Experimentation In Product and Service Development

What’s the role of experimentation in product and service development?

You might want to create quick prototypes and show the value of your ideas for different stakeholders? We believe that experimentation is a way to take ad-hoc prototyping or proof-of-concepts to the next level, and have a comprehensive and well-defined way of working to create new innovative products and services. Furthermore, we believe that in the rapidly changing world it’s becoming ever more important to continuously develop and refine your products and services to address the changing needs of your customers and evolving rules of business.

When you are planning to develop a new product or service out of the data you own, experimentation is a way to define the detailed plan how to move from raw data into actual solution that a) creates value for your identified target users, b) can be turned into high growth business and c) can be implemented identified set of technologies and algorithms.

When building a new product or service, we don’t know in advance if the idea or new solution works in real life, or even know which problems are actually worth solving. In order to increase the understanding of the end user needs it’s a good idea to develop the solution through experimentation, through agile steps. In other words, with experimentation, you can quickly test and verify ideas and take notice of what works and what doesn’t – and eventually what creates the actual value for end users.

What does experimentation actually mean? 

Experimentation consists usually of three different areas: technical feasibility, business viability or end user desirability. Experimentation not only means that you can save time and money from engineering work but also you can get really valuable insights about needs of different user demographics and ways you can sell or monetize the product or solution you are building. 

In order to conduct experimentation, you need a cross-functional team: 

1. User researches and designers who can work with end users to increase the understanding of their needs and propose well-thought concepts to solve the identified challenges
2. Data scientists, developers and architects who can define and evaluate different algorithms, architectures and technologies that are needed to create the product and
3. Business analysts and growth hackers to understand how the solution can be turned into profits, achieving a high growth business for the new product or service.

In the end, after a few iterations of experimentation, you should have a well-defined business and growth model, design for the solution, and plan for implementation, and can make the actual GO / NO-GO decision to invest into the new business.

How can you experiment with experts outside of your own organization?

In addition to the internal teams, large corporations can benefit from working with smaller companies and start-ups to enhance all three aspects of the experimentation process. Enabling 3rd parties to access your full data, we can find new innovative ways to utilize the data, as external developers or start-ups have different, fresh approaches on how the data can be turned into something valuable, or for example connect with their own data to create completely new kinds of products and solutions.

A technical experimentation environment or sandbox enables 3rd party developers to access data, fuse it with their own data, run different kinds of analytics and AI algorithms against the data and create end user products based on those. The key success factor for this type of environment is that it creates a common, secure way to access data from different parties, decreases the time needed for development of new experiments and makes it easier to work together across organizational boundaries.

From a 3rd party developer perspective the experimentation platform offers a way to get access to different data sources from large organizations, without having to discuss individual data integrations, formats, protocols, opening up firewalls, that quite often slow down or completely prevent innovative projects to proceed. 

Experimentation with WhereOS platform

WhereOS enables quick integration of data from multiple sources and multiple formats. The WhereOS experimentation platform enables rapid data processing and development of APIs using data, and to expose the source data from various systems in a consistent manner for developers. On top of the APIs the experimentation platform enables development of SDK features that add further value on top of the APIs, to create actual UI applications for end users. 

Experimentation is a great way to drive new innovation; in order to increase efficiency and decrease work hours you need to have right tools, processes and resources to work with. WhereOS is a good option, when you want to get more work done, fast with less effort.