In March, I went to see Dan Pink discussing the “The Science of Buoyancy” at one of the consistently excellent Intelligence² debates.  The subject of buoyancy is one that Dan has explored in his recently released book, “To Sell Is Human”.  A text that uses selling, ultimately as an example to describe human nature.

Dan describes buoyancy as a quality that combines grittiness of spirit and sunniness of outlook, and this will form the basis of my post. I’m going to highlight the points that Dan covered in this area, and conclude with some considerations for how you might also help to keep your employees “buoyant”.

We Are All In Sales

Dan Pink’s previous book “Drive”, raised some points, asking how motivation works in a sales environment. The response to “Drive” got Dan Pink interested in Sales and “To Sell Is Human” is the result of his research. 1 in 9 people are in sales jobs in America but Dan argues that we are all in sales, despite the role of a salesman often having a negative stigma in our mind (We’ve often seen salesman portrayed as slimey, manipulative creeps in movies – see apt screenshot from Napoleon Dynamite!). 

Research has shown that on average, 41% of our time is spent on what he calls non-sales selling. By this he means, convincing, persuading and influencing others to do things we want them to. This opens us all up to the environment and/or response that salesmen are used to and in an adapting digital world where information is at our fingertips, we have also switched from a “buyer beware” market, to a “seller beware” market. In other words, a salesman no longer has the benefit of having the advantage of knowledge that the buyer doesn’t have. As a result, Dan Pink recommends a change in the foundational qualities of selling, with ABC (“Always Be Closing”) taking on new meaning to now represent “Attunement, Buoyancy and Clarity”. And as we’re all salesmen, whether we like it or not, this affects us all.

Attunement is to bring things into harmony with individuals, groups and contexts. i.e. Can you see the world from someone else’s point of view rather than your own? Having a sense of power reduces your ability to have a sense of perspective. So reducing your feelings of power can improve your acute perspective abilities. It is more analytical than empathy, looking at things such as strategic mimicry and practising to be an ambivert. Extraverts rarely make the best salesman and a buyer is now more likely to buy from someone they like.

Clarity is all about making sense of murky situations. It’s providing clarity to your prospect by asking certain irrational questions in a structured way, curating your questions and information well to make it accessible. It’s also not necessarily trying to offer to fix problems that your prospects already know they have, but rather finding problems they did not know they had.

If you want to find out more about Attunement, Clarity and the rest of the contents of “To Sell Is Human” I would recommend you buy it. It’s an excellent read. Now to discuss Buoyancy…

Buoyancy

Chapter 5 of the book and Dan’s talk at Intelligence² are focused on buoyancy. The line of research takes learnings from social psychology on how to bounce back from rejection. Dan uses sales as an example to illustrate his research as it is a role in life that has a great deal of rejection to deal with. However, the same principles can also be applied to everyday life, when you are rejected in the process of trying to convince someone to do something. Dan quotes Norman Hall’s phrase – “Every day you get up and face an ocean of rejection”. Buoyancy is how you stay afloat on that “ocean of rejection” that Hall talks about.

The research on buoyancy is split into what you do before, during and after an encounter.

Before an Encounter

Dan bases some of his research on what to do before you enter an encounter on Delores Albarricin’s work. Self help gurus will often tell you to think positive, affirmative, be bullish. Say to yourself “I can do this!”. The research actually shows that this is not the best approach. Phrases that ask a question such as “Can I do this?” rather than “I can do this” are far more effective.

Albarricin calls this “Interrogative Self-Talk”. Questions by their very nature illicit an active response whether you’re talking to yourself or to someone else. It prepares you for the encounter and forces you to rehearse. You prepare more thoroughly and are thus stronger than the more bullish declarative self-talk despite the latter sounding stronger.

During an Encounter

During an Encounter is all about “Positivity”. Someone is far more likely to be influenced by someone with a positive affect even if the subject matter is unchanged. So how do you make sure you have a positive affect?

Barbara Fredrickson’s research shows that positive emotions open us up. They broaden our actions, open awareness to a wider range of thoughts and make us more receptive and creative. Fredrickson worked with a Brazilian mathematician, Marcial Losada, to help her discover that affectiveness and flourishing occur when positive emotions outway negative emotions at a tipping point of roughly 3:1. A ratio of 2:1 is no different to 1:1 or entirely negative emotions.

To monitor your positivity ratios you can start by visiting Barbara Fredrickson’s website www.positivityratio.com. As well as this, there are certain positive emotions you should try to be more conscious of – joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe and love. If you select a couple (E.g. Take ten minutes to think about three things you are grateful for) and look for ways to display them, it can have a profound effect on your positive affect and thus enable you to better influence people during encounters.

Note: Check out Fredrickson’s book for more in-depth insights into her research.

After an Encounter

The best predictor of success is how you explain failure. Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania has demonstrated through research that Explanatory Style in explaining negative events has an impact on our buoyancy. The best way to do this is to ask yourself three questions and to construct an answer “no” to each. The three questions are: Is this personal? Is this pervasive? Is this permanent? 

So, if you have just lost a bit of business in a pitch what might you ask yourself?

• Is this personal? i.e. Was there something wrong with the way I presented? Example Answer: No. The presentation could have been better, but the company just wasn’t ready to buy just yet.
• Is this pervasive? i.e. Is everyone I visit going to reject this particular pitch? Example Answer: No. This particular company just didn’t have the vision to see the value. Another company probably will.
• Is this permanent? i.e. Have I completely lost my skill for selling? Example Answer: No. I just had a bad day. I was tired. The next will be much better.

The more you explain bad events as temporary, specific and external the more likely you are to persist. This is an analytical way of improving your buoyancy and thus improving your likelihood at being a better salesman in the future. This is not to say that you shouldn’t look for holes in your presentation, take learnings from the feedback from the client and try to improve your pitch for the next time. It is not delusional. It is learned optimism.

If you go too far on the side of positivity (above and 11:1 positivity ratio to be precise), you might consider yourself to be in la la land! It is important not to be in denial. Using some of the methods above will help you get the balance right between levity and gravity to reach the optimum buoyancy. If you de-catastrophy things in a methodical way, it can make you more effective in sales and more effective in life. 

