How to solve big problems OR How to make decisions fast, within your team
Every Monday in foodora product design team we have breakfast together, this normally divides into two parts.
1) Everyone share their blockers over the week.
2) One of the designers leads a creative exercise with the team.
Working in agile environment there are a lot of situations we need to make decisions and I believe this happens in our peer companies as well. It is good to listen, challenge and debate over a conversation but at the same time it is challenging to make decisions when there are many inputs from different stakeholders where the meetings and feedback sessions were not well-structured, thus a lot of design processes cannot move on because the direction is hanging there.
“Getting good at making decisions fast is key to releasing successful products and services.” — Jonathan Courtney, AJ&Smart.
Around a month ago I attended a workshop held by AJ & Smart, a UX design agency which is expertise in lean UX sprint practice and delivers business advice to their clients.
Three weeks ago I conducted the exercise with my team at foodora. This exercise helps you and your team to brainstorm, gather opinions, organise and prioritise decisions in a very efficient way, no matter what topics you are facing. Our team tried this method about “Improving design team work environment”. You can have your own topic about a specific feature of your product for narrowing down the design direction, how to educate clients on giving feedback or any other topics you need help on gathering views.
Tools you’ll need
- Different colours and shapes of post-its
- Dot stickers
- Timer
- Sharpie / marker
- Clean wall / magic clean matt
Task 1: Gather problems (7 mins)
The task starts with brainstorming your daily challenges and write it as fast as you can, on the same colour of post-its within 7 minutes.
Task 2: Share the problems
After that everyone sticks the post-its on the wall and explains using one sentence better within 30 seconds, in order to be clear and as short as possible, and bringing out one main point you want to tell.
While everyone is posting and explaining the problems, you can see some repetition or similarity, but there is no need to sort or group them as this is not the focus here, because you just need a big picture of what problems you are facing. If your team thinks that sorting is necessary, you can do it after when everyone finishes presenting their stickers. In this task quantity is the key thing. You can see the problems that are all stated on the wall.
Task 3: Vote for problems
In this task the team is going to prioritise the problems — this is why voting is needed. Everyone is given two dots which equals two votes for voting on the problem. You can vote on the problem which they think that is the biggest challenge you are facing now as a team. If there is an impactful person like CTO then they can have four voting dots to reflect different level of importance as they have more experience on the product. This is true and you don’t want to block that.
There are no rules on voting, that means you can put the two dots on one problem or the one you written down.
Task 4: Prioritise the problems and the “HMW”
Moderator prioritises the standing out problems aside the crowds, in our exercise the top two problems including three dots and two dots. Now we filter the problems out and how can we make it into actionable solution?
Then turning it into a “How might we?” question which brings to an actionable statement. For example, our biggest problem is “Feedback is not clear enough for giving us the direction”. Then the moderator turns the question to “How might we get more valuable feedback?”
Task 5: Think of the solutions (7 mins)
The designers are given another set of post-its. This time, the prompt is to write the solutions for the “How might we?” question. Again, just like the last round, this is also about quantity over quality. (You will vote for the quality ones in the next step)
Task 6: Present the solutions
Same as before, everyone goes to the wall, presents their solution briefly and sticks their post-its below the “How might we?” question.
Task 7: Vote for the solutions
This time you have six voting dots each. The team stays quiet for a minute to read again and absorbs the information on the wall. When the moderator makes sure that everyone is ready, each team member votes for the solutions that it might work. It doesn’t matter how many dots you give on one post-its, you can give all of your dots on one or delegate to multiple solutions.
Task 8: Mapping the solutions
Moderator collects the solutions that include three dots or above and starts mapping them on the affinity map including Efforts and Impact (see below). Moderator takes the solution post-its one by one and moves his hand while participants agree where the post-it should be placed. This is actually the only part the participants have more engaged discussion during the exercise. All they need to do is to guide the moderator with the directions: “higher and lower” or “left and right”.
Ta-da! Now you can see all the solutions are clearly shown on the map. Without endless discussions that lead us to nowhere, we can have a picture on what design problems the team is facing, find possible solutions effectively.
Special thanks to AJ & Smart for running this practical workshop! Here is the original video from them:
Give it a try with your team now and don’t forget to have fun!
