INNOVATION INSIGHT: Identifying the core feature of your solution to test

Part 3 of the behind-the-scenes story of the FHL's first Power Play – a three-month social innovation sprint to increase female leadership in hockey.

After hearing from innovation experts Alex Ryan and Sonia Sennik , along with their design leader Cailin Ahloy , the #FHLPowerPlay team made two key decisions last week. They identified their end-user: new female hockey coaches. And they picked two ideas to test, based on the user stories they'd been collecting since their last session.

The first idea is to create a support network for new female-identifying coaches to help them navigate a predominantly male, sometimes difficult environment. The second is to develop a mentoring strategy to connect female coaches with male allies to help them succeed while increasing advocacy and action among men in the hockey ecosystem.

But changing systems and culture in hockey isn't as straightforward as inventing a new kind of sports drink. How could they turn a user story as fuzzy "I want to feel supported as a coach" into something tangible that their end-users could try out during the upcoming weekend sprint?

That's where the concept of a minimum viable product (MVP) comes in. It forces designers like our team to bring ideas out of their heads into the real world. To do that, they have to make hard decisions about what to include – and exclude – in their solution. That decision-making process is vital to helping them narrow in on the one key feature of their solution that solves a real problem for their end user.

Fortunately, they got some excellent advice from innovation coach Alex Ryan.

"A characteristic of great innovation is keeping the user at the centre, being laser-focused on who the end user is. And when you have to make a decision about something, rather than debating it amongst yourselves, take it out and test it with the end-user to see what they say."

Learning to make good decisions and trust the process is one of the toughest parts of innovation. It can be hard to let go of something that feels like a brilliant idea. But that's why we build MVPs and do prototyping/testing. Building, testing, evaluating, revising and even ditching ideas is a critical part of the process that often requires a shift in mindset from the way we usually solve problems.?

Instead of using MVPs to prove that our ideas are right, we need to view them as learning tools that help us acquire new knowledge to discover what does (and doesn’t) work.

With just a few days of prep left before the in-person sprint weekend, the Power Play team focused their preparation on creating a story map of what their end users would DO when they used the solution being developed for them. Would they access digital resources online, go to training courses, become part of a coaching team, create new committees in hockey organizations, or advocate for new policies? While the default idea these days is often to build an app, the possibilities for how to bring the sprint team's two big ideas to life in MVPs are endless.?

For many, that kind of freedom can be paralyzing. But as innovation expert Sonia Sennik reminded them:

"Just be as disciplined as you can on the steps you want to take, and go item by item by item. If you bring it back to hockey, a coach doesn't show up to the locker room on the first day and say, "Hey gals, our plan this year is we're going to win." Right? The coach comes in and sets out a vision, and then the process and the steps on how to get there. So my advice is to get really clear on your process and your steps, and make sure you're all speaking the same language."

Most importantly, the team will need to stay focused on one of the core design principles of the Future of Hockey Lab – generating solutions that are truly innovative.

Instead of creating a band-aid to the problems experienced by female coaches and building something that would help them succeed in a broken system, the Power Play team will have to build MVPs that actually create system change for the benefit of all.

And they'll have to do it all in just 3 days! Stay tuned to see what they learn.