The lovely term coined by Seligman is “Optimism with its Eyes Open”. Perhaps we should all start practising it.

Helping your employees stay buoyant

I haven’t yet tested the theories set out in the book for my own personal well being. However, as a business owner I am interested in not only my own well being in doing my job, but also the well being of my employees.

Feedback

One of the main reasons I like to attend talks such as Intelligence² is that you get to interact directly with the likes of Dan Pink to see if he can provide you with some insights specific to your questions. Being at the talk gave me the opportunity to ask how you stay buoyant if you lose out in a competitive environment (E.g. a pitch for some business against other businesses) but you are ignorant as to why another pitch may have been chosen above yours. Dan’s response was that this is a feedback problem, not a buoyancy problem. This question raised an interesting topic about feedback both from your client prospects but also internally in an organisation and how it can influence buoyancy.

A common problem is that people in the workplace don’t necessarily have a sense of how well they’re doing. Research in the field of talent by Teresa Amabile, professor at harvard business school, shows that employees are most happy when they feel like they are making progress in meaningful work. But making progress is dependant on rich, regular, feedback.

For feedback, an annual performance review just doesn’t cut it. We don’t do performance reviews at Red Badger or any performance linked bonus but rather a quarterly one-to-one meeting with each employee that is informal but basically provides encouragement by telling them what they are doing well, discusses where they could improve and also asks how we can improve to help them and what their ambitions are (what they want to get involved in etc…). We also supplement this with a more agile, informal but constant programme of feedback that is project specific. It’s basic common sense but something that is all too often, easily overlooked.

For your own buoyancy when trying to sell to prospects, it is equally important to demand as much feedback from them as possible so you can implement the above factors, learn where you went wrong, iteratively improve and stay buoyant.

Teams

So what is the right balance inside a team? Should you have a team of all optimists? What about grouping people who work well together historically? 

Brian Uzzi has done some interesting research on teams and came to the conclusion that having a team of people who have always worked together doesn’t produce the best results. Equally, having a team of people that have never worked together doesn’t either. The most optimum teams are a mix of people that have worked together a lot and some who haven’t worked together. This keeps the team both dynamic and coherent, producing the best results. 

Whether you want to mix the team up to include a 3:1 ratio of optimists to pessimists I don’t know. This sounds like an incredible challenge with no quantifiable research showing whether it will provide any benefit. But it’s some food for thought.

Conclusion

This doesn’t feel like the answer to all things. These techniques are not going to help you win business alone. You’ll need to iteratively improve your ways of working (using feedback and experience to help you), pitches need to be on point and appealing to the prospects, opportunities need to be qualified properly and all of the other basic practices of business development need to be in place. However, a pitch is also very creative. It paints a vision. Practicing the above techniques can put you in the right frame of mind to make you more creative, helping to build a better pitch but also help you have more influence over those you are trying to persuade. Inside a company, the precursor to this is to provide better, more constant feedback, change up teams, keep things new and different for your staff and present them with new challenges and that will give them the tools to manage their own buoyancy.

Outside of business, these techniques may also allow you to lead a life with a greater sense of fulfilment. 

Time to start working on the interrogative self-talk, positivity ratios and explanatory style…

This post is about an aspiration. It is about how I want Red Badger to engage with clients in the future. How we can avoid old fashioned Request For Proposal (RFP) processes and just get on with what we should really be judged on. Our ability to build products.

Red Badger has been running as a company for 3 years this May. If you’ve followed our journey or been reading our blog, you will have seen that we as a company have  changed a huge amount. We are catalysts for change, being disruptive in our approach if it is necessary. Check out our new tech page on our website and you will find little mention of Microsoft related technology. If you were to wind back time to two years ago, you would have found that Microsoft would have dominated that same page. This transition has been born out of a desire to find the best solution to any problem without fear of change. To be agile and to adapt. As a result the tech stack we have now built up has changed the way we can deliver projects, applying Lean Startup principles to rapid prototyping to quickly prove concepts, deliver quality Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) and build on them.

We’re not just catalysts for change in the technology we choose or the way we deliver projects; we’re always looking for ways to improve everything we do. The change in how we can deliver projects has made us look at how we try to win new business and how we can provide better value to our clients. I want to provide a brief analysis of this. I’m going to look at a traditional RFP process to start with and then compare it to how we aspire to work with clients and how this links in to part of our current service offering. 

The RFP

An RFP can vary greatly in quality. Some are so brief that they really give you no steer of what they are asking for, resulting in a round of questions from the vendor just to find out the requirements. Other RFPs are at the other end of the spectrum and are so detailed they take a week to read – how long they have taken to build you can only imagine. How a company issues an RFP may differ from company to company but it may go something like this: 

• The client identifies an area in which they want to improve their business (E.g they want a new, more modern website that will better showcase their brand)
• The next few weeks/months are spent building out the RFP, defining purpose, scope of work, vision, objectives, requirements etc…
• The RFP may ask  for a varying level of detail depending on the client but at a bare minimum it is likely to ask for the following:
  • A full description of vision
  • Details of project methodologies
  • Outline of technology that will be used
  • A release and support plan
• They then have to identify a shortlist of potential vendors that they want to work with
• They issue the RFP to the shortlisted vendors
• The vendors have time to consider the RFP and express an interest in building a proposal
• The vendors will be given a timeframe in which to respond – Let’s say 3 weeks.
• In this time, the vendors are allowed to issue a number of questions to the client to which the client is obliged to respond
• The vendors then build out a proposal document. This can vary in complexity depending on the client’s requirements but generally will go into a great deal of depth. It may include the following:
  • Exec Summary
  • A full description of vision
  • The solution including a full breakdown of phases: E.g Discovery, Experience Design, Visual Design & User Testing, Development, Maintenance & Support
  • Project Team Details
  • Timelines/Release Plan
  • Pricing
  • A bit on why you should choose us
  • Case Studies
• The proposal document will then be accompanied by a pitch
  • The pitch will try to portray what is presented in the proposal at a higher level
  • It is likely to be more visual in painting the vision
  • It may include initial wireframes, designs or user journeys
  • But the message getting across to the client will be dependant largely on the skill of the presenter
• The client receives all of the proposal documents and issues dates for the vendors to present their pitch over a period of 2 weeks.
• The pitches are presented
• The vendor is chosen by the stakeholders and the project start date is set subsequent to the signing of contractual agreements.

