#DesignTheTomorrow 16/05/25 asked a panel to defend five statements, regardless of personal positions. Here are my pre-debate notes. Do you agree?

• AI-driven experiments will soon replace traditional research: False
• Adaptive, personalized interfaces should be the default standard for all digital products: True
• “Web” must evolve from static pages into immersive app-like experiences: False
• Seamless cross-platform UX: start on mobile, to web, finish in AR/VR: True
• Speed-touch-gesture-driven interfaces will eclipse screen-based Graphical UI: True

AI-driven experiments will soon replace traditional research: FALSE

Humanity is an evolving concept. If I were to ask you a moral question, you'd likely respond differently here today, in London, than you would twenty years ago. Geography compounds that variety, Western media has recently retreated to less liberal-leaning preferences than just five years ago. In contrast, AI is a ghost of opinion and understanding; a snapshot of limited context, trapped in time. All AI understanding is trained upon datasets, subtly or blatantly, resulting from moments in time. 

Humans evolve individually and collectively across many axes. The same person's breakfast preferences might evolve because of societal conversation on the effects of sugars, palm oils, and processed foods. That opinion then enters the checks and balances of other smaller collectives within a family home.  

AI does not have autonomy in renewing its approach. It doesn't bounce off others to adapt to a new world. It will never stop stamping its feet or hallucinating to its benefit without intervention. You wouldn't trust even the most advanced engineer from 50 years ago to troubleshoot your IT problems.

Finally, Product engineering is anchored to a capitalist market of human demands. Demands will ebb and flow to serve human interests. Research is required to meet the market where it is and how it is thinking today, and the creativity in new market creation is where humans will always excel because it is to serve their evolving needs. Evolving AI training in step with even the narrowest niche would require infinite context and expense. I don't think the ends will ever realistically justify the means.

Image credit to Tawfik Manham

Adaptive, personalized interfaces should be the default standard for all digital products: TRUE 

Anyone who has unfortunately logged into their parents netflix account or even worse their partners, will appreciate the need for personalised interfaces. 

I appreciate that Google already understands this importance in AI.  A few weeks ago, my young daughter ran into another room with Gemini and could just make out the inquisitive whispers. I started to sweat as I heard her querying how Santa was able to get to every single house in the world with presents? You can imagine my relief when Gemini cheerily replied well, "That's just the magic of Christmas!"

I interpret this statement broadly past the interfaces and content of today, because context is so important. Tomorrow's personsalisations will be responsible for adapting to the contexts of a world of new users, where they are, and whatever age and cognitive ability they have (like my daughter whispering under a beanbag). 

“Web” must evolve from static pages into immersive app-like experiences: FALSE 

Tim Berners-Lee's first web browser was called 'WorldWideWeb', it's users were also editors. Shortly after, Nexus followed on as a passive browser. He removed interactivity because passive surfing was a different type of engagement. One channel and form of medium doesn't replace another, we need information in various forms to meet us how we require. I would not be surprised if not a single panelist could point me to their first developed 'immersive experience', as it has likely been removed from the web. Next to pictures, written text is the best form of data storage; it's survived longer than anything ever humanly conceived. I can appreciate Dickens' works as future interactive experiences, without believing that all works of literature need an upgrade to be interactive experiences.

Seamless cross-platform UX: start on mobile, to web, finish in AR/VR: TRUE

There is a delicate balance to be had between designing for today’s most practical behaviour and tomorrow’s next behaviour. Recent research into the tipping point has revealed it to be a ‘knocking point’, where you constantly knock on the door of future behaviour until eventually enough people barge through and steam on.   

Preparing for this debate, I recorded thoughts in a notes app (keep), wrote on a laptop into a browser (docs), on the underground, I added some bullet points, and now, sitting here, I cite my doc using a mobile App. Great design is seamless, but no one read or wrote anything of length on a mobile phone twenty years ago. Regardless of the desire to create the journey I now enjoy today for writing, it would have been a waste of invested capital in light of the return on investment.

I have lived through future AR experiences; they are awesome and inevitable. But most of us have to build in accordance with reality. 

Rather than the “what ifs,” how about the realities of ChatGPT? This morning, I read a post by a form creation company called Tally, where 25% of all traffic was coming directly from ChatGPT. More immediate innovations are already pulling us into cross-platform.

Speed-touch-gesture-driven interfaces will eclipse screen-based Graphical UI: TRUE

Speed of thought is the ambition.

• Ada Lovelace wrote theories on paper notes about conceptual machines for fun in a parlour chat with Charles Babbage, but nothing was ever made or tested in her lifetime.
• Alan Turing waited days and weeks for a calculation after his mathematics were interpreted into a physical configuration of switches and cables.
• Grace Hopper waited hours after punching holes in cards.
• Alan Kay wrote on a keyboard and moved around a mouse after a few minutes. 
• John Romero designed the levels in a GUI editor while playing them!

