Managing the Develop Phase

Learning Objectives :

• Explain how the type of prototype changes as critical questions are answered and the process advances

For leaders, prototyping is a challenging stage of development. You must encourage people to take risks, while also understanding their hesitancy to fail and managing the emotions that arise when further iterations are necessary.

As Christi Zuber explains, prototyping is an immense learning opportunity that can feel uncomfortable in environments that emphasize consistent success. However, it is worth the effort.

CHRISTI ZUBER: In terms of prototyping, we’ve done prototypes across the entire spectrum. Let me start with a disclaimer: I am a huge fan of prototyping for many reasons.

Great user research and insights, along with fantastic ideas, are essential. But until you make something tangible, your work hasn’t fully bumped up against reality. By “tangible,” I don’t necessarily mean a physical object—it could be something you experience, like a conversation or a movement. The point is, prototyping allows your ideas to interact with the world in some form.

This interaction is crucial because it accelerates your learning. It reveals:

• What’s working
• What’s not working
• What the idea could evolve into

Prototyping scaffolds your idea without requiring it to be fully complete. You can begin refining it while it’s still flexible.

From a practical perspective, prototyping can make people feel anxious, especially within organizations. It’s the moment when ideas first see the light of day. Your early-stage, half-baked concepts are suddenly open to critique. Even though you didn’t invest too much time trying to make them perfect (because perfect doesn’t exist), the vulnerability of this stage feels risky.

This is where the “fail early, fail fast” mindset comes in. However, failing—even in a constructive, controlled environment—can feel intimidating. Organizations may struggle with this concept, as the stakes often feel high.

Despite the emotions and challenges, I love prototyping. It’s one of the most effective ways to refine ideas and move them closer to successful outcomes.

There are additional challenges to presenting stakeholders with early prototypes. For example, they may mistake an initial or evolving prototype for a finished product.

If leaders and managers mistake a developing prototype for a finished (or nearly finished) concept, they may not grasp its full capacity and potential—this happened to Airbnb, when a large venture-capital firm passed on funding it because they couldn’t get past the seeming undesirability of paying to sleep on an airbed.

To prevent these kinds of misunderstandings, be sure to explain additional critical questions around desirability, feasibility, and viability, and how you plan to address them, whenever you present a prototype for feedback. (For example, explain how you intend to test different payment methods for a service.)

In the Develop phase, we explored the three parts of concept development:

1. Idea Selection

2. Evaluation

3. Prototyping

You now know that the develop phase is about much more than just building a working model. It involves decision-making, critique, and iterative experimentation with a structured focus.

For managers of the innovation process, the work also involves coordinating reviews, tests, and revisions. When concepts stray too far from the innovation sweet spot, you can encourage your team to revisit ideation tools from earlier modules. The aim is to:

• Expand ideas with too little impact
• Rein in ideas that seem too unrealistic

This is also the time to seek outside feedback from other teams.

For leaders, the concept poster is a useful deliverable from the ideate phase. It can also help explain the concept to reviewers and other stakeholders who need to be involved.

Tools for Evaluation:

• The Six Thinking Hats: Provides a structured framework for discussions, helping teams adjust perspectives and gather critical insights.
• Rose, Thorn, Bud: Offers a concise way to build consensus on what is working, what isn’t, and what has potential.

The develop phase emphasizes convergent thinking and decision-making. It requires just as much leadership as the previous phases, if not more. While collaboration and experimentation remain crucial, this phase demands:

• Honest, constructive feedback, even when it’s negative
• Clear decision-making about when a concept is ready to advance

Ultimately, success in the develop phase depends on finding the right critical questions and advancing toward validating a final prototype.

For innovation leaders, adhering to a development process based on solid methodology not only builds team dynamics but also increases efficiency, saving time, money, and effort.

Prototyping early and often allows you to identify and address potential issues quickly and eliminate or adapt the parts of your concept that will not work. Throughout the development phase, it is the job of the team leader to maintain focus and adjust speed when necessary.

Importantly, prototyping can help you demonstrate the value of an innovation to skeptics. In the video transcript that follows, Christi Zuber explains how her team used a prototype to overcome resistance to an improvement to patient experience at a new healthcare facility.

CHRISTI ZUBER: So we were involved in building out a number of new clinics. It was, I think, 20 new clinics. Before we begin to build out all these new clinics, what can we do to make these more patient-centered, bring in the things that they need when they need it?

So we did sort of a journey map about coming in and wayfinding and getting to where you need to go and waiting for your appointment and going in, et cetera, et cetera. We redesigned many things. But the example that I wanted to give from a prototyping example is we saw that there’s a lot of confusion and anxiety, particularly for people who were older, when they were in the waiting room.

So they know that their appointment’s coming up. They’re in a waiting room. Maybe they’ve been given a time of when they’ll be seen. But they’re afraid that they’re going to miss something if they walk off. And many people, they were worried about, well, I have to go to the bathroom, or I forgot something in my car, or whatever it might be. And they were afraid of leaving.

And so we said, well, what if we made the waiting process and the time more transparent? Could that be possible?

So we talked to some of the physicians and medical assistants and said, do you have a sense when someone’s coming, how long it will actually take for them to be seen? And they said, oh, yeah. We have kind of a gauge. And we talked to the people who were the receptionist staff. And between all of them, they were like, yeah. We have a pretty good gauge on when they’ll probably be seen.

CHRISTI ZUBER: So we came up with this idea of let’s make it transparent and put the wait times on basically a digital board that’s updated out in the waiting room.

The larger advisory committee within the health system said, no way, because what if it says it’s 10 minutes, and then it ends up being 20, and then they’re disappointed? And so we can’t do it.

So we worked with the staff. And the staff, they were actually willing to do it. It was more executives who were concerned. And so we went against convention and decided to try it anyway.

There was already a television in the waiting room. So we hooked a laptop up to the television so that we could project from our laptop onto the television an image. And then we had other team members back in the clinic area. And so the team members in the back were like air traffic control.

They would talk to the receptionist, and the physicians, and medical assistants. And they would work together and say, OK, let’s come up with the time. And they would send those updates through an instant messenger service to the person on our team who was sitting in the waiting room. And then they would update the board.

So it looks like there’s this active digital board. But really, it was very Wizard of Oz prototyping, where we’re just communicating through instant messenger and then projecting something that’s not really a tool up on the board. It’s a screen that we’ve made.

And the patients loved it. And they would come up and check the time. And they knew that they had time to do things.

So we went through a day, talked to the clinicians, talked to the patients, got feedback. We ended up going through that entire week.

Long story short, it ended up being so successful that it became part of the redesign of that facility. And it really embodied this transparency of, instead of worrying so much that we might have something wrong or be off, why don’t we be as transparent as we can, so that people are a part of this and bring them along the way and make this much less paternalistic?

Congratulations. We have reached the end of Develop phase.

This develop phase of design thinking provides tools and frameworks for selecting concepts, critiquing them, and then testing them with prototypes.

When you are practicing bringing your own innovation concepts to life, remember that you’re not limited to the tools from phase. Many of the research and ideation tools from earlier phases will be of assistance here as well.

For example:

• When you need to identify stakeholders for feedback on your concept poster.
• When a failed prototype must be changed to answer a critical question more successfully.

Prototyping is an iterative process, and designers must often return to the clarify and ideate phases to:

• Develop ideas.
• Evaluate test results.
• Expand and adapt innovation designs.

I wish you luck in fostering an experimentation mindset which makes developing innovations not only efficient but exciting as well!