18 Alpha Build: Verification in Creative Collaboration

To describe something as “Alpha” sounds like it would be a compliment, doesn’t it? The Alpha Dog, Alpha Male, all those kind of connotations–not all are always great, but still, Alpha is first, highest, tops.

But not so fast, my friend. Here in the creative world, Alpha is not those things. In Creative Collaboration, the final stage is known as Alpha Build, and yes, it is still awesome. Because the team has done something, worked together, made a thing that didn’t exist before. But is it first, highest, tops? Nah. And it’s not supposed to be.

The Alpha Build is the final stage in Creative Collaboration, and it’s the culmination of the team’s efforts together, to make a tangible and testable product. But that doesn’t mean the team is done. Far from it. In fact, the next phase of product testing, the Beta Version or Beta Testing, is where a product is far along enough to get looked at by a more public eye. But there are many, many versions of the product before that. There can be many iterations and designs in the Alpha Build stage before a team is actually ready to produce that Beta version.

In other words, the Alpha Build is the prototype. And in design thinking and design sprints, Alpha Builds are not supposed to be perfect. They’re designed to be made quickly, with lots of issues and a few bright spots. Getting a little feedback helps a team go back to Could Be and run their idea through the process again.

So if your team doesn’t have it nailed down perfectly at this stage, take heart. That’s how it should be. Here are some examples:

WD-40 is so named because it wasn’t until the fortieth formula that the chemists got it right. The name actually stands for “Water Displacement, 40th Formula.”

James Dyson of Dyson vacuums made 5,127 prototypes of his vacuum before it was ready, and they’ve continued innovating after that.

And of course, the story goes that Thomas Edison took over 1,000 attempts to get his lightbulb invention to work right. One of his most famous quotes notes the importance of that journey through many Alpha Builds:

“I have not failed 10,000 times—I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

So Alpha is indeed good. It’s a time to celebrate the team’s effort in creative collaboration, that something got done, and it’s a time to learn what to do next. Teams can think of Alpha Build as a prototype, as previously mentioned, but it also aligns nicely with the Verification stage in individual creativity where the maker shows their draft to others for feedback. It also shares a lot of familiarity with the Prototype stage in a design sprint or the Create stage of Design Thinking.

Let’s dive in for a little more about the Alpha Build as part of the Creative Collaboration process.

Let’s Get Real: The “Alpha Build” Stage

The collaborative efforts of the Will Be stage had the team diverge in a fairly narrow space, then converge quickly to decide what to build. “This is the thing that will be,” the team said.

So, it’s kind of simple: the Alpha Build phase is when the team builds the thing they said they would build. This stage is about creating a tangible artifact. This could be a low-fidelity prototype, a wireframe, a detailed storyboard, or a representation that allows the team (and maybe a few select insiders who weren’t on the team) to interact with and evaluate the proposed solution.

The goal is to move beyond abstract ideas and create something concrete that can be tested and refined. It does not have to be anywhere near the final product. In fact, speed is often valued over precision in collaborative creativity, and the goal is to learn something. So the Alpha Build is about making something good enough to get quality feedback, rather than making some thing good like a polished final version.

Divergent-Convergent Thinking: Slim Swerves

This Alpha Build stage continues the pattern of divergent-convergent thinking, but with a different, gentler arc. As the team enters the divergent phase, there will often be a period of individualized work. Here is where it’s key that the team be constructed well, with a wide diversity of abilities and skillsets. The team can disperse for a short while to work alone and come back with content or material, or they can shape things together in pairs or small groups as an active collaboration with roles and expertise applied along the way.

The divergent thinking happens in this way, as the individual expertise is given to the project, then as the ideas mix and mingle, the build starts to take shape. But since the Will Be stage has made it clear what the team will make, the divergence is narrow–the most narrow it has been, in fact. That’s because here, all the ideas and input are highly focused on the same topic, the build itself, and any divergences are small differences or little details to try.

Teams can pretty quickly whittle away the ideas here, too, which leads to a pretty narrow and fast convergent thinking phase. Ideas may be taken out because they are either not quite within the Will Be vision or they are perhaps to complicated or intricate for the speed and learning purposes of the Alpha Build, where a team just needs to get it done so they can figure out what’s next.

For example, while building a prototype for a web app, the team might realize that a particular navigation element, which seemed great in theory, is actually clunky in practice. This realization would trigger a mini-cycle of divergence where the team thought of a few other ways to do it and pitched some possibilities, followed by convergence where the team picked the idea that was at least good enough to try for now. Even though these are important creative ideas on their own, the overall direction remains focused on bringing the Alpha Build to life.

Warts and All: Alpha Builds Are For Learning

A prototype or alpha build isn’t supposed to be perfect. It doesn’t even have to be good. It has to be “good enough,” as we mentioned before. The Alpha Build provides invaluable learning opportunities, because now all the ideas and theory are out in the open, good and bad on a thing that’s been made. This change, making the theory into a tangible product, alters the team’s perspective. Hands-on time with the prototype helps the team see clearly what’s working and what isn’t. And the Alpha Build can be surprising, too, As the team experiences their solution prototype’s design and functionality in real time, they will often discover unforeseen issues or new approaches to focus on.

The insights gained from the Alpha Build often lead to another round of creative collaboration, just like the creative process circles around for the individual artist. And while there’s still divergence and convergence, it keeps getting a bit narrower and narrower, as now the team knows what the solution is, and what its problems are. Many times the speed of the design sprint will become less important here. After the Alpha Build, the team can take its foot off the gas and work more deliberately on the individual issues and positive elements they discovered, to come up with the next iteration.