The above is a very rough outline but the end-to-end RFP process prior to the project start date can take several months. The point at which the RFP is issued to the vendor, to when a decision is made, is also rarely less than a month.

Some of the above is absolutely necessary. However, our aspiration is to change this whole process. An RFP is often much too detailed and the end-to-end process is incredibly long, though my biggest concern is that the vendors are being judged, not on their ability to deliver, but their ability to be convincing during a presentation. Case studies and/or references become the medium through which the client validates their decision but these don’t necessarily represent the client’s requirements. This leaves the client in danger of choosing a less capable vendor on the basis of their case studies being similar to their own requirements.

In short, an RFP process feels old fashioned and cumbersome. It feels like some stakeholders are going through this process only to cover their backs by demonstrating due diligence. It is not progressive and it certainly doesn’t provide best value.

Just Do It

“Just do it” might invoke an initial reaction of “this sounds risky” so let’s use an example of a real project we’ve been involved in that demonstrates a progressive rapid prototyping approach to selecting a vendor.

Last year the BBC launched BBC Connected Studio, the vision presented by Ralph Rivera, Director of BBC Future Media. The vision was to foster near to mid-term innovation projects across BBC’s products by encouraging start-ups, agencies and other individuals to pitch their innovative ideas.

We pitched for the Homepage, Search and Navigation studio. There was a lot of investment from the BBC that went into the connected studio days but I am going to concentrate on how we got from brief to selection. The process went something like this: 

• The BBC prepared an innovation brief with highlights of their business objectives
• You had a day to come up with a concept and prepare a 2 minute presentation
• The BBC then listened to and filmed 30+ 2 minute presentations.
• They narrowed their selection of concepts down to 9 vendors who are invited back
• The 9 vendors have 2 days to build a rapid-prototype of their concepts at the end of which they have 10 minutes to demo them.
• The BBC deliberate for a week and then inform 3 vendors that they have been sucessful
• A pilot phase of 8 weeks is then planned for a date in the future

We delivered the 2 day prototype using our tech stack, effectively re-building the home page from scratch using Node.js, integrating to real data and presenting an MVP.

This is not a perfect example as BBC Connected Studio is slightly different to most projects but it does demonstrate how the BBC can make solid judgements based on ability to deliver, not on ability to present. The presentations themselves were kept incredibly short and in fact weren’t really presentations, they were demos.

We have now gone on to complete an 8 week pilot, working very closely with the BBC so they can quickly get an idea of what we’re like to work with on a project, get used to our processes and our technical capability. The project has far exceeded expectations, has been delivered efficiently and on-time to the BBC and is now ready for user testing.

NOTE: In the last 12 months we have also delivered rapid prototypes for News International, LV, RSA, JLT and MoreTh>n.

The BBC was a loose brief because they wanted to encourage innovation, empowering the vendors to be creative with ideas. Some clients may like this approach, some might not. Regardless, delivering an MVP to reduce risk to the client still works for much more specific briefs.

More Specific Briefs  

We have recently won another small piece of business that had quite a specific brief. They had a clear vision and wanted details from us that would be included in a traditional RFP such as; details of project methodologies, how the products will be maintained & supported and how we scale. However, they also had a desire to move quickly and with little risk. They have broken the vendor selection down into two phases. Here’s how this went.

Phase 1:

• A brief is sent out to the vendors. They must respond with a light pitch outlining approach and accompany it with a very small prototype.
• The brief also sets out some expectations for the prototype. It has quite rich animations. It must be HTML 5 on a mobile device. It must integrate to the accelerometer.
• We build a pitch detailing our approach, alongside building a prototype. NOTE: You can view technical details of this prototype in this post “Simple 3D without Canvas or WebGL“
• We present our pitch alongside a demo of the prototype and a review of the code. (The audience from the client is a mix of both tech and business people. This is also important)
• We are chosen for Phase 2.

We delivered a pitch that satisfied all of their questions which included some rough wireframes, designs and a release plan but we also delivered a rapid prototype, could demonstrate to them our delivery capability and show them the well architected code. Phase 2 is now about to begin. We are the chosen vendor but there is a further test before the full project is won. Phase 2 is paid for but is only 21 man days. It sets out to build upon the Phase 1 MVP to build a production quality component (1 of over 200 that will need to be built in the full project), with the aim of proving further technical questions before being satisfied that the project is feasible. When the technical feasibility is proven we will move straight into full project mode and get started on the design & build of the following components. In the unlikely event that we prove that the project is undeliverable, the client can stop the project having invested only 21 days on development.

To summarise:

• The client has chosen the vendor (us) by working with them for just a week
• The proposal document was light but satisfied their questions.
• A prototype demonstrated to them that we were capable of delivery.
• They can now go straight into developing a live component, using this to prove technical feasibility
• Initial spend is little. Risk is little. Speed to deliver is fast.
• Once feasibility is proven we are already in project mode and can move straight into the design & build of the rest of the project

The Benefits for The Client

The Lean Startup principles are all about reducing risk. We apply these principles to our project delivery processes, using a tech stack that allows us to rapidly deliver. We like to prove concepts quickly and cheaply by rapidly delivering MVPs and then quickly go from MVP to full release. We’d also like to apply Lean Startup principles to the way in which we work with our clients to start new projects. By building rapid prototypes, working collaboratively with the client during the vendor selection process we bring the client the following:

• Transparency in the vendor’s ability to deliver
• Confidence/familiarisation with their processes prior to decision
• Transparency of culture prior to decision
• A refined view of vision (Having something tangible that you can see and use is the best way to assist the painting of a vision)
• An MVP that you can use and build upon when the project gets going
• A clear comparison between the vendors based on what matters – their ability to deliver quality product.
• Reduced risk and investment
• A faster decision

In Summary

I’ve been working on agile projects for nearly a decade now. Back in the early days it was particularly hard to sell but behaviour has slowly changed. The client is often used to agile ways of working and is not surprised when this is our chosen project delivery methodology. Ultimately this is because they now understand that it provides better value, an understanding that was missing a few years ago.

Our aspiration is to avoid the traditional RFP process and move to a rapid prototyping approach to selling. We believe this provides much better value to the client. However, the journey to get there may be a long one, and I am under no illusion that this will be the only way we engage with our clients any time soon. But we will keep pushing to provide them with better value and hopefully we can convince a lot of them to embrace change, sooner rather than later, in the way that we do.

To avoid repeating what has been said in previous posts, I’m going to keep this blog as short as possible.

As announced by David in his July post, we have been planning to open source XPF – our layout framework for XNA, for a little while. Jaco Geldenhuys and Jonathan Dickinson have been working around their busy schedules to get the code ready for a public release. We are delighted to announce that this has now been completed and our Github Repository is public.

What next?

XPF is now open to everyone so please go ahead and start to play. If you want to contribute, all the details on how are up on the Github wiki as well as the repository rules and license details. Jaco and Jon will also be doing some work in the developer community to try and attract some potential contributors.

To help you to get started. the Getting Started With XPF blog post has been uploaded to the Github wiki but there are also some historical XPF posts on our blog that are not yet uploaded so you may find some of those useful.

Any new documentation and/or announcements will now be made on the Github wiki rather than our blog. This will avoid the need to retrospectively update old blog posts that are no longer relevant.

So that’s about it! We look forward to seeing how the community can take XPF forward in developing it further. Happy coding!

As Red Badger grows steadily and moves into its next stage of development we are facing fresh new challenges every week. To assist our development we are delighted to announce two new non-executive directors who will provide us with the support and advice we need to help us realise our very big ambitions.

We’re very excited to announce the appointment of Mike Altendorf and Les Dawson OBE as Non-Executive Directors. Both will support Red Badger’s strategy  and help to drive business growth as Red Badger continues to deliver high quality, innovative technology to it’s current client base.

Mike Altendorf

Mike was the former founder of Conchango, one of the UK’s most successful digital consultancies and systems integrators. Mike has many years of experience in consulting services and technology, founding Conchango in 1991 and building it into a £45m+ revenue business before its sale to EMC Corporation in April 2008.

Les Dawson

Les is former CEO of Southern Water and current chairman at John Murphy & Sons. Les was also an Executive Director at United Utilities and was head of operations at Transco. He has over 30 years of experience in the industry and has a passion for driving business change through the innovative use of technology.

It’s just over 3 weeks since the BizSpark Summit on 7th June. I’ve been so busy it has taken me this long to write a blog post about it. So here’s a summary.

16,000 Startups

There are 16,000 startups that are part of Bizspark in Europe so we were honoured to be nominated as one of the top 15. There was a really good bunch of talented startups presenting and lots of interesting people. The event as a whole was fantastic (I have written a little about the build up to the event here). There was an incredible amount of organisation that went into the event from the event organisers Forgather, to the input from Microsoft’s European Bizspark representatives spearheaded by Bindi Karia and the coaching from Mike Sigal. It was a busy couple of weeks leading up to the event (I think I must have changed my pitch about 10 times, the last change being on the eve of the event) with a full day of rehearsals (one run through per startup) and final feedback at Microsoft’s Victoria offices on the day before the summit. Drinks and food were put on by Microsoft that evening so that all of the startups and Microsoft Bizspark folk could mingle and get to know each other.

On the day we arrived early at Ravensbourne college (where we were former incubatees) to prepare our stands before the main event kicked off around 9:30. It was actually quite daunting as there was a crowd of approximately 300 people in the auditorium and all presentations were up on a big stage. This was a definite step up for me when it comes to presenting.

David Rowan, Editor of Wired UK expertly moderated the whole day with Dan’l Lewin (Corporate Vice President Emerging Business Development) doing the opening conversations and getting the day started.  I won’t give a running commentary of the day, you can find more info on that here, but I will say that the day was expertly delivered and there were some really interesting keynotes including Bob Dorf, author of the Startup Owner’s Manual. In-between the keynotes were the three sessions for the startups to present with five startups presenting in each session. I was relieved that I was in the first session so that I could do my presentation and then enjoy the rest of the day.

My Experience

As I mentioned in my previous blog we were slightly different to the rest of the startups that were presenting because we didn’t have an actual product to show and the day was very product focussed with a large contingent of VCs in the audience.

So, I had five minutes to introduce who Red Badger were, describe the problem, paint a vision of how our product idea would provide a solution, describe the market, the business model, the competition, the team, and finally a closing message to the VCs. It was a hell of a lot to fit in and despite lots of practice, I ran over as did most of the other startups.

It was a very good experience though. The hardest bit was painting a vision. Quite a few people in the audience (and the judges) didn’t get what our idea was trying to do. It would have been much easier had I been able to show them what we had done. However, when we were in the breakout sessions, we had a lot of interest from people with experience in the industry who completely got our vision. So, overall it was a successful day for Red Badger. I personally have taken a lot out of the day and the whole process. I have learnt a lot from the coaching, taken some good feedback on board and look forward to doing things different when I am next presenting to a large audience like this one.

The other startups

I think one of my favourite things about the whole event was spending time with the other startups. Apart from them obviously being very talented entrepreneurs with some excellent products, there were some great people too. There was a real sense of camaraderie between us over the two days. We were also all very different and although we were effectively competing against each other on the day, in the real world I don’t think there was a single competing product. The highlights for me were autitouch, theappbuilder, fittingreality & paperlit. Go check them out as I expect they’re going to continue doing great things for some time. Autitouch specifically impressed me as on the eve of the rehearsals, they had a pivot with some potentially ground-breaking research results coming through that changed their pitch at the 11th hour. Freena Eijffinger handled the change incredibly well to deliver a faultless presentation.

