Let me know what you think! DM me @philippemora
My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. 

Head of Product and VP Engineering at Sikka Software.
thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader.

Let me know what you think! DM me @philippemora
My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. 

Head of Product and VP Engineering at Sikka Software.
thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader.

At Sikka, I introduced iterative product creation in 2015. It did take us two years however to find our footing and after a lot of trial and error, we finally settled for a design and implementation methodology that works for us (and enables us to deliver those Minimal Lovable Product weekly drops that delight our customers).

See, after trying Agile and see it fail miserably (for all the good reasons), I did innovate at Sikka and opted for our simple “sikka lean” against continuous delivery and faux-fake-agile. 

My personal nirvana would have been a healthy combination of design thinking, agile and lean; however one must always find the right spot based on the DNA of the teams we're working with. 
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For this reason, I'd like to take this opportunity to summarize my take (and an extended summary of a few others) on what are the most efficient iterative design methods in 2017. 

This is more or less the de-facto way of developing for innovation and new products: lean - iterative, intuitive, creative (vs. the traditional incremental, staged, uncreative tech methodologies favored in the distant past). 
Lean basically focuses on evolving a product based on continuous market feedback by testing every new idea and every assumption with users on a daily (more reasonably weekly) basis. The product team starts by creating a small initial set of features (I call this the “Minimal Lovable Product”) and drops it to the marketplace in order to get immediate end-user validation early on.  We then continue to iterate the product in fast build-measure-learn cycles, while the product team prioritizes the features and direction as user feedback data keeps coming in. 
The lean product development was pioneered and perfected by Toyota  for manufacturing (then adopted by Apple) - and very well summarized by Eric Ries in his book “the lean startup”. 

The beauty of Lean is that it connects metrics directly to product development. In other words, there is immediate understanding of the effect of a new feature on the business’s revenue. It places the end user in the driving seat of the product and its roadmap. 

• Companies using lean:  Unilever, Intuit, GE, Toyota (manufacturing), Apple (manufacturing)
• Benefits of lean:  Products more aligned with market needs, faster validation of products/features, reduced risk, better prioritization of work, features closely tie up with the business model 

I love Design Thinking. Personally when I ideate I always start by applying Design Thinking to my thought process. Design Thinking, which applies the creative approach of designers to any problem was invented at Stanford’s D-School. It’s a very solid and beautiful process for design and ideation amongst creative types. However it really takes forever if done well to actually hatch anything that makes sense because it heavily relies on guided exploration and brainstorming.  And difficult to implement when you don’t have superbly creative types in your product team. But IDEO has been extremely successful and the first to apply Design Thinking to business-driven products.

Benefits of design thinking

• Team cohesion (my teams at Nvidia are still raving about it, 10 years later)
• Highly creative outcomes

Common issues with  design thinking

• Long discovery timeline
• Unexpected results
• Requires a lot of (intense) interactions with current users

First and foremost, Agile is dead. Agile was created in 2001 as a simple way to implement lightweight development processes to make software better and was built around 4 basic principles: trust, collaboration, improvement, and accuracy.

Then the old-guard (stuck in a closet waterfall mindset and non-technical with no hands-on code writing experience) stepped in and made it “a process”.  the result: well, another process. 
So let’s go back to Dave Thomas’ (and his friends) original manifesto:
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“We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

•  Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
•  Working software over comprehensive documentation
•  Customer [user] collaboration over contract negotiation
•  Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”

I am not going to spend time on scrum and other methodologies that have been invented to implement agile but I’d say this, the key reasons why dev teams love agile are:

• Test driven development (TDD) — this  means that no QA is necessary in agile
• Estimation (this is when most dev teams fail: incorrect estimate and lots of padding!)
• Pair programming
• Backlog prioritization
• Retrospectives
• User stories

However, for as long as agile software development is not part of an agile organization incorporating agile governance and agile budgeting, there is no point in trying to fit a square peg into a round hole … it will fail, here are the common issues that “faux-agile” mindsets have a real hard time to understand: 

• Less certain timelines
• Impacts whole organization, not just tech/product
• No product roadmaps (that’s hard on the fake-agile crowd)
• Embracing uncertainty (that’s also super hard for most)

Companies using adapted versions of Agile (DevOps): Apple, Facebook, Google, GM and Spotify

When the Agile mindset is strong, here are the 3 main benefits to the organization:

• Faster, iterative development
• (Almost) bug free code with no QA (thank god)
• Higher productivity from fewer people 

Rapid development methodologies have three major caveats: first, they require a uniform mindset across the board at every level from all teams, most importantly dev and product. The most common pitfall is for dev to demand waterfall-style specifications, supremely detailed flows, prototypes and mocks, though not in the form of PRDs and MRDs but already broken down in long and cumbersome encyclopedia-britannica-style epics and user stories, thus completely negating the purpose and philosophy of rapid development frameworks. 

