Minimally Viable, Earliest Optimistic, and Definitely Impactful.

Three years ago our company, Reading Plus, had never used a “minimal viable product” approach to deliver software.   We would release software at most twice per year – a “major” release in the summer, prior to the start of the US school year, and sometimes a “minor” version over schools’ holiday break.

When we started creating the new version of Reading Plus, Version 4, we made a choice to forgo our “scope design build test release” waterfall process in favor of an integrated agile / UX process that stressed frequent delivery of working software.  We embraced the idea that an MVP would be “good enough” for our users.

We made that choice because of some generous ideas and assistance from Jeff Patton, Jeff Gothelf, Tom Daly, and Whitney Hess.  I am grateful to all of these individuals for what they shared and made available from their wisdom and experience.

The first MVP we created for the comprehension component of Reading Plus, SeeReader, was pretty rough.  Browser support was limited, there was almost no media, fonts were not ideal, and the design was far from complete.  But it was built by a team that continuously integrated research, design and development right along with testing and shipping software, and it came together quickly.

One of the most useful suggestions that Jeff Patton gave our team was to run a “friends and family” release of the MVP.  This allowed us to feel better about what was rolling out the door.  After gathering a last set of feedback and making final tweaks, we released it to some of our key partner schools.  At this point, we had about 30% of the eventual program in place, and that 30% was just the early optimistic version of what was to come.

One of our partner schools is the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, Georgia.  They were one of the first groups of students to use the earliest version of our new product.  We invited them into the process as partners, and involved them in making some of the early design choices around iconography and colors.  These were the first in-person usability tests with actual students ever for us as a company.

Over the next year, the students and faculty at the Ron Clark Academy used our product as it grew from the initial MVP right up through the full product it became at the “official” release in July 2013.  They were a touchstone, keeping us on track and making sure we always had users we could reach out to for opinions and feedback.  All of our changes and design pivots had to consider their experience as existing users who would be using across multiple interface changes.

Late last year, we learned that the standardized scores for reading for students at RCA had improved significantly, and that Reading Plus was a big part of that.  Ron reached out to our CEO, Mark Taylor, and proposed the idea of shooting a video that summed up their experience with the program.

As someone who passionately advocated for the MVP and Agile/UX approaches internally, the success and the response of the program as shown by the video they created was extremely gratifying.

Epilogue:  The official release date for Version 4 came and went last July.  The “big” release moment was similar to the 20 or so others during the course of 2013, except that we had two full days of downtime to make upgrades and infrastructure changes.  From the DevOps side, it was nice to have that cushion to move around assets in our network.  The release was a success, and since then we have continued to release new editions of content every week, and new features of the program every 2-3 weeks.  It is a credit to our users, the teachers who administer the program especially, that they have rolled with our new software release paradigm so well.  Usage is up more than 20% this year over last year.