Creating a human-centred, design-led product strategy
Uplifting design to bring product, design, engineering and many more departments together.
Picture an old Victorian house with no underpinning built on London clay. The ground is soft, the house heavy. Great British downpours have battered the foundations putting the structure under scrutiny. The rain causes the substrate beneath the house to shift, the bricks and lime mortar move and the walls crack. The structure of the house is compromised.
If the house were underpinned with stronger, deeper foundations it could stand resolute for many more decades. The same is true of product strategy, though instead of steel pins or concrete pads to strengthen the foundations we need to identify real problems and turn them into opportunities.
A strategy underpinned without user research is guesswork. Things may seem right on the surface but put under enough scrutiny and the foundations will start to falter.
Before the end of 2023, Pion’s CEO Mike Eder, challenged Design to create a human-centred, design-led strategy for Student Beans. This would be something we would pin our mast to for the next 12 to 18 months. The idea was to gather leaders within Student Beans to create a unified vision for a particular area we wanted to improve, built from the foundations of user research. This signalled a levelling up for design within the business.
By bringing together multiple departments, narrowing focus on one area and creating strategy on foundations of known user needs, we believed we could create a vision statement flexible enough to carry us for well over 12 months.
To give an idea of the breadth of expertise in the room, we had representatives from Engineering, Product, Design, Research, the CEO, Product & Growth Marketing, Content and Brand & Comms.
In this article, I’ll be detailing the methods and the process we created to facilitate and run the workshop, rather than diving into the detail.
Pre-workshop: Planning and gathering requirements
Planning and feedback are key with an expensive, 3-day workshop at this altitude. You need to know everything from:
- What you want out of the workshop as a business?
- Who will be there and why, and what does each person want out of it?
- To dates held, location, travel, accommodation and much more
To alleviate any unease, one of the first things we did before kicking off the workshop was understand exactly what the key stakeholders across the value chain wanted out of it. Knowing the needs of our stakeholders meant we could tailor a workshop that had direction but could be flexible enough to allow for deeper conversations and changes of direction when needed.
Through managing healthy tension and natural anxieties, we came away with a few key themes for takeaways:
- To have a high-level set of linked initiatives to challenge our thinking, backed by user and business needs
- To understand what we were going to do next, who was going to do it, and what the message would be to bring the business on the journey
- To bring people together to create sharp focus, build trust and have fun
- To align on what we can simplify and/or remove in the UX (Shrink, Hide, Embody)
We also collated what we thought were the main business challenges to date. This gave us extra context with which to build our workshop around, and allowed us to sharpen our expected outputs.
We needed a methodology which would provide guardrails but not be so prescriptive so as to stifle discussions; the methodologies would be the guides for deeper and more free-flowing discussions.
There are hundreds of methodologies to choose from, but quite often the simplest are the best, although it does depend what you want out of your workshop, too. We sprung for:
- The creation of HMWs (How Might We) — from 1,000 to 100 feet — based on known needs, reframed as opportunities
- Journey maps to identify the gaps we wanted to address
- An Impact/Effort matrix to sort the HMWs and get a sense of scale
- Dot-voting at multiple stages
- Rapid-ideation at the solution level, grouping and theming to create the higher level initiatives (using John Maeda’s SLIP from the Laws of Simplicity)
- The Three I’s framework from Dan Makoski’s book Uplifting Design
An agenda was then visualised within FigJam and circulated with the workshop group for feedback and sign off. The agenda was visual to be easily scannable and tried to allow for large chunks of time for conversation to flow.
Tip: I found writing the outputs for each day not only helped me cement why we were gathering, but also helped others allay any residual fears of spending so much time doing something new without knowing what may come out of it. We also included extra context explaining some design-thinking techniques in more detail, for anyone not familiar, in the form of FAQs.
