August 2022: Pretotyping Showdown – returning to the office vs. working from home

30 Aug

The answer is yes.

If you think of your team members and employees as customers, you can quickly understand why and how they use your systems.

Of course, you can always force or mandate working from the office, compliance or communications tools, but have you considered how your customers (i.e. employees) are affected?

For example, remote vs office work is fiercely debated, but I see very few companies approaching this as an innovation and experimentation problem.
If you do a Lean Canvas with your team where they are the customer, everything changes.

You need to ask:

What problems do they have?
What's unique about how we solve them?
How do we measure success?

Then pretotype it ⁠— run experiments to test that what you perceive and/or what your staff tells you is valid.

There isn't a 'right' answer to the return to the office question. Like all solutions, your approach should work for your unique culture, people, city, and business ⁠— learn, measure, and experiment to find the best solution, and as always, keep the 'customer' in mind.

Need help solving for this kind of business challenge? We've got the solution. It's time to empower your team by embedding rapid experimentation and pretotyping in your business. Are you ready?

Image source: The Daily Aus

If you're in Australia, you might remember that over the last two years, we've had to check in with QR codes almost everywhere we went with the COVIDSafe contact tracing app. Well, now the app is just another reminder to pretotype before you invest heavily ⁠— $21 million to trace two contacts doesn't seem like a worthwhile investment!

Remember: "should we build it?" is always a better question than "can we build it?"

This app could have been pretotyped in a few weeks in the midst of the pandemic and made useful through rapid experimentation and learning fast. What a waste!

You can read more about it here.