An Agile Fairy Tale

Hi everyone, I'm Andrea and I currently lead the iOS team in Buongiorno, part of the Docomo Digital group.
Today I’d like to tell you a story.
A 2 year long story which i hope will continue for many years to come.
This story talks about KidzInMind and the team behind it.

So… let’s start.
The most exciting challenge for a modern big company is to continue to innovate.
When I talk about innovation I mean a never-ending search of new business lines and technologies.

The average age of employees in the company led us to consider the segment of technological parents who want to safely introduce their children to the mobile world.
After a round of marketing research and focus groups we decided to give a chance to this shared need.

And we chose to develop this new product line in an agile framework, more specifically a scrum team of developers, designers and marketers.
Some of us had already experienced this methodology with great results, so we had no doubt we were following the right path.

Agile software development is a set of principles where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams.
The first two points are more related to internal factors and they raise the confidence of the team members as the primary ingredient.

But I want to focus your attention on the 3rd and 4th principle.
These two principles talk about the ability to listen to your customers’ feedback and adapt your current vision.
Remember: you're trying to solve a problem.
No one knows better then your users how this problem worries them.

When you're developing an app for kids, customers and users are not the same identity.
You've got to convince parents that your product is safe for their children, while you become an enjoyable brand for kids.
In this direction we usually organize two kinds of validation tests: app navigation for parents and game sessions for children.

The adaptability is the game breaker of current products' evolution.
The difference between you and your competitors can be measured with just this parameter.
And when I talk about the ability to change I mean: market strategies, tech platforms up to your vision too.

So… why can’t you afford to follow a plan?
There are years of expertise in waterfall management.
Also during my study, the waterfall was the state of the art.
Now, we all have internet and you have lost the tipical constraints of a physical product that needs to be delivered to users.

Unfortunately other competitors have lost these constraints too.
So we have to reduce our time to market to receive feedback.
Therefore we must release something simpler than initially thought.
Reid Hoffman said: "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late".

When we have a plan to follow we have to trust our hypothesis.
We want collaborative customers, so if we start to satisfy their expectations from the beginning, we’ll be able to understand how far we are from solving their problem..
This kind of prototyping it's called MVP minimum Viable product.

And this is our MVP for iOS version of KidzInMind.
It was released in just 50 days at the end of 2014.
We implemented just two core ideas:
- the guided access support to satisfy parents;
- And two game engines to entertain children.

The second iteration pointed out our attention to increase our retention.
Our little users love music videos therefore we implemented a simple video gallery with a small catalog of five lullabies.
Again: everything just to validate our assumptions.

At this point, with surprise and excitement, we came in contact with our first top brand character: TopoTip of Studio Bozzetto.
They chose us to empower their content with our technology.
For the first time, just after few months, we were on italian TV as enablers of a famous character.

This gave us the strength to continue with our short development cycles.
We started receiving more requests as enablers of other top brands.
We signed contracts with telcos for white labels.
But as you can see the kid room in the app became too crowded.

Our MVP app became an MVP framework with the redesigned concept of the home.
We translated the safety vision for parents and children in a visual environment.
At the center you can see our current top brand in Spain: Cleo produced by Imira.

Now it's possible to customize every floor or add a new one.
In these screenshots you can see two examples of floor: the video gallery and the activities catalog.
We can easily adapt some layout aspect in just a few clicks. But this wasn’t our original idea.

Until now I have talked about “what” and “how”.
But the real difference between a product and a successful ecosystem is the purpose.
Why are we doing this?
The more you are able to inspire this idea inside your team, the more your team will instill this purpose inside the product.

So what did we learn after two years of KidzInMind?
This path is very difficult to follow because you and your team will need to be humble enough to accept feedback and a lot of discipline to manage failures.
But the rewards behind the rainbow are really really special.

Thank you all for your attention.
I hope you enjoyed our journey.
But now sorry, they’re calling me!