Keyboards are a temporary crutch. 

Tomorrow's interfaces will seem magical, but the most magical interface you are experiencing right now is "thought to thought". Until we get there, everything is up for grabs.

Velocity: Simulate AI participants to Instantly find basic UX problems  🔗 

Customers are a Product's most essential Stakeholders, but they aren't the only ones. Other external Stakeholders influence buying decisions or are affected by your Product's activities. Likely, you are one of many internal Stakeholders. Business and Domain experts with skin in the game trying to figure out how to win a significant market share of buying Customers. Your job is to harness this team's potential. 

It's been said, "Rallying Stakeholders is Product Management" it's also been said that Product Managers should ambition to facilitate partners rather than stakeholders to 'co-design' the change. Practically though, which ceremonies and tools foster collaboration with Stakeholders and align a Product strategy? 

Identifying your Stakeholders

• Stakeholder mapping (internal & external)
• Customer Interviews
• Customer Journey mapping

Stakeholder Collaboration

• Biz: Quarterly business reviews (QBRs)
• Product: Quarterly initiative reviews
• Ops: Fortnightly / monthly release reviews

"Two 30-year-old men and two 30-year-old women are sitting around a conference table discussing a plan they've made to use AI to generate product outcomes that will each make them all insanely rich. They are all laughing. The dress code is casual." - stable-diffusion-xl-beta-v2-2-2

Stakeholder mapping: internal & external

Nothing gets done if everyone gets a view on every decision. There's no guarantee that your team will even agree on your stakeholders. When discussing Stakeholder management, visual maps of those influencing/interested in your Product's outcomes usually jump to everyone's mind. Traditionally, these represent relationships with internal teams and broader partnering organisations. But a separate map is also valuable for external Stakeholders. Your external Stakeholders are all those affected by your Product's usage context. You may only have one customer, but there are likely many 'hidden' stakeholders within that customer's journey of using and purchasing the Product. Some journeys may exist far before your Software, such as purchasing and onboarding journeys; your customers may need finance sign-off or might even have been given the Product from on high by a senior manager. These are hidden Stakeholders.  

Sticky notes are the quick solution but ongoing, you can get your spreadsheet game on: Stakeholder Map in Excel with David McLachlan

Customer interviews

There's no more critical stakeholder than your customer. How are you even going to discover your hidden external stakeholders? Customer Interviews are the most important part of Product Management. You should be speaking with your customers every week; when you talk to them, you can ask them to share who it is that influences their journey and who is it their outcomes affect. Hidden stakeholders are often Bosses and co-workers but also friends and family. In your interviews, dig into where your customers were when they were last conducting the job of your product. Physical locations often reveal relationships; it takes a whole family to sit around a dining table.   

The very best reference for Customer interviews: Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez

Customer Journey mapping

Hidden stakeholders lie in wait across the Customer journey, a partner at breakfast time, a friend in the evening, and a colleague at lunchtime. When a Customer has a job to be done, their journey to complete that task likely starts long before your Product. A map of all the touchpoints your Customer requires to complete that task will provide a clearer view of the habits and activities with which your Product is competing. Journey maps can focus on the part of or the complete task. Customer journey maps evolve with your understanding of the average target customer, and they’ll be continually refined during customer and stakeholder interviews. 

Some examples:

• Actionable Customer Journey Maps with Debbie Levitt
• Assumption or Research first mapping with Kate Kaplan
• I use Miro, here is their guide

"Blackbeard the pirate and two 30-year-old businessmen gathered around a whiteboard, discussing a customer journey map to set sail and and find buried treasure. They are all laughing. The dress code is casual." - DeepAI

Business alignment: Quarterly business reviews (QBRs)

Business leaders have a responsibility to ensure Products are progressing towards their strategic intents and financial outcomes. They will be wildly enthusiastic to see an update of (at least your best guess) quarterly product revenue, churn and costs. It’s great to share these conclusions but only through the context of outcomes. You set the scope, remind your business stakeholders of their desired results and inquire if anything has changed since previously agreeing to these outcomes. 

Now is the time to clarify the business sense of all Product initiatives in play. Then, you can share a full rundown of your successful and unsuccessful experimentation. This meeting is vital to your highest levels of trust; you need to share enough of your journey to help your business Stakeholders feel invested in your conclusions. 

Some snappy QBR advice: Quarterly Business Review Best Practices - TK Kader

Product alignment: Quarterly initiative reviews

Product initiatives have to meet the goals and objectives of the broader Company strategy. All those tasked with hitting these strategic outcomes need to align on how they are placing their bets. In attendance could be the CPO, VPs of product, and product managers, but it also can include leadership from other disciplines, CTO, design leaders, etc.

