Kicking off a feature with a design workshop
Kicking off a feature with a design workshop
A simple how-to for creating a multi-session workshop with your team
You have a clear roadmap and a cross-functional team. You are doing your best to follow continuous discovery best practices, speaking to customers and using assumption tests to compare and contrast different ideas. You are now at the point where you have a validated feature in build after some really great design work, and you are ready to kick off work on the next opportunity. You want to do so in a way that makes it clear to the whole team what that next opportunity is, reviewing what you collectively know about it, then jumping in to ideate and design.
You consider a design sprint, but you can’t dedicate your full team plus senior stakeholders for 36-straight hours, nor do you think you need to. If you are doing regular discovery activities alongside delivery, you should have clear opportunities to go after and lots of juicy insights that have evolved both the problem and solution spaces. Design sprints are great when you are faced with a huge problem and no clear solution, but if you’re working on an existing product or redesigning an experience, that’s probably not what you need.
Instead, focus on giving your team a clear definition of the next opportunity to solve, clear boundaries within which to operate, and the time to kick start possible solutions.
Before planning this workshop, agree an opportunity to focus on with your team and go in with that alignment already in place.
Once you’ve done that, you can use this is an agenda for a workshop that can help get your team started on the right track with ideation. The goal is to come away with wireframes or sketches that you feel you can put in front of real users to conduct compare and contrast tests and rapidly progress solution ideas. This workshop is designed to be done in person, but there are suggestions for making a remote version.
Tip: You’ll want to already be recruiting users for tests later in the week, so that you can keep the momentum going when you leave this workshop.
Format:
This is a multi-session workshop, with two phases:
Phase 1 is focused on aligning participants on the strategy, insights, and assumptions to frame your thinking,
Session 1: Review Insights
Session 2: Journey Mapping
Session 3: David Bland’s Assumption Mapping
Session 4: Prioritise How Might Wes
Phase 2 focuses on rapid ideation,
Session 5: Initial Designs
Session 6: Wireframe or Prototype.
You can space the sessions out in any way that suits your team’s needs, but make sure participants commit to attending them all.
Participants:
You, the product manager to act as facilitator and guide through insights
Design lead
Tech lead, so that you get an early sense of whether the ideas you’ll test are feasible
Design team
Phase 1
Phase 1 sets the scene and ensures everyone is aligned on what the opportunity is, who your customers are, and what insights you have.
Start by reminding your team what your target product outcome is (the metric your team can influence directly through their work). You also want to talk about the opportunity you’ve aligned around and why it’s the next priority for your team. This should be a real customer goal that once solved for effectively will have a really good chance of positively impacting your product outcome. The reasons it’s the next priority opportunity should include things like how it will affect your position in the market, how many customers are impacted by this opportunity, and how important it is to them (but remember, this isn’t an exact science).
You’ll also want to remind the participants from the outset that the goal of the workshop is to come away with wireframes that you can test with real users.
Session 1: Review Insights
Input: The insights you’ve gathered from discovery tasks Output: Grouped How Might We questions to prioritise later in the day
This session should be a review of all insights you’ve collected around the opportunity that you’ve gathered so far. This can be in any format, for example you might want to throw a slidedeck together, but if you have your insights organised on a Miro or FigJam board, you can use that instead.
You’ll run through your insights, inviting discussion and sharing stories you’ve heard from customers and stakeholders. As you do so, have your team write notes as ‘How Might We’ questions (HMWs). Once you’ve been through all the insights, share, group, and prioritise your HMWs.
How to write a HMW:
We ask questions to turn customer and business challenges into opportunities for design. Using the How Might We format reminds us not only that a solution is possible, but a variety of solutions is possible, as the question can be answered in multiple ways. A properly framed How Might We gives us a frame to think innovatively.
Make sure participants have their own stack of sticky notes.
Write ‘HMW’ at the top left hand corner of each sticky note
When you hear something interesting from the insights, quietly turn it into a question
Write the question on a sticky note and peel it off, collecting it in a pile
You will end up with a pile of your own notes
After going through the insights:
Review HMWs
Each participant reads out the HMWs at the end while placing them on the wall or onto a frame within an online whiteboard tool.
Organise HMWs
Once all HMWs are up, work together to group them (10 mins).
We will revisit our How Might Wes to prioritise them before starting ideation.
Session 2: Journey Mapping
Input: Agreement on the highest priority actor and scenario
Output: As-is journey and pain points
Journey mapping is a visualisation of the process someone will go through on their way to reach a goal. Before the session, you’ll want to have already agreed the actor and scenario and the journey phases. You can complete multiple journey maps in this session— just make sure to create 1 map for each actor and scenario.
Re-introduce the customer goal that you are working on.
Introduce the initial components:
Actor - this is the user or persona who is going through the journey. Because you’ve started with your insights, this actor should align with a persona who has surfaced from the data you’ve gathered.