The future

As for Red Badger, well, we’re hoping we’re going to be around for a long time too. We continue to innovate, building up a solid foundation and providing great products for our clients through Consultancy. Product plans are afoot however, so keep an eye out for us in the future.

So, you may have seen our recent blogs about the BBC Connected Studio for Homepage, Search and Navigation – Creative Studio and Build Studio.

So far the experience has been an incredible one. The BBC have run two fantastic events that have been very well organised and almost militant with their timing. In brief, the Creative Studio had 32 teams presenting which was then whittled down to 9 for the Build Studio.

It sounded like the BBC judges had an incredibly hard time in choosing the finalists to go into the funded 6-8 week rapid prototyping Pilot phase because there were some incredible ideas amongst the 9 participants.

We are really pleased however, that we have been chosen as one of the three teams to go through to the Pilot stage. The other two are Kent Lyons and Goss Interactive so congratulations to both of those as well.

Our original concept in the Creative Studio combined a number of ideas including a time based homepage combined with varying levels of manual and automatic personalisation and the semantic web. In the Build Studio we had 2 days to focus on one idea and the BBC wanted us to explore the timeline view. It was a bit of a risk but the team chose to rebuild the prototype for the homepage from scratch using Node.js (rather than using the existing PHP codebase that was provided)  in the 2 days allocated.  This was integrated to real BBC data and demoed at the end of the 2nd day.

So, in the Pilot we will more than likely be taking the timeline view further and making it production ready. We haven’t yet defined the requirements for the 6-8 week project and it going ahead is subject to some business case analysis and agreement being reached on costs, deliverables and timescale. If it does go ahead however, once we have built it, the pilot will be live to the public on the connected studio site so the BBC can gather some real feedback before making a decision on whether to implement it into bbc.co.uk.

So far the Connected Studio has been a great experience. We have given the opportunity for a a number of our staff to be involved (the team for Build Studio was entirely different to Creative Studio) so it feels like it has been a real team effort. We’ can’t wait for the pilot to begin.

Microsoft are entering their 8th year of doing the BizSpark European Summit which provides an opportunity for some of the best startups in Europe to present their business ideas and products to a panel of investors and expert judges. I’m presuming that if you are reading this blog, you know what BizSpark is.

Red Badger has been a member of BizSpark pretty much since it’s inception in May 2010. It has provided us with an excellent platform to grow our business by not just providing us with free Microsoft tools but also providing our business with key support through networking, events and key advice (particularly through Bindi Karia).

Anyway, back to the summit. We are incredibly pleased to have been nominated by Microsoft as one of fifteen startups in Europe (and one of two in the UK) to present our business ideas at this year’s summit to be held on 7th June. You can see who all of the other nominees are here. On the day there will be a number of keynotes and panel discussions with the day being MC’d by David Rowan, editor of Wired UK. Presenters and participants include Bob Dorff (co-author of the Startup Owner’s Manual), Professor Jerome S. Engel, last  year’s Summit pitch contest winner Alessandro Rizzoli (CEO of Mobapp), plus Microsoft’s Dan’l Lewin, Corporate Vice President, Strategic and Emerging Business Development.

Startup Coaching

In the afternoon the startups will get their opportunity to present to the 250-400 investors, expert judges, and other guests. They will get a slot for a 5 minute lightning pitch followed by 5 minutes of questions. This is not a lot of time to sell your business idea so Microsoft have provided all of the training and advice to make sure our presentations are as sharp as possible. This includes some high level coaching on our presentations from Mike Sigal, an entrepreneur and startup coach who has been performing this coaching role at the BizSpark Summit for the last 3 years. Having gone through the first iteration of advice from Mike (the second iteration is to follow), I can say his advice is very inspirational. Combining this with the constant coaching from Bindi and a full day of rehearsals on 6th everyone should be well prepared come the 7th. Supporting the coaching is the PR activities surrounding the event being co-ordinated by Maxine Ambrose and Daisy at Forgather ensuring all the startups are meeting their several deadlines leading up to the event.

Our Pitch

What we are pitching is an interesting question as we are slightly different to the other nominees. From what I can gather, the majority of the other nominees have a fairly mature product for which they might be asking for investment for. We are slightly different in that we have a product idea and ultimately want to move in that direction and fairly soon. However, we are currently an early stage product company. What I mean by that is that we want to self fund the product arm of the company through profits made from the client services arm with the two running side-by-side. We’re just not quite there yet. So, our pitch will be geared toward presenting what problems our idea will solve and how the world will be different once it is built. An interesting challenge.

Previous Winners

Previous winners of this event have had great success as a result, gaining lots of recognition as well as some key investment.

Stolen from this page – “In 2009, Swiss company KeyLemon wowed the judges with its face recognition technology and has enjoyed steady success since.  In 2010, the joint winners were Artesian Solutions and Kobojo.  Last year, French games company Kobojo secured over 5 million Euros of investment, has expanded into other countries worldwide and has reached over one million active daily users.  Early this year, Artesian Solutions announced that investor firm Octopus was investing £2 million in this successful young British company, which focuses on sales intelligence.

Last year’s winner is Mopapp, whose CEO Allesandro Rizzoli impressed the judges with his ingenious mobile appstore aggregation service.  Alessandro has since relocated the company from Italy to London and the company continues to grow.”

People’s choice award

This year there is an additional award, The People’s Choice. This goes out to the public vote and is entirely based on people clicking on a Facebook like button. It largely depends on how active you are at promoting your company to all of your personal and company Facebook friends. Not my favourite method of voting but if you have 10 seconds spare, do go and like Red Badger on our Finalist Page.

Summary

That pretty much sums it up. I’ve now got more work to refine the 5 minute presentation, some rehearsals and then the big day. Wish me luck!