There must be enough product initiatives to hedge bets and meet your goals. Product managers can share the results of preliminary experimentation, research, or first releases related to overall goals. Product teams can also request more funding to build or optimise an existing solution. Or propose new initiatives for feedback and buy-in.

Initiatives reviews are going to be different for everyone, but here is Atlassian’s take: Atlassian's Quarterly Company Planning Process with Peter Scobie

Operational alignment: fortnightly / monthly release reviews

Release reviews ( most often Sprint reviews) provide the opportunity for teams to show off the hard work they have done and to talk about success metrics. These are the most commonly conducted meetups, but what I want to emphasise here is talking about success metrics. Before release, Product Managers should share how each feature's success will align everyone honestly around the most important outcome. I've always advocated getting as many internal and external stakeholders in the audience as possible. Teams want to show off their hard work, and everyone loves seeing new stuff before it enters the world! This isn't a time for experiments only for what shipping is and how you measure its effect. 

A meetup event in london where everyone is gathered around a small table deep in discussion about something very interesting. - Dalle

Community Meetings! 

Finally, there's your local Product Management community; you are a Stakeholder in the ongoing betterment of Product Management processes. There are loads of Product Managers, VPs and CPOs who want to improve their processes and can only do so by sharing the best and worst of their experiences. 

Please join us at the next #ProductJunto to share your real-world experiences with us. This topic was the conversation of the March 30th 2023 meetup discussing stakeholders.

#ProductJunto

Frank Robinson, who originally coined the phrase, emphasised the MVP only within the context of the journey of his packaged process (SyncDev); it was an outcome of the entire process, which engaged with customers and users from the beginning. His was a process of continually 'Test Selling Validation Prototypes' all the way to the outcome of his entire engagement.

"Due to the misconception of this term, I have stopped using MVP altogether. Instead, I talk more about solution experimentation. These experiments are designed to help companies learn faster. Here we are experimenting to learn, not building to earn." - Escaping the Build Trap

Constant experimentation en route to the MVP will result in more useful software because shipping code will always incur a cost you are going to be lumbered paying for, it may as well be worth paying for, which you will not know unless you've been ideating and measuring all the way to the destination. I'm not advocating stopping using the term MVP as it's useful for cross-functionally sharing the agile mindset. In recent years I've preferred the term Minimum Viable Prototype, which I think I got from Accelerate. However, perhaps even then, it's still too milestone related and removed from a discovery process to be helpful. I think now, I will throw my hat into Minimum Viable Progress because it speaks more to a process than crowning achievement. In the context of progress, MVP becomes a suitable classifier for bounds-checking our next deliveries.

Join me to discuss the concept of MVP at the Product Junto on Thursday 16th March, 2023 at 6:30 PM It's a free event, we'll be meeting at the Barbican centre in London. I look forward to discussing.

Today, with a heavy heart, I announce the closure of Storyboard. We will cease operations and turn off all Storymaker software on Feb 1st, 2023. If you are a Custorian or Storyboard customer, please continue to read more about the next steps and how we aim to make this transition as smooth as possible.

The backstory

I originally started Storyboard as 'Custorian guide' to reveal the compelling stories hidden within Art exhibitions when thanks to 2020's COVID lockdown, virtual attendance became a sudden priority. Initially, our exhibitions were photogrammetry of physical exhibitions, but our analytics quickly suggested the real opportunity was in the overlaid short-tappable stories. 3D scans of exhibitions looked great, but the attendees hardly stuck around for more than a few seconds. But if just one tappable story were clicked, dwell time quickly lept from 12secs to 2 minutes on average! It was an aha moment, and we pivoted to focus more on the creation of Stories for virtual environments. I sourced and led a team to ideate, develop and deliver a Web3 system to display decentralised versions of TikTok-style stories (30-60sec video) across various virtual reality environments. It's been super exciting to pioneer a new technique of raising dwell time in virtual exhibitions. Our platform used web technologies, display kiosks, and AR to demonstrate that tappable video stories increase visitor engagement in the real world and then again in VR across many unity-based virtual worlds, including Decentraland, Somnium Space. 

Why are you shutting down Storyboard?

Raising engagement in virtual exhibitions is challenging, but increasing attendance has remained a more pressing need. Storyboard can reliably increase visitor engagement, but we depend on a marketable audience. Regardless of quality, in 2022 we could not guarantee a significant virtual audience would attend any virtual exhibition. We worked with small agile brands to quickly create engaging exhibitions, but their lack of overall attendance made ongoing virtual exhibitions unjustifiable, so retention of small customers remained challenging.

Only brands big enough to invest in exhibitions for PR and skills investment alone could afford our virtual exhibitions, but such shows often took six months to source, close and create. Our pricing didn't warrant our overheads, and the available customers didn't justify the investment to standardise the process through software. 

