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Webinar: Getting to Beta

Graeme McCubbin

Dec. 5, 2014

Richard Stobart held the final in the current Digital Leaders Webinar series on Wednesday titled ‘Getting to Beta: taking 'stubborn' products to beta in 8 weeks’.

Topics covered included:

  • Understanding Beta, knowing what you’re trying to achieve
  • What you should be achieving in Alpha and Beta
  • How to learn to see if it’s worth investing in this stage
  • The activities covered Alpha and Beta
  • The risk of this stage
  • Using the feedback from your customers

Among the insights shared were:

  • Alpha is about getting to the start of Beta, understanding all the things that will de-rail you
  • What you want is a shared vision of what you’re building to be established and embedded within the team
  • Once you’ve got real-life customers, you’re in a different level of risk
  • Alpha is about DEfining your service, Beta is about REfining it
  • The important things to put in place for your Beta team: your technology, your larger team, your roadmap of the build, your onboard strategy for your service, metric gathering to put in place


Tips for successful Beta teams:

  • Prepare the core elements and understand what you have to do in the Beta stage
  • Establish the purpose and culture of your team
  • Test the risk, make sure your users can get through and provide feedback
  • Look at key metrics which influence your service
  • Run real customers through your full service and then get feedback – talk to your customers, know them, know them better than they know themselves and know exactly how they use your service


Tweet us at @Ubxd with the hashtag #GetToBeta if you have any questions or to get in on the conversation: