Introduction

This Organise workshop is a follow-up to the Reveal and Position platform workshops and the final instalment of the FAST trilogy. It is organised in such a way that teams can either do the Lite or Full version, depending on their goals and time. The Lite version results in a Storyboard with drawn screens and gives a concrete view on what the MVP will be, which is suitable if teams just want to take it one step further than with the Position workshop. On the other hand, the Full version also prototypes and tests the MVP so the team could really start validating their platform afterwards. This last part could potentially also be outsourced to third-parties as the Storyboard should be sufficient to build and test a prototype.

The goal of this workshop is to validate the platform model with a simple prototype, not to build a complete product. It should be run with 4 to 7 participants and preferably at least 2 facilitators.

In this book, we take you on a journey and walk together past all the exercises and see how they are applied to our leading platform example Airbnb. You'll get a full explanation of the exercises to be able to directly apply it to your own context.

The Platform Design Sprint is an adaption of the Design Sprint 2.0 as taught by AJ SMART. Their course is found at https://aj-smart.teachable.com/. Our aim was to keep the Design Sprint process as unmodified as possible as this enables an experienced workshop facilitator to also be able to facilitate our variant. As such, many of the exercises along the way are the same as what they created. Our adaptations are explained on another page of this book.

Minimum Viable Platform

The goal of this workshop is not to build the whole platform. Instead, we aim for a Minimum Viable Platform (MVP), which is the minimum amount of organizing for the maximum amount of learning about future versions of the ecosystem. The definition is inspired by https://medium.com/work-futures/minimum-viable-ecosystem-53ae03d43cbf.

TLDR;

We aim for the Minimum Viable Platform by first formulating the key interaction we want to facilitate in the ecosystem as a How Might We question. Then, we set a 2 Year Goal that states what would happen if the role would no longer be constrained as a means to help us zoom out and investigate what the constraints are that could stop us from that 2 Year Goal. These constraints are formulated as Sprint Questions. These constraints are what the platform aims to take away. Based on the Sprint Questions we determine which role is the most constrained and becomes the focus of this sprint. We draw a map of the journey including touchpoints to better understand it and determine the area of the map that we want to target in the MVP. We sketch possible solutions to reach the 2 Year Goal, taking into account the Sprint Question obstacles, and select the concept that we like most. We add more granularity and details to the Concept through the User Test flow exercise and then collectively create the Storyboard which contains all the MVP details. The Storyboard is converted into a working prototype and shown to our users in an interview to (in)validate the assumptions we started with: does this MVP solve the HMW.

Before you start

Before you start the workshop, determine who is the Decider, which is the person who has the mandate to make decisions. This could, for instance, be a manager or product owner.

Also be sure to obtain the materials for this workshop: Whiteboards, rectangular yellow stickies, square yellow stickies, alternative color square stickies, green and red dot stickers, sharpies, A4 paper, paper tape, scissors, glue, and a timer for timeboxed activities.