On Friday last week (that is the 4th of May 2012 just in case you are reading this in 2013) we spent an excellent day up in the BBC’s plush new MediaCity, Salford offices with a bunch of BBC folk, other start-ups and generally bright, vibrant people. The cause was the first instalment of the BBC’s Connected Studio. First, a little about what the Connected Studio is and then I’ll tell you some more about the day.

BBC R&D are looking at innovation all the time with the real possibility that some of the very cool new tech they are currently working on not surfacing for another 10 to 20 years.The Connected Studio is an initiative to look at how the BBC can innovate just a little beyond the existing roadmap for digital. The intention is to do this in a collaborative manner with BBC staff working with invited external digital agencies, technology start-ups, designers and developers to participate in generating new ideas, concepts, features and functions . Find out more here.

The main focus areas each having their own creative studio days are 1) Homepage, Search and Navigation 2) Weather and Travel 3) BBC Children’s and 4) The Olympics. There is a reasonably detailed engagement charter detailing the steps to achieve the goal of generating ideas and moving them rapidly through concept to proof-of-concept to pilot. Each focus area will start with a Creative Studio day. This is a one day event (the first being 4th May. More on that later…) to facilitate ideas and concepts. Out of the ideas pitched at the end of the day, a number of the companies or individuals will be invited back to the Build Studio. The build studio is a 2 day innovation workshop to develop ideas and proof-of concepts much like a Launch 48 (although you already have the concept by this point). The objective is to have a working PoC at the end of the 2 days. Of these PoCs, up to five will be invited to work on a 6-8 week Pilot Build for which there will be up to a £50K budget. The BBC then has an exclusive option for a 6-12 month period to take forward any successful pilot it chooses for full product development.

There is a total fund of £1m to develop concepts throughout the year, with an additional £1m of BBC staff time.

That was a quick overview of the overall concept of The Connected Studio I’ll take you through the experience of participating in the first Creative Studio.

The Creative Studio

We were limited to 2 attendees, as I believe was every other company. So I attended along with one of the UX Consultant’s in our network Alex Ng. The Creative Studio on 4th May was all about Homepage, Search and Navigation. Prior to the day we had been provided with a creative brief so knew that the focus was to explore the potential uses of customisation and personalisation.

You have the option of booking in advance, a 15 minute closed pitch with the BBC and a third party. This is for those that already have a developed idea and want to protect their IP. Everyone else presents in an open session, the time you have to present largely depending on the number of people presenting.

Arriving at MediaCity between 9-10 for registration (I left my house at just after 5am) you get a good breakfast before getting started at 10.

The new BBC Office has lots of space that has been built to foster collaboration and creativity. We were situated in an events space that had been segregated into a number of areas for the main presentations, break out areas for collaboration and another presentation area for some presentations by some key BBC experts that were open to all if they chose to attend.

Adrian Woolard (Project Lead R&D North Lab) got the day started, introducing us (probably about 60-70 people half of which were the BBC) to what the Connected Studio is, the vision unveiled by Raph Rivera and what was expected of us. James Thornett and Clare Hudson then introduced us to the current homepage and it’s journey to now, their strategic objectives and the challenges they face. At 10:40 we were ready to go and had a 4pm deadline to be ready for the presentations.

We had developed a few ideas into one concept on the train up to Manchester so requested a closed pitch on the day but they were full. So, it turned out soon after that we had a 2 minute slot to present in the open session in front of the audience and the camera. Not nerve racking at all! As we already had an idea we went off into our own little space to develop it further, prepare wireframes and a presentation to fit into the 2 minute time slot. Other people gathered around the “ideas wall” to collaborate with others who up to now, had only half an idea and wanted to create a team to work up some ideas on the day. Others went to speakers corner where various BBC experts were waiting to answer any questions.

Supporting the open spaces were a number of 15 minute “expert” presentations in the morning. The agenda was as follows:

• 11:00 – 11:15 – Audiences: Simon Williams (Audience Planning Manager)
• 11:15 – 11:30 – Market Analysis: Tim Fiennes (Senior Market Analyst)
• 11:30 – 11:45 – Homepage Tech: Tom Broughton (Senior Technical Architect for Homepage)
• 11:45 – 12:00 – UX&D: Steve Gibbons (Head of User Experience and Design)
• 12:00 – 12:15 – Personalisation: Phil Poole (Senior Project Manager: Personalisation & Social Platform)

I didn’t attend all of the morning sessions as I was deep into developing our idea but both the Homepage Tech session and the Personalisation session were very useful. Both gave an insight into the current state of their topics plus a view of the roadmap ahead. Especially interesting was Tom Broughton discussing their ambitions to implement a Triplestore to allow semantic search features – something that was prevalent in the idea we were presenting.

A very nice free lunch was available from Midday and then the afternoon session was focussed around developing the presentations whilst those that had closed pitch sessions were presenting in a private meeting room. Linda Cockburn, a creativity consultant that led the BBC’s Creative Network for 5 years, did a presentation on how to present and then there was an opportunity to present your pitch back to her and real members of the Homepage audience to get personalised feedback prior to the 4pm deadline.

At 4pm we were all ushered to the presentation area where a number of plasmas, a microphone and a cameraman awaited. There were twenty-three 2 minute presentations. The whole day (as expected from the BBC) was run to strict timelines, the excellent event production team running a tight ship for everyone involved including the 15 minute morning expert sessions. So, the pressure was on to fit our presentations into the 2 minutes, some of which were cut off because they ran out of time. All-in-all there was a high quality calibre of presentations with some excellent and varied ideas produced. Some were digital but to my surprise most were hand drawn presentations on flip-board paper and there was one presentation told in the form of a story.

At the end of the presentations at 6pm, beer and wine were provided (until 11 if you wanted to stick around for that long) for all of the attendees to mingle. Some very interesting people and all in all an excellent day of fun and innovation. The next step is to wait to see if we get through to the build studio (we should hear by the end of this week). The concepts presented will be judged on, Distinctiveness, Relevance to brief, Innovation, Value, BBC public purposes and Connected Strategy (One Service, Ten Products, Four Screens – http://tinyurl.com/connected-storytelling)

Our Concept

Without doing too much of a reveal, our concept was based around turning the home page into a living thing that is more dynamic and more real-time rather than a navigation step that users spend very little time on. Less than 10% of people used the personalisation features in the previous version of the homepage and lots of people will continue to ignore it. With this is mind we introduced various levels of personalisation and testing the idea of machine learning to automate personalisation as much as possible. Once a semantic Triplestore is introduced, this could be taken a lot further.