Second, issues will arise when old-school organizational practices, such as re-introducing QA as separate of dev (QA does not typically exist in modern devops orgs) compounds the previous issue by adding another layer of administrative thus slowing down the process. often to a crawl. 
Remember, in 2017, the data represents the user, and nobody else. The sooner you get your product in the hands of your users, the more and the faster you learn from them. 

Lastly, devops organizations must understand that with rapid iteration comes with a lot of cost in terms of code written and re-written - teams must provide for some "adjustment" periods typically dedicated to refactoring and re-alignment.

My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. Since July 2015, I've been the Head of Product at Sikka. We're using big data, analytics, machine learning and AI to redefine medicine - our angle is the business of being a doctor. What we do is very, very cool. If you want to talk to me about that, you are more than welcome to contact me here or follow me on medium or twitter and chime in.

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I am really excited to share a few things that we’ve been working on for the past 12 months at Sikka Software — and I think we’re truly changing the nature of the game for the benefit of our clients.
See, we’ve been really thinking hard on how to connect the dots of big data, cloud, mobile, artificial intelligence, machine learning and APIs to put together real value for our clients in retail health. Over the past few weeks we’ve rolled out really cool stuff such as a brand new dev API, a marketplace, mobile auto-scheduling and two alexa skills — so I thought I would share a few thoughts about this on-going work because we’re really passionate about it!

While in “medicine of need” (that would be your general doctor), big tech focuses first on solving the automation of diagnosis, which eventually will evolve into AI+nurse as it has been predicted by the brilliant minds of A16Z last year, we believe that for all those other doctors in your care team such as your dentist, ophthalmologist, chiropractor, fitness and wellness coach and even your veterinary (that’s the “medicine of want”), focusing on the business of being a healthcare entrepreneur (in other words running a practice as effectively and efficiently as possible) is a problem that today tech can solve and automatize.

So this week I am so proud to share with you that we are launching two major AI-based initiatives that are a bit revolutionary for our clients: Practice Insights, the first set of Alexa-based skills for dentists and veterinarians, and second, we’re adding bot-based auto-scheduling to our Practice Mobilizer mobile apps (Apple and Android). 
The vision behind all of this has been summarized super well in Vijay Sikka’s Medium post yesterday: we think that soon practices can become self-driving thanks to our technology. In fact, we’re well on our way to make the practice almost self-aware, and to enable the doctor to interact with it using natural voice conversation to drive the business, such as AI-based auto-schedule, inventory management and auto-order, real-time patient appointment arrival notifications and so much more to come in the next few months.

So with this in mind, we worked hard with our AI and product teams for 8 months and we’re launching as a first step our Practice Insights service (beta) today.

Practice Insights works with Amazon Echo and Alexa so that doctors can have hands-free interactions with their practice during their work day. Once the Alexa skill is enabled, doctors can ask about business and day-to-day operations questions such as “when is my next patient arriving” or “Read me my morning report” (a very popular Sikka feature that was until now only available via daily PDF emails).

Video Credit: Jason Folk (@jasonfolk)

Last year we were so proud to launch our first two mobile apps we called Practice Mobilizer (and its companion app Patient Mobilizer)
And with a rapidly growing organic user base, we’re now addressing more than 10,000 practices in the US with this complementary service (beta) which in 12 months has enabled more and more doctors to securely exchange voice, text, and video messages with their patients, check their business vitals, while also helping patients to automatically check-in to their appointment while on their way to the practice, thus drastically reducing wait-times.

Today we’re super happy to add auto-schedule to Mobilizer: patients can naturally interact with our bot in the secure message panel enabled by their doctors, and our AI-based scheduling bot will automatically pick-up the conversation using real, “human” natural english to suggest timeslots that will best fit the patient’s schedule, based on the doctor’s appointment calendar.
(Note: we’ve been using great stuff from Microsoft in terms of language understanding called LUIS and superb multi-calendar sync APIs by Cronofy)

Here’s the silver lining: at Sikka we’ve been totally dedicated to add real value to our doctors and practices, using the best that today’s tech can offer, while making sure that the tech is as unintrusive and easy to use as possible.
Practice Assistant and Bot-based Autoschedule are the first offsprings of the AI-first initiative we launched internally a year ago called Ipiktok (means: keen, sharp in Eskimo)
We’ve got a really great team here, and we’re super focused on bringing even more value to retail healthcare in the next year. Try our apps and skills, and please tweet + blog about your experiences using the “ipiktok” hashtag so that we can read and learn from your feedback!

My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. 
Thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader.
Head of Product at Sikka Software.
 Here's my contact info.

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