How to innovate while respecting budget & deadlines?

Creativity is often stifled by an ROist approach to ensure maximum team performance.

I see a general trend of aiming for the shortest path to the minimum viable (MVP). But is it possible for teams to be enthusiastic when the level of requirement is to deliver the Minimum Viable? Faced with these applications, often slick and soulless toolboxes, users are also saddened, and quickly go their way. It is then impossible to validate or even invalidate a market pull. How do you know if your concept is good, if you have given it only a minimum of chances?

Preserve the inventiveness of the teams, make your users vibrate, while respecting deadlines and the budget!

In framed and realistic contexts, I recommend taking inspiration in part from agencies like Collins, Cuberto, or Snask whose main mission is to disrupt everything that moves. You can, like them, keep this creative energy, while meeting your project constraints.

First change MVP to Minimum Lovable Product. The new role of the team is now to deliver a small nugget. It is not about doing more, but about changing the approach, creating well-defined spaces to take very targeted risks.

Drive innovation, feature by feature.

First look for the crucial moment to thrill users in the service. Make this functionality the heart of the experience, and make it visible on your plans.

If your value proposition is unique, then this core experience should be too.

To invent its specificities, offer all the flexibility possible to the teams to imagine this carefully chosen functionality, by encouraging experimentation, collaboration and dialogue with the target users. It's an opportunity to leave the office to be inspired, to open up, to encounter the unexpected, and to disrupt locally. You will then manage to provoke the right emotion, this click that you will have had on the ground and that you will integrate into the service.

For the rest of the functionalities, it is not a question of applying this approach to the rest of the application, under penalty of reinventing the wheel each time, and of missing the budgetary objective. Impact the creative choices of the heart of experience on the rest of the course: Art Direction, editorial, micro-animation, original biases. This will provide you with a consistent and thrilling experience.

At BeTomorrow, to control our results, we like to manage the level of innovation of each feature. And even in our Innovation Lab teams, where we might expect fewer executives… the trend is also towards targeted invention: more often than not, each product attempt carries its unique flagship innovation.