Our key points were the following:

• Make the homepage more useful and more relevant
• Make the homepage more real-time
• Surface content that uses automated personalisation as much as possible
• Cater for varying levels of personalisation from none at all to more interactive users
• Use the semantic web to improve the “discover” features of the site to be specific to you

Here’s one our mock-ups that we presented to give you a taste of what we were thinking:

Summary

I doubt we will pitch for Weather and Travel or BB Children’s creative studios due to this being less relevant to the work we do but you never know. If they interest you though, I would highly recommend getting involved in The Connected Studio whether you are a digital agency, tech firm or and individual designer or developer. It really is an excellent day.

Here’s a few links of interest:

• http://www.bbcconnectedstudio.co.uk/
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2012/04/connected_studio_home_search.html
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2012/04/connected_studio_launch_backstage.html

Location: Clerkenwell

Salary: Excellent plus Share Options

Red Badger is a creative software consultancy – we are working on some really innovative projects with some excellent calibre clients. Our integrated teams (PMs, BAs, UX, Designers, Devs, UI Devs, Testers) collaborate using agile project methodologies (Scrum and Kanban). We are a startup, having been in existence for 18 months and are growing rapidly. We are in need of a charismatic, talented Agile Project Manager to integrate into our talented team. You will be working on some very exciting projects ranging from Rapid Prototyping/Concept Lab type environments to longer term engagements.

You will need:

• 3+ years running agile projects (Scrum experience is a must. Kanban is a bonus).
• 1st Class Project Management Skills
• An understanding of technology and experience working closely with technology teams to deliver projects
• Be used to working in iterations, daily stand-ups and using velocity to determine what can be achieved
• To be comfortable working in multi-disciplined teams
• To be comfortable working very closely with clients
• You need to lead
• You need to be reliable and motivated
• You need to have an eye for detail

Desirable:

• Experience working in a User Centred Design environment

This is a great opportunity to work with in a really sociable, fun environment. Red Badger is still young but growing so you’ll be involved at an early stage in our history and to have influence in shaping our future.

For more information or to apply please contact us here: hello@red-badger.com

As we now roll full steam ahead into 2012 I thought I’d take the time to do a blog on Red Badger’s year in 2011.

The Beginnings

Red Badger was formed in May 2010 with Stuart Harris, David Wynne and I investing some of our savings into building a company based on specific ideals with a specific long term strategy in mind (this has evolved over the last 18 months). We wanted to be in full control of Red Badger’s destiny and as such decided not to seek investment of any kind. We also made an executive decision that we wanted to dedicate ourselves full-time to Red Badger so decided that we wouldn’t contract ourselves out to clients as individuals to fund the building of the company. This of course had it’s implications. We all quit our jobs and for the next year we would be working in each others homes, building up the company with no income whatsoever.

Into 2011

As we entered 2011, the company was nearly 7 months old and we were still just 3 guys working from each others homes. 2010 had largely been about creating a presence. We formed some key partnerships, pitched to potential clients and generally got ourselves out there. In October, we also started to design our twitter app, Birdsong for Windows Phone 7. By January 2011 we had two main channels of work – we had been working on a couple of large pitches (amongst others) for 2 very big clients and developing Birdsong. By 25th January v1.0 of Birdsong was available in Microsoft’s Marketplace.

Birdsong

At this time, Windows Phone 7 was in it’s infancy having only been released in November 2010 – having been involved in developing on the platform in its beta stages, we had every confidence in a bright WP7 future. However, we knew that Birdsong wasn’t going to contribute to building the foundations of Red Badger in monetary terms and in fact didn’t plan for Birdsong to be making large contributions to Red Badger revenue in the long term as only a small percentage of apps actually make companies a lot of money. Birdsong for us was all about building a Red Badger presence.

The first half of 2011 was an incredibly enjoyable time for Stuart and David being able to focus on developing Birdsong, shipping features in response to customer demand – part of this involved creating a good customer service platform through Zendesk. We also started to do the promotional work around it, engaging with Microsoft at an early stage. The Microsoft activity is on-going but you can read the Microsoft Case Study on-line.

We knew that Stu and Dave’s time on Birdsong was going to be short lived once client projects came through so we had to ensure it was architected really well (This is a given anyway) to allow for someone else to come in, learn the code-base and take over where Stu and Dave left off. By May and over 1,000 BDD specs later, Birdsong was doing pretty well – it was on v1.4, was the leading premium social app on the WP7 platform and had gained some notoriety among the WP7 consumer base and internally at Microsoft. It was achieving what we had set out for it.

We have ambitious plans for Birdsong, were aware that it still had a long way to go and was by no means perfect but were preparing ourselves to have to leave it for a while.

The Madness Begins

In parallel to developing Birdsong we had been working hard on a couple of pitches (amongst others) for 2 really big clients for quite some time (At time of writing neither project is live so we can’t talk about them yet which gives you an indication of their size). In April, we finally won both projects with both of them due to start just a few weeks apart in May and June.

All of a sudden, we needed to build two project teams of ample size and find an office to run them out of. We started plugging into our network of people we have worked with before. We knew they were very high quality but availability was an issue. Everything we do is Agile and built on a UCD approach so we needed integrated teams consisting of a PM, UX Consultants, Designers, Developers, UI Developers and Testers.

With a lot of hard work we somehow managed to assemble two teams with the right people to work on our projects – 90% of which we had worked with before (Which eases the worry of whether you’re getting quality or not).

At the same time, another startup – Fluxx was formed in April. They are a digital strategy company setup up by a number of our friends and former colleagues at Conchango. They had just found a lovely new office in St. Paul’s that would cater for their growth expectations over the next 2 years but at the time they had ample space spare. We were in discussions to partner with Fluxx as a development partner so it made sense for both companies that we would sublet a floor in their building for 6 months.

