Strategy Designer - Value Design (32%)

Medical Definition of Disability

This is the result of a physiological or cognitive difference.

Social Proof

This is the tendency to treat our social environment as a source of information.

Research

This is what takes design from an activity about self expression and intuition to a strategic and rigorous business practice. It keeps project teams customer-centered and focused on customer success - because ultimately companies can't be successful if their customers are not. It builds compassion for your customers, your users, and their challenges. It enables you to take advantage of expert perspectives and build confidence that you're solving the right problems, and solving the problems right.

Business Value

This is what the product gives back to the organization. This can be revenue, reduced attrition, lower service costs, higher customer satisfaction, and so on.

Co-Creation

This is when a design or product team invites people outside the core team into the ideation process. In these cases, the design team brings expertise on the tools and methods of ideation, and the guest collaborators bring the expertise of their perspective. In other words, you get these diverse groups together because they know the problem space intimately and have intrinsic reasons for wanting to solve the design challenge.

Group Think

This is when people in a group consciously or unconsciously keep building on a single idea rather than come up with new ones in order to seek harmony and avoid conflict.

Emotional Job Dimension

This job dimension is how the consumer feels or wants to feel when doing the job, or when the job is done.

Social Job Dimension

This job dimension is how the customer wants to be seen or perceived when doing the job, or how the job fits into an existing social dynamic.

Functional Job Dimension

This job dimension is what the job performer wants to do. They have clear start and end dates.

Job Statement Writing Method: Job Story

This job statement writing method focuses on three aspects: a triggering event/situation, the need/motivation, and the desired outcome. This approach helps you understand why someone would hire a particular product to complete a job and how you can get the job done better.

Job Statement Writing Method: Outcome-Driven

This job statement writing method identifies the main jobs and defines a comprehensive list of desired outcomes for each job. This approach helps you understand all the possible needs and outcomes when you ae developing a new product or redefining our market.

Effort

This may be bandwith, financial considerations, opportunity cost (the idea that you have to say no to something else in order to build this), or maintenance.

Business Value of Design

This means designing products and services to help organizations satisfy customers' needs. More specifically, this means creating products and services that are: - Desirable to customers, meeting their demands and expectations. - Technically feasible to build and maintain. - Viable or successful for organizations, generating long-term value

Trade-Off Scales

This method helps the group sort through and align on priorities. First, create a short list of factors, options, or features, listing no more than 10. Then visualize a ranking scale with the same quantity of numbers on it. So if you have five factors, your ranking scale is 1 - 5; if you have 10 factors, your ranking scale is 1 - 10. Then have stakeholders discuss the differences in their rankings, and their rationale.

Outcome-Driven Method Component: Direction of Change

This outcome-driven method component defines how the job performer wants to make progress on the job.

Outcome-Driven Method Component: Unit of Measure

This outcome-driven method component describes the metric of success the job performer has defined. This could be time, effort, skill, likelihood, ability, and so on.

Outcome-Driven Method Component: Object of the Need

This outcome-driven method component describes what the need is about and what will be affected by doing the job.

Outcome-Driven Method Component: Clarifier

This outcome-driven method component lists any other context needed to frame the desired outcome.

Scoping

This process is the logistical plan for how the project will be structured. It should be intentionally designed to allow for both discovery and exploration. It allows you to plan, organize, and manage the time, people, and other resources needed to solve the framed challenge. It outlines the work to be done, how it will be completed and by whom, and the expected outcomes. It helps your team understand what a project does and doesn't cover.

Experience Data

This provides the context for how customers have actually experienced the service - and importantly 'why?' they feel the way they do about your brand. This is human feedback that points to the gaps between what you think is happening and what's really happening. This allows you to see the big picture so you can focus your efforts in areas that are most likely to improve the outcomes of the business.

Fidelity

This refers to how closely the prototype conveys the intended experience of the final product.

Social Value of Design

This refers to how organizations can develop products and services that foster positive social impact and change.