Alana, our UX Researcher, gathered all of the relevant insights from her extensive generative discovery from the weeks and months before. She turned the insight into How Might We statements in an attempt to reframe the problems into opportunities. Explaining the benefits of How Might We statements is its own article, but I’ll give a quick example of what I mean by reframing a problem into an opportunity using HMWs:
Insight: Users are often frustrated about finding out there’s no ketchup left in the bottle.
HMW (poor): How might we tell users there’s ketchup in the bottle?
HMW (better): How might we make users feel confident there’s going to be ketchup in the bottle, every time?
You’re looking for statements which will allow you to ideate with enough creative freedom, but be narrow enough so as to not go completely off-track.
Tip: We found marking the HMWs with an altitude helped us frame our understanding of them at first glance. We also tagged them with the stages of the model we were using, to help us know where they fit in along the user journey.
We enlisted the help of one of our Employee Experience Execs to make sure we were well looked after throughout the workshop. I can’t stress the importance of having a well prepared physical space, especially when you’re being creative.
Somewhat serendipitously, one of our Senior Product Designers gave me a book for Christmas, Uplifting Design by Dan Makoski, which happens to focus on how to bring the design-thinking mindset into businesses.
Before the workshop I was lucky enough to have a couple of calls with Dan— former design leadership at Walmart, Lloyd Banks, Motorola, Google, Motorola, Microsoft and more — who gave me some tips and tricks on running a good workshop. His book is a must-read for anyone looking to drive a business forward with design-led, human-centred practices.
Day 1 — UNDERSTAND
I chose singular verbs to describe each of the three days in an attempt to make the context of the day clear, as well as to create a sense of action and intent.
The purpose of Day 1 was to transport everyone into the minds of our students, what their journeys, frustrations and hopes are and how they relate to the workshop topic. We needed to become aligned on our historic business problems and to understand what the north star metric was we were trying to shift and why.
Our CEO kicked the workshop off with our guiding principles, some housekeeping rules — no laptops or phones in ideation sessions, for instance — and a renewed look at our challenges and opportunities as a business. Having C-suite sponsorship is absolutely key for any sort of strategy, and even more so for a design-led strategy.
I then took the group through the fundamentals of Human-centred design and why we were leading the workshop, focussing on building out our strategy with desirability as the driver.
Tip: We used IDEO’s three lenses of innovation as a guide and reference to keep the user need in mind when also tackling viability and feasibility.
We introduced our How Might We statements one by one to keep the spotlight on each one, to allow room for questions or challenges, or both.
There wasn’t much doing in the first couple of hours. We constructed our guide-rails for the workshop before we started collaborating properly. We began by theming our HMWs to give us a sense of our field size. Some of the statements were 10ft, that is to say related to specific areas of a flow, whilst others were 1,000ft, more centred on a student’s challenges overall with an entire flow and or centred around the core value proposition of our business.
We prioritised the themes on a simple Impact/Effort matrix before spending the rest of the day allowing room for discussion around the breadth and importance of the most highly impactful themes.
The prioritisation round went smoothly and so we began work on ideation ahead of Day 2. This is the benefit of having every day and its outcomes carefully planned but simple. If you’re ahead of schedule you can bring things forward as it suits the group.
Ultimately, starting earlier than planned on ideation meant we’d be creating more time for the bigger, more complex discussions.
Day 2 — IDEATE
Having already done one ideation task the day before — taking one of the HMW themes and diverging for 10-minutes to come up with as many specific and 10ft solutions as possible in that time — and converging to discuss and theme the outcomes into more manageable groups (which we later renamed our Initiatives), we were set to storm into an entire day of ideation.
We warmed up by each coming up with as many uses for a paperclip as possible, no matter how absurd, in 5 minutes. The idea behind the Paperclip Test is to stretch your creativity and to highlight that creative thinking can be exercised.
We diverged and converged until all of the HMW themes were complete. This became a little repetitive after a while, and accompanied some grumblings as to where we were going to land. After ideating on such massive themes, we ended up with hundreds of solutions, so it’s easy to get lost in the detail at this point.
We voted on the most valuable initiatives (our idea groups) based on whether they satisfied our 4 Cs; our set of bespoke principles for the workshop focus area, which I won’t disclose here.
