid "build > measure > learn" cycles to improve our product concept and validate the market need.

I'll cover the benefits and pitfalls of doing live design and development in front of potential customers and competitors. The talk will illustrate how opening up our development process at a conference provided visitors to the stand with an opportunity to experience Agile and Lean methods first-hand, and that marketing teams can learn a lot from Agile development teams.

This talk will appeal to anyone directly involved in product design, development and marketing, including: designers, product owners, developers, testers, project managers and marketers.