Design Thinking Workshop: Tribute

Design sprint for Tribute last 5 business days and the outcome was the validated concept for a decentralized network where organizations cooperate with communities of contributors in a fair and sustainable way.

After gathering the feedback of the potential users and adjusting the necessary changes to the product, it will proceed with the Final Design Stage and Delivering the MVP. Normally UI design is completed within 1-2 weeks and the MVP delivery task 3-4 months.

Team

• Philippe Honigman, Co-founder & Partner at Tribute. (Decision Maker)
• Max Semenchuk, Certified Design Thinking Expert & Parter at 4ire Labs (Facilitator )
• Ksenia Kirikova, Senior UX/UI Designer (Designer)
• Kirill Kirikov, Solution Architect at 4ire Labs (Engineer)
• Stanislav Varetsky, Product Owner at 4ire Labs (Product)

Schedule

Monday

Challenge Definition (3hrs):

• Talk with expert, questions on the problem
• Customer journey
• Voting for the challenge

Solution brainstorm (3hrs):

• Doodling
• Crazy8
• 6-3-5 Brainwriting
• Presenting 1-pager proposals
• Discussion + How-Now-Wow
• Voting

Tuesday

Solution Selection (3hrs):

• Scope Selection
• Sprint Questions
• Experiment Definition

Prototyping #1 (3hrs)

Wednesday

Prototyping #2 (3hrs)

Preparation for interviews and closing (3hrs)

Challenge Definitions

Goals

• Contributive token recognized as a new class of incentives in at least one customer segment
• Tribute Network (DAO) in place and starting to fund some commons projects

Promise

• Drive more activity from customers, business partners, network/marketplace users
• Increase retention and loyalty of network/marketplace users
• Attract early users/promoters as low cost
• Incentivize people to act as shareholders without diluting investors/co-founders
• Offer low-cost, flexible stock-option plans
• Acknowledge and reward individuals’ efforts in flat organizations
• Strengthen legacy businesses’ customer base when facing competition from platform

Who are the customers?

Contributive tokens may benefit any organization that creates value through collaborating with networked individuals, whether those organizations are centralized – as traditional firms -, democratically governed – as cooperatives -, or decentralized – as collectives of self-employed workers or consortiums of independent businesses.

Use cases are provided in our white paper. Potential user organizations include large enterprises (open innovation programs, startup studios, intrapreneurship programs), sharing economy marketplaces, blockchain projects, open-source software, incubators and accelerators, networks of independent workers.

The customer segment that we regard as most promising is mid-sized companies ($5-500M revenue) which already use non-cash incentives (future value) with their employees, partners, and customers.

We believe that contributive tokens might be used as a new class of incentives and a subset of related spending, which amounted to $90B in 2015 in the US alone.

More people outside of companies than inside. Unstable. Liquid market presses the salaries.

Examples:

• Fair4B – a network for IT services (sales, marketing, delivery management). 300 freelancers, going to put 2.5% of revenue in the fund = $50k. 70% to the professional, 20 for the networks, 5 for the hiring, 5 for delivery.
• Cryptobooks – share the books revenue e.g. 80 to the author, 20 to the org.
• Les Fleurs d’Ici – deliver local flowers, ¾ customers are business. Need a shipping network and want to incentivize
• Sociable
• Orange Startup Studio – large telecom project, studio for internal startups. Want to give shares, but not orange
• Hyperloop – want to pay only in stock options
• Local Fench Taxi – Driver Stock option plan (if the driver hits 1000 rides)
• Maybe guys like Stocksy United

Existent solutions

• Custom modules for ERP/CRM

• Excel
• Aragon Open Enterprise (that planning suite)
• Colony?
• Coupons
• Travel and gift cards
• Cash incentives: direct impact on the bottom line, competitive pressures
• Non-cash incentive programs: opaque, small scale, no alignment with shareholders
• Stock-option plans: costly, impact on governance, corporate-level vs. operational, no liquidity for holders, impossible at large scale
• Bounty systems: market value, no alignment with shareholders
• Continuous organizations: value continuous investing rather than a continuous contribution, might be complementary

Challenges

Selected challenge: Make clear the potential value of the incentive.

Solution Ideation

Sprint questions

Can we:

• Describe what token is inside our project
• Show a clear forecast of the token value
• Create a wallet for non-tech savvy people
• Can we make a really interesting social mechanic (~social proof)
• Can we inspire a tryout experiment with the prototype

Questions for interviews

Selected challenge: Make clear the potential value of the incentive.

1. What is it now?

• How important is it for you to increase the participation/loyalty in your network? (painkiller or vitamin)
• What incentives do you currently use or plan to use in your system (if any)? Tell more about them (numbers, success stories, etc)
• Do you have some examples of incentives you like in a product you use or at a company you know?
• How easy is it to explain your incentive system to your network (users, customers, contractors, partners)?
• What is the hardest thing in offering incentives to your network?
• Why haven’t you offered long term incentives so far? (if not)

2. Can we create a wallet for non-tech savvy people?

• How do you understand my Balance screen? Is anything missing?
• What’s unclear about seeing the balance?
• Do you understand how the token holder can use the tokens?

3. Can we show a clear forecast of the token value?

• How do you understand the idea of “Earning simulator”? What positive/negative aspects do you see?
• Does this system make a clear forecast of the token value for you? How would you check the value of tokens on your account in 3 years from now?
• Do you think that it would help you to explain the token incentive to your network? Does it make it clearer to yourself?

4. Can we describe what token is inside our project to the network participants?

• What can be misunderstood with respect to the token, the token value, the earnings?

5. Can we inspire a try-out experiment with the prototype?

• How do you feel about the idea of using such an app for incentives tracking?
• What’s the desired option of integration for your system (API, SDK, redirection to Tribute)? Why?
• What are the main metrics you think you can improve with this approach?
• Would you like to show this prototype to your network?
• How do you plan to introduce the system and the app to your network?

Feedback

Day 1:

• Philippe Honigman: Thanks for doing it, welcoming, smooth, gradual, incremental. Curious, but hard to understand how it can lead to something. How it can be expanded to the development of the product.
• Stanislav Varetsky: I enjoyed the activity very much. That’s cool to hear the feedback. At the end of design sprint, it would be nice to hear again.
• Kirill Kirikov: Smooth and interesting process. It’s becoming clearer how we can implement something from this.
• Max Semenchuk: Enjoyed.

Day 3:

• Stanislav Varetsky: Enjoyed the time spent, was really cool, did a lot. Liked that we had few design iterations to fix on the go. We’re going to the interviews with the design we all approve. Hope after the interviews we’ll have feedback from real users used to improve the whole project.
• Max Semenchuk: Full and productive.
• Philippe Honigman: Enjoyable, communication was easy. Conditions were great. Regarding the process – still a bit unsure. It could bring about many results, but more work is needed. Meetings were very productive even though the team was very small. A bit frustrating that we can’t go on with the interviews right away. Still don’t know about what will be the next step. Even if it’s just an exercise at the end, I haven’t wasted my time, but I hope that more can result form the effort.

Possible next steps

• Find more power and continue product development
• Stop
• Merge Tribute features for another project
• Find more potential customers (maybe outside of France)
• Take Fair4B and try to solve their need

If you have also an idea in DeFi/ FinTech and don’t know how to proceed – Design Thinking approach is the best way for validating and resolving challenges with the expert team and getting as outcome the digital prototype tested by end users. Contact us for free to discover more.