After grouping, we revisited the key user journey map and, within the swim-lanes of the 4 Cs, we moved the initiatives into the gaps to essentially give us a first look at the beginnings of a uniform hypothesis statement to bring the value chain together. We made sure to map to the model we were using for the focus area, and to link the initiatives back to our key user need themes.
Day 3 — CREATE
The 3rd and final day was about creation. As the days went on the path through the forest became more and more clear. Day 3 was about conversation, tension and disagreement, big decisions, fried brains and renewed direction. Thanks to the ideation on day 2, we now had our initiatives and we’d plugged the gaps in the journey map, so we were set with the tools to be able to walk away with a joined up vision.
Tip: Theming granular solutions is a helpful way of gaining clarity on a group’s thinking, without being directive or specific to the squads who’ll be picking up the work. You want alignment on the hypothesis, you don’t want the answers.
We asked questions for every initiative on the user journey map in order to create the start of a high-level design challenge brief or a strategy memo. These would be the important points with which our colleagues could build their work around. The questions were:
- What does success look like?
- What are the high-level solution themes?
- Are there any data components we need to consider?
- What are the most important elements?
- What teams does this span?
- How does it relate to the other Cs? (4 Cs)
Having created the briefs, it was clear we had one far more complex and hearty than the others, so we decided to focus on that by creating its own unique journey map and diving into the specifics. This activity wasn’t pre-planned, and shows the importance of having a flexible schedule, and allowing the group to flow within it.
Once all initiatives were fleshed out we mapped them out on the Three I’s framework creating a high-level idea of what needed to be done now and by who, to get the ball rolling. This framework also allowed us to push certain things out to the year-mark so we could create a vision around the work. The Three I’s framework is a take on Now, Next, Later but uses language to inspire and focuses on building a vision, rather than an actionable list.
The columns are Inevitable, Improbable and Impossible. Most companies operate within the Inevitable space, reeling out work with a 1 to 3-month vision or roadmap. This can be demoralising at times. Likewise, the Impossible column, say 3 years away, is also too far to conceptualise with any accuracy and depends on your company size, budget and ambition. Improbable is the sweet spot. Improbable has enough unknowns to be challenging and interesting, and will facilitate vision creation.
We ended up with a joined up vision statement which looked something like this:
We believe that by building A and B, we can do C whilst also instilling [user needs] in our service by making X more [user need], so that we’ll be able to increase [focus area] from [key business metrics] within [specified timeframe].
Pin that hypothesis statement on every board, at the top of Slack channels, wherever you need to. This is your north star vision.
Conclusion
By having that large north star vision with specific initiatives, a key business metric (be bold) and a specified time frame, you’re giving your product and engineering teams the direction and confidence to move ahead on their own. You’re offering them the way forward but you’re not telling them how to get there. The main metric is the transparent target senior management can hold others accountable for.
By only discussing the main metric as a leadership group, you’re also creating room for your colleagues to work out their own OKRs and KPIs, their own set of metrics for the quarter within which they can manoeuvre should they need to.
The workshop is the big bang that’ll create the excitement and alignment needed to tackle a problem for your users. You must also have a meeting cadence figured out in order to check the heartbeat of any long-term initiative.
Links referenced
Pion — https://www.wearepion.com/
Student Beans — https://www.studentbeans.com/uk
Laws of Simplicty — https://www.whatyouwilllearn.com/book/the-laws-of-simplicity/#:~:text=SHE:%20HIDE,a%20slim%20and%20light%20product
How Might We Statements — https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-might-we-questions/
IDEO’s Three Lenses of Innovation — https://isaacjeffries.com/blog/2016/3/9/three-lenses-of-innovation
Uplifting Design by Dan Makoski — https://www.uplifting.design/the-book
The Paperclip Test — https://genuinecontact.net/paperclips-creativity/
The benefits of How Might We statements — https://dscout.com/people-nerds/how-might-we-statements
