Hello, and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast I might pass since I'm the CEO of quality tenants. And today we're talking about the key roles. In a rapid prototyping team and we are well and truly deep into our series on rapid prototyping. And when you get everybody together to rapid prototype, it's really key that you pick the right team and you give them the right role.

So let's chat a little bit about this sort of cast of characters, if you will, that you're going to need and how that might really give you the insights and the learnings from your prototyping. Now I want to stop just by setting up a little bit of context here and, uh, just remind you of where we are in terms of [00:01:00] rapid prototyping.

You know, rapid prototyping is essentially just testing light versions of a product idea. Testing a sketch or a model that evokes an experience. That's a bit similar to what the finished product would be like. And the whole cheat here is you don't have to wait until the product's finished before you test.

In fact, you can test really, really early on. And what I found is that when you test really early on, you know, what you get all these hints that you would never have thought about to include in the product or to remove from the product. And that's really the beauty of the practice. And we've talked a lot about all the different characteristics and techniques and tools that you might want to use in rapid prototyping right now.

I'm going to yeah. Dig into some, well, some harder and lessons I might say, around the right people in the right roles you need to have when you do it. So the [00:02:00] first thought here is that you can of course prototype just by yourself with one end user now, um, For some of you who didn't catch some of the earlier parts of this series, it is essential that you test your prototype with the actual end user, the consumer, the audience, whatever you want to call them, you're testing with them.

And, um, this is really important because as creators of products, we get a little, uh, shall we say, enamored with our own ideas and, um, After a while we can kind of be a bit lost in the fog of our product. And we kind of think it's amazing, but the true test and the true judge of whether a product is amazing is of course it's the end user.

So let's talk about some of the other people that are involved. If we've got the end user and we're testing with them. You know, as I said, you could do it all [00:03:00] by yourself, but you're going to find it much better, much easier if you do it together as a team. So let's talk about who you want to have in the room, helping you on your side, on your team, pulling together a cool prototype, and helping you do the testing now.

Um, The most important thought here is having a diverse team. And, uh, again, I'm going to give you four archetypes of the type of, uh, people that you want to have in your team. And then we'll talk about the roles that they can play and how you guys can really embrace rapid prototyping. Now, the first one.

Is the, you know, the knowledge seeker, the FactFinder, the magician. Uh, so you want someone who's really good at the facts and the data. And the next one you want is someone more, a bit more like a campaign, lots of energy and positivity. You want someone who's a good understands or very empathetic? [00:04:00] What we might call the mediator.

And lastly, someone who's all about patterns and structures, the architect, um, that would be a really, really high-performance team. If you could bring those sorts of people, of course, they're all going to want to listen to the user of all going to want to listen to. The customer and the consumer, but those are some really good one's types.

If you want to make it even simpler, just make sure you have ideators. Yeah. Makers, um, people who come up with new ways of building the prototype and people who love bringing them to life. So I think it's really important because. You want to avoid groupthink particularly if you're a team that works together and you're working on a new product or service idea, you know, invariably, you're all going to think it should largely be done the same way.

And, um, that's only going to deliver you a very expected outcome. If you bring together more, what I [00:05:00] call the cast of characters, um, if you bring together a diverse team, you know, you really do get some magic through. That intersection of different culture idea perspective is really, really bad half or so.

Try and build a, I always call this cast of characters and together you can do all sorts of things. You can make prototypes and work with your end user. And get some really good outcomes. So this naturally kind of leads us to what's everybody doing? Like there are roles to play. So you're often in an environment where you have a 45 to 60 minutes sprint, where you're going to build prototypes, test them with users, and it's pretty intense.

So you actually need some pretty clear. Uh, roles to play. And of course over the period of a day, if you do lots of different sprints, you can mix it up and take on different roles as well. Um, I generally have always found that people really associate with one of these roles. Then I'm going to share with [00:06:00] you.

And, um, as a result of that, I tend to see people stay in that role for a whole day. Maybe even two days in a row. And that's okay. That's totally. Okay, cool. So what roles are there in a rapid prototyping team who are about to conduct a spring session, uh, where they're going to build prototypes and test them with users?

Well, I'm going to take you through them and explain some of the nuances to each of the roles. So here they are. We've got five main roles. The captain, the facilitator, the designer. The host and the scribe. Okay. Captain, it's all about getting us to the objective here and balancing all the information that you're getting throughout the process, knowing when we should stop when we should start, when we should continue, that's really the captain's role.

Now, the facilitator is really the guardian of the process and that. They're really checking on a few [00:07:00] important things. Are we testing the right thing? Are we listening to end users? And do we really, um, do we agree on what we just learned? And you'll remember that from a previous episode of the bottom up skills podcast, I talked about this key question of what do we learn and what do we do next?

I mean, the facilitators, making sure that that thinking process is really intact. Okay, so position number three, the designer, you really do need someone dedicated to the, if you will, the production of the prototype. And let me just say, this person does not have to be an art director, graphic designer. If you can draw a straight line and a, and a circle with pen and paper, then you're in, I think it's more important that we identify that it is somebody who is performing that role.

Now, of course, It is really exciting to have an [00:08:00] amazing creative or art director person joining your team in this role because they go quicker and they can bring to life in such great fidelity. You'll just have, you'll have your customers and uses drooling over paper prototypes. Let me tell you. Okay. Uh, so we've got three roles.

So far captain facilitator and designer. Now we're going to talk about the last two. Uh, number four is the host. Now the host is such a crucial role because it's often the first person that the recruit or the user or the audience, consumer customer, whatever you want to call them. That's a person who's going to test your project.

It's often the first person they meet. So the host is about greeting the...