The context is nice, we created this technological product on a Friday, on the day of a retreat. There was in 2020 a retreat that we did in October, of 5 or 6 days, and there was a day we took just to make a technological product, and we realized that there was an opportunity that gave birth to ANDY.

How did we do this?

We started this marathon, so to speak, of attempting innovation with a dynamic that we named Q&Angry Shotgun. This dynamic had a time of 15 minutes and basically, we asked people silly things, and made people animate their most subjective brain, the right side of their brain, where is everything that is silly, where is everything that is creativity, intuition, art, creation, let’s say so. And we started asking people things like “if you were a vegetable, what would you be?”, “if you were an item or a kitchen utensil, what would you do?”, “if you could be a specific time of day, what would you choose?”, “if you could be a chocolate brand, what brand would you be?”, “if you could change your name, what name would you choose?”. And all these questions made us, in a very quick way, stay in a much more subjective paradigm, much more creative, much more peaceful, which animates the parasympathetic much more than if we came to a room and asked, “give me 10 ideas to solve the problem of our economy”.

Because basically, we need to blur our minds to better focus, what we need to learn to swim is to gently almost drown. And then we start with this Q&Angry Shotgun, which is already a dynamic that we do in our daily life. There is even a blog post on the Angry Ventures blog on this topic. Basically, it’s a weekly question we ask everyone, and it’s also usually a very silly question, where we ask everyone and then everyone answers as well. We are already on Q&Angry 170/180, we do one every week.

So, we started with this dynamic, which has to be done quickly, that is, when the facilitator asks something, the answer has to be given in 1 or 2 seconds, it’s the first thing that comes to mind. The facilitator always must exist in this project, in this case it was me, but it could be anyone else. Then, in 15 minutes and in groups of 2, we made a second dynamic, which we named How Might We?

And basically this “how might we” had an intention, an output, which would be a cloud of ideas, with post-its, in which these post-its are obstacles, or deadlocks that people have in their lives. How could we make it easier for pregnant women to always have a spaceship that would take them to their appointments, so they would not have to take public transportation? Silly, isn’t it? Second, how could we make it easier for blind people to have sound effects that were somehow activated, according to their GPS position, and where their phone, through some app, gave them some indications about cars, about traffic signs, about priorities, about new places, sites of interest from Google Maps or any other map. How might we?

And this cloud of ideas, as an output, gives us a set of obstacles and gives us a set of deadlocks. Then, as a third dynamic, as a third step, another 15 minutes, and we switch groups. Basically, if we are 2, one person from the group passes to the right side and we make a kind of wheel. Then the third exercise, in this case, is an affinity mapping exercise. What is this affinity map? The idea is, somehow, to create some context in “How might we”, in each of those idea clouds, and try to center an idea and create a cloud of labels related to that idea. And somehow, we also try to create here a kind of sets of themes. I just gave those two “how might we” of mobility related problems, be it pregnant or blind, but in fact those two have a pattern, a common denominator. So how can we take all our ideas and somehow group these various ideas into themes? And group these ideas into themes by creating a cloud of labels related to those themes?

Then we switch groups again and in another 15 minutes what we will do is prioritize and define the ideas that make more sense to us. Or at least the themes that are stronger and have more relevance for us. And then we use the Eisenhower matrix, and this matrix allows us to create themes that are very important and very urgent, themes that are very important and not very urgent, or themes that are not very important and not very urgent. And we will only want to focus on those topics that are very important and very urgent, at an early stage.

We change groups again and do another exercise. We define the problem statement, the root of the problem of the themes that are in Eisenhower’s matrix, in the first quadrant of the very important and very urgent. And after defining these two themes, we switch groups again and do a story mapping exercise. The story mapping is a mechanism for us to find a kind of user’s story and to create a holistic view of all the experience related to that problem, and that also helps us to build a solution. And with this mapping story we can also define a central persona, and also a central intention for the project, according to the problem and the solution that we find.

From there on, it is very simple, you change groups, we create another group for a very simple exercise of defining the client’s journey. Group change, again another exercise, this time make a sketch of the solution, with a set of requirements, a paper, or a meter and tape, post-its and pens, and try to design a prototype, a shitty prototype, as I like to call it, of what would be our solution.

The final step, that is, how do we create the MVO? With groups of 3 people, we look at each of those solutions and problems, and try to create the content and shape of the challenge or the strongest problem/solution of them all. And the whole team then focuses the rest of the day on creating. This team has a division between content and form, content guys, design guys, marketing guys, business guys, who focus more on content, and technological guys, UX/UI guys, who focus more on form.

And there we have a product. Ours was Andy, which is basically a tool that helps people who create and do social networks, to reduce by 80% the time of creating templates, the time of standardization to what the client wants, and essentially helps us to facilitate everything that is social networks and everything that is content for social networks.