This week was special, on Thursday the work of the last five months got to see the light of reality. Close to 200 policymakers from all different ministries in the German government listened and interacted with us during a 120 Minute release and information event - the beta version of the Digitalcheck is here. How did it go? Some data:

  • Over 50% of our participants interacted via Slido
  • There were 24 questions, with a positive sentiment, mainly focused on details and not on the refusal of the overall idea
  • 77% of the participants answered that they know who to ask in case of questions (average 4.3 - on a Likert scale of 1-5)
  • Also, 77% were satisfied with the event overall (average of 4.0)

While this is not perfect (and we are already back at the drawing board for the now following roadshow) it is a success and a milestone to celebrate!

Personally, I am also beyond happy since the launch now allows me to share the ideas we have been working on in the last months, you find them here. Always happy to hear your feedback! (just to be transparent up front - I do not think the URL or the “OZG domain” is the right location for all this, but it was the best we could do for the beta).

Launch presentation preparation

Naturally, the whole team was on presentation and preparation duty this week. Together with our designer, I completely overhauled the presentation based on the anticipated needs and demands of “extreme users”. Our work was guided by “Critical Chris”, “Interested Ines”, “Political Peter”, and “Time-sensitive Toney”. Drafting their demands beforehand and combining these with the goals for the event, we were able to sketch what success would look like. After this task followed the “classic” presentation approach (storyboard -> script with timeboxes and responsibilities -> presentation building).

Another thing that (was time-consuming but) made the life of our ministry counterparts simpler: presentation slides coupled with a detailed notes format. I built a document that showed the slide and notes on one page following this format:

  • Message/statement of the slide:
  • Who is presenting:
  • Timebox for the slide:
  • Talking points to cover:

Will go this extra mile for all important presentations from now on.

Thoughts about MVPs and how to convey them.

While preparing the presentation we also ran into the challenge of somehow conveying a vision of how we are going to move forward (of cause in a user-centric, insight-driven, iterative way). While in the public sector this is often coupled with a list of detailed specifications, we chose a more product-based approach. What did we do? Working with the “MVP-Triangles” (e.g. here) we tried to send the message “we will continue to get more sophisticated with our work, but we do not know yet what this will look like”. I like this visualization because it helps to structure aspects of a product in an easily digestible way - but does not run your team into a path dependency. I probably need to go into this in more detail - but no time for that this week.

That’s it for this week. Happy to have launched our work - what a great feeling! Looking forward to the implications - support, more data to iterate, more transparent working, … much to do!