Outcome
During the discovery cycles in Gavelytics, I led the team primarily to think about the problem we were trying to solve rather than the solutions, which helped us be collaboratively creative, and come up with top-notch solutions.
Overview
Product Design Strategy
Collaborated with key stakeholders to understand roles, boundaries and expectations of Product Design.
Defining Product Goals
Identified business, growth, maturity and adoption aspects of the product that were key to its success.
User Research
Redefined and validated and refined current user-research efforts with ideation sessions, surveys and feedback from our user base.
Personas
Repurposed and consolidated the persona effort that was done previously to make it more specific. We would talk about Ericks, Robs and Lisas all the time.
Defining the Problem
Defined the scope of the design by a series of "how can we..." statements and made collaboration, creativity and focus status quo.
Product Roadmap
In collaboration with our SME, I created as roadmap of features, feature improvements, that enabled the team to see months in advance.
Process
Product Design from Day 1
Our executive and SME teams came from a non-technical heavy background but they still had big expectations on what the product had to be; I had to be careful to communicate what the plan was to design a product that connected with users was. Getting buy-in from the team early was instrumental, so the first thing that I did was to explain the design process and how it fit within the SDLC, I also explained what my role could be; All of this was framed in plain-English and framed in terms of time-to-market and rework, as they were his primary constraints.
Key takeaways from this kick-off meeting were:
- Executive team to be clear about my role in the organisation.
- User research and testing overrides opinion.
This allowed me to the team onboard and ready to act.
Product Goals
I facilitated a couple of sessions to ‘download’ what the business goals were, along with internal and external pressures, key dates, resources needed and potential business model.
User Research and Personas
Most of the user research was performed by the our in-house SME in an unstructured way by the time I joined the company. However, I had to refine and refocus his research in a constructive way, by asking lots of questions, surveying litigators, and reorganising and synthetising some of the previously gathered research results. This was important, as persona’s information helps me drive product design decision making.
Later in the design process, we merged Lisa and Rob, as they “experienced” Gavelytics in the same form, and shared some pain points and goals.
Lisa, Priority 1. Looks Familiar?
Erick (sic.) Priority 2.
Rob, Priority 3. As seen on TV.
Understanding the Problem
Together with SMEs and persona representatives (two Lisas, one Erick and one Rob), I facilitated a mapping session where we envision a cohesive product experience, where we first devised our product to be.
Product Design Strategy
We kicked off development by rating user stories in terms of value to user (SME voted) and time-to-build (development team voted). The point of this was to generate a common sense of urgency for those items that were pressing, and since communications were team-wide, there was little ambiguity in what to work next.
Once everything was prioritized then it would be put in context of a journey, the reason for this is that it’s easier to understand a user story in context of use, rather than just floating around.
