Lean Workout Learnings for OpenQRS
Sometimes, the road to figuring out what's next looks a little like this...
OpenQRS recently did a Lean Workout to decide: what's next?
We had three potential "next steps," (in leanspeak, MVPs). Since the decision about how to proceed wasn't murky enough, we generated 100 more questions (Thanks to an exercise from Eugene Eric Kim's Changemaker Bootcamp).
This exercise surfaced questions about the product roadmap, the project's need/impact, our theory of change, the funding/enterprise model and product adoption/engagement.
We'll be answering these questions on this blog. If you have questions for us, please leave a comment and we'll include them in our Q&A series over the coming months.
Then, we put OpenQRS on the Javelin Board
(Thanks to Dominique Aubry of Lean Leadership for the awesome workshop on how to apply lean to social impact projects and our partner in the Lean Workout Renee Frissen of Social Tech EU)
The "big idea" as presented conflated many smaller problems. To do lean tests, the idea needs to be one discrete problem
Strip the big idea down to the MOST important problem to test first
Develop a Vision, Mission, Strategies, Goals for that problem
Key testable assumptions behind our value proposition:
- "major failures are precipitated by micro failures"
- "if we can track micro failures, we can prevent major failures"
- "we can track micro failures as well as major failures"
Work openly to share our vision, milestones and progress.
Enable you to participate in building OpenQRS with us.
Test our key assumptions & report as we learn.
Lean Workout Reflections:
To broaden the context before narrowing the focus gave us a rich lens through which to approach the Lean Workout.
Flexing our prioritization muscles to cut to the bare essence was a painful and much needed workout (we continue this one)
Designing small, smart tests was a great analytic workout
Lean prompts us to take action directly with customers
Lean adds intention/accountability to these actions
The paired workout model provides a partner for accountability and to hone these skills we learned in the workout
We found the Lean Workout valuable enough to continue a weekly Check In (abbreviated Lean Workout) for the next 3 months.
Erin will post our Check Ins here on Tuesdays, so that you can keep up to date with our progress!
Here's a snapshot of this week's lean workout check in:
Icons from the Noun Project: signpost shared under cc by Zach VanDeHay; learning 1 and 2 in the public domain shared by and OCHA Visual Information Unit and Duke Innovation Co-lab respectively.
