Real Sprints #2. A little bit of empathy goes a long way!
How can you get a foreign design team to quickly empathize with their user when kicking off a Design Sprint?
Each week, we’re publishing real Sprint stories, from people in the field who tell us their story how they applied Design Sprints and their challenges and successes.
Mert Çetinkaya, Learning & Organization Design Lead at ATÖLYE talks about the challenge of getting an external team to quickly focus on their end user and how he took a novel approach to get his team to develop empathy from the outset.
“A Global energy company brought an innovation team together from offices around the world to run a Design Sprint on how to improve the LPG service experience for their customers. They already had some good research about the main pain-points of LPG users, but they didn’t have any validation around this research.
One of the main pain points was running out of fuel in the evening whilst cooking, customers were unable to order more gas and couldn’t finish preparing their meal.
We did a Design Sprint where Day One was about problem validation and understanding the user. So we carried out field interviews. I wouldn’t say we learned that much new information, but the team had flown in from around the globe and we wanted them to understand the context of the market they were serving.
Normally, the team only meets their customers whilst testing the prototype. This is when you already have developed your concept, so too late for customer insights! Our team members were coming from France, the UK, Netherlands, India etc. They were really distant from the reality of their main LPG users. So, we took the team to see how people were interacting with their product at homes. It was a great way to enable the team to empathise with their user, and we had all these stories of users that we could refer back to throughout the next stages of the sprint.
They listened and connected with their customers, the people they were serving became tangible. We created a shared narrative and developed our reference personas.
We already had a fairly specific problem definition, such as, “How might we help people to not run out of gas?” The team could have started already ideating with this problem, however, beforehand we wanted to give them context and a solid foundation in their user.
We created the user journey from ordering to running out of gas, everything that was involved in the service journey.
It was interesting when we started the ideation phase. It seemed like there were not really that many good ideas being generated, so I tried to provide some inspirations. Time was passing and I found myself becoming more and more involved in the discussion. The team started getting into technical details of potential ideas and their feasibility. Some of the team members were engineers and they really wanted to get into the specifics. I got caught up in the discussion.
Then I had this epiphany: technical details and feasibility were not even relevant from the customer’s perspective. So, we took a step back and looked once more from our customers point of view. Once we started ideating in this manner, really great ideas started flowing.
We ended up selecting multiple prototypes, from physical objects to phone services and all the way through to an App.
We tested prototypes the next day. The App wasn’t well recieved, people didn’t want yet another app, they wanted a simple solution that showed them when they had one hour of cooking time left, so they can place a new order. We validated some solutions that we thought had more potential to move forward with and invalidated others. The team was super happy.
The process really boosted my self-confidence. Actually, it was a really great experience: getting stuck, seeing how the team was frustrated and not moving forward, then taking that step back and seeing it again from the users perspective. It really focused the team and generated the best ideas.
It was this struggle, frustration and overcoming it that made the process so memorable for me and the team.”
Design Sprints put the user at the center of the Design Process. Being able to get the whole team to empathize helps to create more innovative solutions.
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