Work together, alone.

Two weeks in, we’re in the discovery of how Blindfeed’s journey will be shaped. We’re aligned as we have the vision of how things should be, in the place that we want to build for our users. Here’s the highlight of things that we’ve done this week.

100-day plan

My ultimate goal as a product designer at Blindfeed is to maximize design’s value and impact on our products. Through constructing my 100-day plan, I was able to assess the design context and the difficulties I’ll be facing in the coming months.

Fuck yes moment

To help the team understand what my motivations really are. I’d identify and share the moments which made me as a designer stop and say “Fuck yeah!” in last few years. This exercise eventually helped us to define a hierarchy of values as individual also Help us see how we could shape the culture at Blindfeed which would lead us to the next FY moment.

Defining the Hero’s Journey

The Hero’s Journey is a pattern of narrative identified by the American scholar Joseph Campbell that appears in drama, storytelling, myth, religious ritual, and psychological development. This storytelling method adopted by Airbnb during the creation of Airbnb Experiences. After mapped out the core hero journey of the Blindfeed hero (our user), we were able to identify the unknowns, the critical obstacles and possible pain points for our users where we should put our focus on.

We are confident that we know why we’re here doing what we do and possible steps to test out our vision. But one question keeps popping up in my head — Why should we exist in our user’s life?

So we dedicated some time to boil down our vision and values into one statement, one that communicates why.

And we “Fucked up Friday”

On Friday, we set to run an exercise which would allow us to achieve this one sentence. Firstly, we worked individually to come up with a story of how our users interact with our product. Each person got to share their stories and we were able to identify the important parts, patterns, and similarities.

After we named and put common ideas into groups, we were supposed to split back into individuals again and to write a statement that incorporates the ideas identified together. But instead of doing that, we went into a discussion of word choices of some ideas. One long exhausted discussion didn’t get us anywhere and we were a bit frustrated. Until Björn called timeout and we went to lunch together (and topped up our caffeine consumption ☕️).

We were able to solve the problem later the day (the statement is still in baking). But we learned a lesson that came at the right time before we run our first design sprint next week.

WORK TOGETHER, THEN ALONE

Mixing isolation and collaboration offered the best of both worlds.

Any work we did from the beginning, we’d discuss and create a common understanding of the subject together. Then we work alone to come up with ideas to share. Eventually, we’ll analyse each individual’s ideas and work on of the best possible solutions agreed as a team together.

While collaboration tends to produce more consistently good solutions, independent exploration also allows deep understanding when it comes to solving a complex problem. We’ve learned that we should continue to explore mixing collaborative and isolated creative. It’s a great opportunity to find out more insights in the design sprint next week. ⚡️

*Fucked up Friday is basically we got together and share everyone’s favorite moments, learnings and Fuck-ups in the week over a nice meal.