Startups need to exist far enough ahead of the demand to offer an untapped opportunity but not 'too' far outside observable market conditions to strain the confidence of even early investors. 

Additionally, despite attracting 400+ Stories, 50k+ views and £13k from paying customers, we struggled to convince investors of the opportunity beyond what they believed could be quickly cannibalised by existing social networks. Although initial feedback from Creators was favourable, investors feared the additional process overhead wasn't justifiable at scale as evidence suggests we'd be unavoidably black-listed.

There are roads ahead; however, we have no further runway after four pivots. Of course, I could blame the disastrous market conditions and unfavourable capital-raising environment, but ultimately I didn't achieve a clear Product/Market fit within the required timeframe. 

I'm a paid customer; what happens next?

Storyboard will honour all contracted agreements; we'll do our best to please contact kevin@storyboard.guide

What will happen to the Storyboard Platform?

We have developed the following audited software written in JS/Node: 

• Storyboard's 'Storymaker': 
• Converts videos & images into AMP Story format 
• Deploys Stories to Google Cloud and Filecoin via IPFS
• CMS for associating Stories with exhibitions 
• Narrus: Backup & deploy annotated Matterport 3D captures as CSV
• Custorian: X-Platform Tappable 'Story' Player

If anyone wishes to make an offer for our assets, we'd be happy to hear from you. Please contact kevin@storyboard.guide

Parting Thanks

Revealing the world's hidden stories remains a noble aim. I thank everyone who joined our team on this adventure and gave us a glimpse of our Web3 / XR future. Everything we ambitioned will evolve in due course, and I wish future entrepreneurs the best of luck in tackling the problem of in-venue virtual engagement. 

The 'World Wide Web' once held a sense of wonder. In a small Scottish town, on my bi-weekly trips to my local public library, I'd type out the addresses of webpages I'd scribbled on scraps of paper gleaned from TV and comic advertisements. It felt like prospecting; every web page was a clue within a worldwide scavenger hunt.  The same excitement to explore and contribute is not what it once was. New generations are unlikely to surf an 'internet super highway' of static text and interlaced pictures. Perhaps that same enthusiasm is once again on the horizon for 'Adventures in the Metaverse'. 

When hot topic cultural terms such as 'The Metaverse' invade industry spaces, professional derision can sometimes leave it feeling like only a domain only for the naive. Professionals often strike down hyperbole to show their understanding of technical nuance. Yet, veterans need to accept responsibility in plotting a vision for generations to come. Accessibility to digital information is still deserving of reverence.

Metaverse and Web3 are the "successor states" to the internet as we know it today. Everyone with strategy & budget responsibilities with a view 5 years or more requires an informed opinion. 'The Metaverse' by Matthew Ball challenged many of my preconceptions. As a result, I've come away with a newfound respect for the term 'Metaverse' and the architects stepping up to its early challenges of incorporation.

"Web3 does not require 3D, real-time rendered, or synchronous experiences, while the Metaverse does not require decentralisation, distributed databases, or blockchains .. (Web3) is about societal formation and governance + (Metaverse) is about technology and its proliferation." - Matthew Ball, VC/author of 'The Metaverse'

Spotify Co-founder Daniel Ek posited that the web, until now, has been translating physical into virtual; what we'd once buy as a hardware device like an alarm clock is now an app. Now in the Metaverse, we're tasked with producing 3D alarm clocks. Those with the most experience - are game developers. I didn't quite realise how the gaming industry and notably Fortnight & Roblox were not just informing the creative design principles and building the underlying technologies of the "next-generation internet" but also serving as the Metaverse's economic precedent.

Whatever it is, your concern is required.

A Metaverse is coming, its infrastructure, politics, communities and dependent markets will take at least 5-10 years to build. You can roll your eyes from the bylines or get into the trenches and help build towards your ideals.

"it promises to exist as a parallel plane for human leisure, labour, and existence. Therefore, the philosophies, culture, and priorities of the companies that lead in the Metaverse era will help determine whether the future is better or worse than our current moment, rather than just more virtual or remunerative. ..An ever-growing share of our lives, labour, leisure, wealth, happiness, and relationships will be spent inside virtual worlds, rather than just extended or aided through digital devices and software. It will be a parallel plane of existence" - Matthew Ball, VC/author of 'The Metaverse'

"the economy in the Metaverse . . [will] be larger than .. the physical world" - Jensen Huang, CEO/Co-Founder of Nvidia  

"If one central company gains control .., they will become more powerful than any government and be a God on Earth" - Tim Sweeney, Co-Founder of Epic

Embrace the Metaverse vision

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Guide others through the Metaverse and get paid with Storyboard.
Join our waiting list: www.storyboard.guide