Scenario and expectations - the scenario is the situation that the user is in related to the customer goal, and any specific expectations they have at this time.
Journey phases - these are the high-level stages within the journey.
Then walk through the journey phases as the Actor, together noting down their:
Actions - steps and behaviours taken by users, which should remain high-level.
Mindsets - the user’s thoughts, questions, motivations, and information needs at each stage. Where possible, this should be taken from research (again, possibly from quotes shared during your Insights Review).
Emotions - plotted as a line signalling the emotional ‘ups’ and ‘downs’.
Set timer for 5 mins and go through Actions. Then reset timer for another 5 minutes and go through mindsets. Repeat for emotions.
Conclude with a discussion of the map in terms of Opportunities. Do any of the groups of HMWs map to what we’ve learned? What are the key pain points experienced by the Actor on this journey?
Session 3: David Bland’s Assumption Mapping
Input: A team that brings diverse perspectives on the domain and customers
Output: Risky assumptions to test or confidence to proceed with safe assumptions
With the insights and our journey map(s) fresh in our mind, we’re now going to do a round of assumption generation and mapping that was originated by David Bland and is part of the regular cadence that comes out of Teresa Torres’ Continuous Discovery Habits. This will allow us to unpack our assumptions across:
Value - why do we think customers want a solution to reach this goal?
Viability - why do we think we should solve for this and how would it benefit our business?
Usability - why do we think users would be able to work out how to use a solution for this opportunity?
Feasibility - why do we think we can build a solution for this customer goal?
This exercise is intended to make sure that our team remains in a position of open mindedness and learning. The assumptions you generate should, however, remain based on what you know today and believe to be true. However, this will give us the chance to design in such a way that we will be able to test the assumptions we have– to be sure that they’re true.
Teresa Torres recommends that you phrase your assumptions so that they need to be true for a concept to succeed.
Limit yourself to one, single statement per sticky note-- and no bullet points
Have strong opinions, but hold them loosely to make room for new information, whether due to a challenge from someone in the room or from future research.
Based on the customer goal, HMWs and the journey mas, write down your value assumptions on a single colour sticky note. (5 mins)
Repeat for each category, each colour-coded on a different colour.
Prioritise as a group across a matrix with known/unknown along the x-axis and important/unimportant along the y-axis.
Identify the riskiest assumptions, which are those in the top right hand quadrant of your matrix. If you don’t have many, or you have a way to validate the assumptions without designs (e.g. reaching out to Legal to ask for more information), then congratulations! Your regular interviewing is doing its job, and means that your existing assumptions do not carry much risk. If you do have several high priority assumptions, then it’s important to test these before bringing them forward into a solution idea.
Session 4: Prioritising your How Might Wes
Input: Your HMWs from earlier
Output: A clear framing for your design challenge
Now we return to our How Might Wes. This is a quick session to remind us of the things we learned in the insights review at the beginning. Review the HMWs silently to re-familiarise yourself with them. You’re now going to spend a few minutes dot voting the HMWs that you believe will set you up to best frame the opportunity your team has focused on.
Dot vote (2 votes each) for the HMWs that you think have the best chance of giving you the frame to solve for the chosen opportunity. Remember, you want the best chance to solve it in the way most likely to impact your product outcome.
Review the priority HMWs as chosen by the group.
Phase 2
Phase 2 is your chance to ideate. The idea is to leave these sessions with wireframes to put in front of real customers.
Session 5: Initial Designs
Input: Your HMWs from earlier
Output: A clear framing for your design challenge
Before you begin, allow everyone to walk the room, reminding themselves about the customer goal, the journey map(s), any risky assumptions to be aware or, and the priority HMWs.
Divide the ideation into 1-hr sessions. In each, spend 20 minutes sketching your idea framed by the user pain points and those HMWs to frame your thinking.
After 20-minutes, share and critique the designs. Ask questions, take notes, and use ideas that you like in your next round.
Repeat two more times.
Hang the designs on the wall or lay on a table where they can be reviewed alongside one another. Dot vote (2 votes each) the ideas you see that you think may solve for the customer goal most effectively.
Session 6: Wireframe or prototype
Input: Your initial sketches
Output: Wireframes or low-fidelity prototypes to test
This is the only session that may be for designers only, and you should adapt to their ways of working. Give them enough space and time to focus, but be on hand to answer questions.
Take the highest voted sketches, and use them to create wireframes or low-fidelity prototypes that you can take into testing with real users. Always try to compare and contrast solutions and make sure that you are aware of what you are learning about your customers. Bring that forward into your shared insights and your understanding of the problem and opportunity space you’re operating in.
After the workshop
Don’t lose the momentum! Have your team take the wireframes or low-fidelity prototypes into testing with real users in order to see which ones test better, so that you can keep refining designs and creating a product that is valuable for both your business and your customers.
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