Lately, I (we) have focused more and more on underlying customer challenges and needs because of great book ”Inspired by Marty Cagan”. Book focuses how excellent product organizations are doing their stuff on a daily basis. We also started our reference customer program to gain better insights about their underlying problems.
As a part of the discovery phase, we interviewed six of our customers to gain insights about the problem. The idea was to use interview materials as a input for the design sprint. By design sprint I mean Google Ventures (GV) design sprint explained on http://www.gv.com/sprint/. Design sprint was picked because everyone have had very different idea about scope and problem in the past discussions. Also customers has asked asking about the functionality in question.
None of us had no previous experience about the design sprint except the facilitator who have participated two shorter design sprint executions. Also the underlying idea was to gain experience about design sprint method for the future reference and usage. I had high hopes about the method but also worries example that important stakeholders won’t buy the outcome even if it is tested and validated by customers. I was also thinking that could we made the progress described in the Sprint book in just one week?
I acted as a decider (product manager) in design sprint and three of our developers and designer did take part with me for the design sprint. Only problem we identified with the setup was that we were not able to have other experts to participate whole week for the sprint like sales or support people.
I’ll have five more posts about the feelings and outcomes we are gaining each day so stay tuned!
Related posts:
https://www.kattilamaki.com/2018/11/13/design-sprint-day-1/