Product Discovery and Innovation at BPP
Innovation Week, December 2023
In my role at BPP as Director of Product Design I have built a team over the past year of just over a dozen highly skilled designers and researchers. As well as providing all the product design, service design and user insight gathering skills needed across the product portfolio, many of the team can also considerably help with the process of product discovery.
In established product development, the discovery process is a critical phase where teams gather insights, define problems, generate ideas and explore solutions, finally validating assumptions before moving into full-scale development. As such there are clearly defined steps and various acknowledged frameworks that can be used to facilitate this process of innovation. In the early phases of the discovery process, designers and user researchers can really help focus on problem definition, user insights and defining use cases and user pain points. These user-centred considerations in turn form some of the essential building blocks of modern product thinking, which when coupled with commercial drivers, market fit and technology considerations, all piece together into the wider product discovery and development process.
One of the challenges we discovered early on at BPP, while setting up the product teams in Product and Technology (P&T), was that a lot of the digital platforms and supporting processes had grown organically and were both intricate and complex. It was clear that Service Design — as well as more UX & UI focused Product Design — was essential to improve the portfolio of our products; as the number of back-stage processes and teams involved to deliver the end user experience was considerable. In addition, some experienced user researchers were also required to help pull together the various user insights uncovered by both formative research and evaluative testing. Championing the user centric-focus to understand the needs, preferences, and pain points of the target audience is always at the heart of our ways of working in the Product Design team; and fortunately, there was significant support across P&T for this user-centric approach.
That said, there seemed to be varying levels of understanding across our teams and disciplines as to how the discovery phase should work in practice — and crucially how Service Design and User Research could contribute to really help define these initial phases. So, in the interest of getting everyone up to speed and promote knowledge sharing across all the disciplines in P&T — from Engineering, to Product Management, to Data and the Product Design team itself — we decided to host an Innovation Week at the end of 2023. One of the aims was to introduce the concept of Problem Framing; which is a process that helps define the problem space — a critical building block of early product discovery.
A set of half a dozen or so business, technology and user experience challenges were proposed in the month leading up to the Innovation Week — with the intention that these would be defined and shaped and then taken into a 1-day Hackathon. The Hackathon itself would focus on rapid ideation and exploring innovative ways to solve the problems, ideally with a rough prototype delivered in code by the end of the day! No pressure!
Generally, everyone was reasonably familiar with the Hackathon concept, but Problem Framing — with its goal to fully define the problem that needed solving and provide a clearly articulated Problem Statement at the end — was perhaps less familiar to many. And so, our Principal User Researcher, Oliver Shreeve, came up with an optimised, light-weight and easily accessible template we could use as an introduction to the Problem Framing framework.
[Read about the Custom Problem Framing Sessions and how we ran them]
Following Problem Framing, our freshly minted, super-succinct Problem Statements were taken into an all-day Hackathon. In the end these were a mix of technology, business and user problems, all of which had been validated as being of significant benefit to the end user experience; and in a lot of cases radically improve business efficiencies as well. These ranged from enhanced identity management; smarter tracking of student attendance; monitoring student performance and progression (for both the tutors and learners themselves) through to automated upload of verification documents when enrolling; to better ways of encouraging students to stay in touch after concluding their courses; and finally, an enhanced and easy to understand visualization of career pathways.
There was an amazing level of engagement, and because the teams had all collaboratively worked on their problem statements, there was alignment and buy in right from the kick-off on the day of the Hackathon — so all the teams hit the ground running! The leadership team of P&T was staggered at the level of fidelity of the final outputs — which included fully working prototypes in some cases! All the assets were produced in a little under 12 hours — maybe a touch longer for a few super-dedicated engineers — and the senior stakeholders from across the business who attended the playback sessions were suitably impressed. In the words of one exec team member:
“Well I didn’t have a clue what to expect from today, to be honest … and I’ve been blown away by that! The amount of work and effort that you guys have put in is just phenomenal really. I’m sitting here looking at these six different things thinking why can’t we do them all? And … when am I having them!”
All in all, the week was a significant success and we have taken some of the ideas and concepts into consideration for the ongoing product roadmap. As well as providing some innovative solutions to a variety of user and business pain points, we had amply shown the value of both Problem Framing and how our User Researchers and Service Designers could really help in the formative discovery process. It was great to hear from Engineers and Product Managers alike that they were really engaged by being part of that process and could see the value in working collaboratively in cross-functional teams from the outset. It also has created an appetite for both doing Problem Framing again, and also trying out Design Sprints and other rapid ideation and prioritisation frameworks in the future.
In fact, the Innovation Week was deemed such a success that we’re holding another one in the summer — this time we will invite stakeholders from across BPP to participate in both Problem Framing sessions and potentially the Hackathon itself too! Watch this space!
And if you want to know more about some of the other co-creation and problem solving techniques we are also looking at in the discovery space, then please read Part 2
[Link to Part 2: Collaboration and Alignment — Lego Serious Play]
