Day 3 — Converge & Fiesta
Tuesday was a great day. We were satisfied with the amount of ideas we came up with. We realized, we were able to compensate a group of 7 people by doing 2 to 3 ideas each.
Today we realized a part-time sprint isn’t ideal. Our sprint flow was interrupted by work, emails & messages. (We decided not to put our phones away for the day)
Day 3: Converge and Summarize
Day 3 is the day in which you reduce the scope and align your ideas to your product vision. This day is the day when you summarize and disregard ideas for later. As product designers we don’t say “No”; we say: “Not Now”.
Visit to the Museum
A visit to the museum is a silent review of all the proposals made by the team the day before. During this “visit” we identified elements we like and highlight them with small stickers.
Silent Critique
During silent critique, the facilitator explained what he understood from the sketches done the day before. The author then complemented the understanding.
Votes & Super Vote
After understanding the sketches, we did a round of votes to show the elements the team liked the most. Then, our product owner Super-Voted and selected a couple of sketches.
Separate the Winners
In this sprint, we didn’t have to choose either one solution or another. The winning sketches did not compete against each other.
3–12–3
We took the winning screens and did a 3–12–3 exercise. We split into teams of two and discussed for three minutes how we could combine the ideas. We then sketched for 12 minutes and presented to the other team in 3 minutes.
Story Boarding
We stripped down our ideas. We worked together and agreed on some basic navigation elements. The conversation got heated for a moment because we couldn’t agree on the glossary. What’s a Party? What’s a Challenge?
Introducing Fiesta!
We selected fiesta as our product’s name. We took some of Dribbble’s game dynamics and metaphors and translated them into a party theme. A fiesta is a room in which people can share experience with code.
See Tomorrow’s post for more details.
What Went Right:
The team remembered the vision and our problem statement. When someone, including the product owner, was drifting away the team aligned him to the product vision. We even referred to the specific area of the room in which we had set the vision and problem statement.
We allowed for some play-time and creativity during the Story Board session to avoid boredom. This worked nicely, but we were forced to pull our weight towards the end of the schedules time.
What Went Wrong:
We need to focus exclusively in the sprint. We are not being fully efficient in our sprint nor on our daily work. We are pulling days of work from 9:00 till 11:59. This has affected our work rhythm.
What do you think?