So, with project wins in place, a new office and a staff rota of the highest quality we secured a bank loan to get us off the ground with rent, buying furniture and equipment. We moved into our new office in May, raring to go.

The Projects

Both projects were very different but both incredibly challenging and innovative. One is an interactive 3D HTML5 website for a large automobile company with no dependency on Flash for modern browsers. The other is a large Government project that I can’t say anything more about. Both are mutli-platform with Web, Mobile and Cloud elements.

The first thing to do was to get the processes and systems in place through which we would run our projects – we now had clients in Germany so a cloud based infrastructure fitted perfectly (See: How The Cloud Underpins Red Badger’s Business) to allow for a remote but collaborative working environment. We also had to educate our clients in the way we approach and deliver projects.

In May, we kicked off our first project, meeting in Hamburg for 2 weeks for project planning and requirements development (Sprint 0). Once that project was underway we started the kick-off for the 2nd project.

It was a very interesting time, integrating two new teams from scratch, getting used to the new office and spending a lot of time flying between Munich, Cologne, Hamburg and London. Over the next few months we iteratively improved the processes of the projects and solidified our working relationships with both the clients and the Red Badger team internally.

Both of the projects have gone incredibly well and are both still on-going 7 months later.

The Intern Programme

With all of the above going on, it is easy to understand how difficult it had now become for us to focus any time on Birdsong development. This presented us with an issue as we have long term ambitions for Birdsong but it is very difficult to dedicate a resource to it that can be earning us up to £1,000 per day when Birdsong has only made us about £3,000 in a whole year. We decided to align Birdsong development with our plans for developing talented youth by using Birdsong as a training platform for our interns.

So, in June (Earlier than initially planned) we launched our intern programme. We advertised for a few months through our blog and a number of University job board sites. In all, we had 65 applicants for 1 position (admittedly some of these were students that seemed to be applying for everything regardless of position and relevancy of their skillset) so there was quite a lot of work to narrow these down to a final 8. We then set the final 8 a coding challenge, reviewed the code that they sent us and ended up interviewing 3. We finally offered Joe (an incredibly talented and self motivated student at Kings College) a part-time position due to start in November. (Joe’s Blog).

We have given Joe the responsibility of owning Birdsong development and support. We are investing in his long term future at Red Badger (we are investing our hopes on him joining us after graduation) so take a senior developer off of projects to pair programme with him when he is with us. This is costing us over £1,000 a week in developing both Joe and Birdsong but we think both are worth it. If we didn’t have Joe we simply couldn’t justify doing this just for Birdsong development.

Joe has now been with us for a month, has two weeks off to sit exams in the first two weeks of 2012 but is making fantastic progress. There is an incredible amount of code to familiarise himself with but he has almost completed the Trends functionality (a good feature to ease him into the dev) and will soon be able to start moving on to more pressing bits of functionality such as updating the Push Service (which we know is in need of some desperate attention). So hopefully, Birdsong users won’t have to wait too long for an update. Watch this space…

Growth, a new office and new project wins

As well as running our two main projects (delivering quality is our primary focus), the second half of 2011 has been about solidifying partnerships, trying to secure new business, and growth (which is dependent on an improving cash flow).

At the beginning of December we moved into a new office as we were growing out of the Fluxx space (at the same time Fluxx were getting big enough to grow into the space we vacated). With so much going on it is taking us some time to get the office in ship-shape but the interior designers have been in, we’ve got water supply/drainage fitted and now need to get the kitchen fitted and let the interior designer do his work. Hopefully it will be done within the next 6 weeks and working in a messy office will be no more.

An important part of our growth is to hire permanent staff so we have started converting some of our contractors to permanents and bringing in other new permanents into the team. Rachel has also joined as Client Services Director (blog) who is responsible for business development and marketing so this should give us the extra focus on new business that we need. We need more people across a varied skillset but finding the right quality (which is absolutely paramount to us) is difficult so that is one of the challenges we face. A nice problem to have.

As well as growing and moving into the new office we have also won new projects, most significantly with a major media corporation doing some innovative rapid prototyping using Node.js (See Steve’s Blog here). We are well shaped for 2012, with 3 large parallel projects and some smaller ones to fit in also. There’s lots of hard but fun work ahead of us.

Moving on to 2012

2011 was a year of transition. 2012 will very much be focussed on securing the future of Red Badger. We have had a great 2011 but it would be naive of us to think we are out of the woods entirely. We are still very young so our focus must be to grow steadily and sensibly and to win new innovative projects with both new clients and existing ones. The first 6 months of 2012 will be very interesting. In the 2nd half of 2012, if all goes to plan, we have some interesting product development plans to kick-off.

We of course will continue to develop Birdsong, hope to take Joe on for a year long full-time placement in June and may potentially bring in new interns/grads in the summer to bolster the Birdsong development team.

We also will be doing a re-branding exercise and overhauling our desperately out of date website. We just haven’t had the time to do it up to now so hoping to get something moving on that this month.

Exciting but challenging times.

Ravensbourne

I realise in this (now rather long) blog that I haven’t mentioned Ravensbourne College. Ravensbourne is an innovative, creative University on the Greenwich Peninsula in South East London. They offer great support services to their post-grads and an incubation programme (with the help of a European Development Fund grant) for startups in London. This acts as a stimulus for new entrepreneurship in London. In Jan 2011 we were accepted into the incubation programme which provided us with free facilities and meeting rooms as well as an opportunity to work with other incubatees that were based there. This very much provided us with a platform from which we could launch ourselves. Our first meetings with our clients were held there and our first projects were won there. So, our gratitude goes out to all at Ravensbourne, especially Chris Thompson (Who heads up the Ravensbourne Programme) and Carrie Wootten (Head of Enterprise and Innovation).

Finally

Happy New Year to you all. I hope 2012 is as good for you as I’m hoping it is for us. I have a good feeling about it.