Behavior Change Design

This refers to intentionally creating experiences that foster desirable behaviors.

Solution Agnostic

This refers to something that is generalized that it is interoperaberable among various systems.

Influencers Alignment Topics Best Practices

- Strategic vision and its value

Good SMART Examples

- Achieve market share of 30% in the United States by the end of the fiscal year. - Be rated in the top 3 in Gartner's Healthcare Magic Quadrant and Forrester's Healthcare Wave by the end of the fiscal year. - Achieve a top 30 ranking on Fortune's 2017 Best Companies to Work For list.

Corporate Integrity Workshop Structure

- Analyze a product or service through the lens of values, thinking about what values it currently expresses. - Compare this expression to their stated organizational core values. - Brainstorm ways to express the core organizational values they want to focus on, both in terms of changes to existing features and new ideas.

Interview Best Practices

- Ask open-ended questions - Ask how and why - Avoid demoing a feature or asking for feedback on an idea - Talk to the right people - Aim to talk to at least five people - Take detailed notes - Look for workarounds - Identify what's surprising to you

Design Team Elements

- Stakeholder roles/disciplines/levels/departments - Soft and hard skills - Experiences - Expertise - Personalities - Culture - Backgrounds - Gender - Race - Age - Neurodiversity

Insights Process

- "Download" Your Research Learnings - Refine Insights - Define Opportunity Areas

Good Solution Agnostic Example

- "I need an easy way to get help from a salesperson."

Bad Solution Agnostic Example

- "I need to embed a lead form on my website."

Research Ethics Best Practices

- Be Honest - Ask Permission to Record - Stay Lean - Limit Access to Identifiable Data - Observe Regulations - Respect Participants' Expertise - Pay Participants Fairly - Listen Without Leading or Advising - Take Only What You Need - Ensure Representation - Seek Support If You Have Ethical Questions

Journey Mapping Benefits

- Better team Alignment: Expose how the work of different teams, like sales and service or design and community, come together. It also helps disparate teams speak in a common language about the customer. - Strategic Thinking: Promote strategic conversations about where to invest your company's resources and effort for the highest impact. - Deeper Understanding of Customer Pain Points: Expose gaps, places where the flow isn't as smooth as it could be, and moments of vulnerability or dissatisfaction for your customers. - Increased Empathy: Increase empathy for your audience's experience by assessing your customer's expectations and emotions as they move through their journey. - A Strong Case for Innovation: Expose the innovation work that needs to be done, and discover what matters most to customers. - A Guide to Measuring Impact: Model changes in current customer experience, analyze each change's potential for impact, and model new experiences before they are officially designed.

Methods to Increase Shared Understanding

- Build compassion for customers and users through research and prototyping - Use data to increase logical understanding - Use stories to increase logical and emotional understanding and compassion - Visualize a premise or framework to create a memorable shorthand - Use an experience narrative to convey a product or service vision

Inclusive and Equitable Team Culture Development Best Practices

- Build core team values that celebrate authenticity - Map personal interests to tasks and development plans. - Build collaborative workspaces - Empower micro-moments to learn about team member interests and motivations.

Main Methods for Evaluating Success

- Business Success - Customer Success - Societal Success

Inclusive Design Best Practices

- Center On: Inclusive design is "one size fits one" - or how a product adapts to fit each unique person. - Interrupt: Habits that perpetuate exclusion. - Ask: Whose voice or contribution is missing in the design process? - Seek Out: Exclusion experts who can provide insights about how to approach a design. - Remember: Inclusive design is a long, hard game that's full of challenges and it's not perfect.

Key Moments to Gain Alignment

- Challenge Framing - Research Insights - Opportunity Area Selection - Design Direction Selection - Bringing an Idea to Market

HMW Statement Use Cases

- Challenge framing and scoping: Clarify the project's purpose and unify the design team with a common challenge to solve. - Synthesis: Articulate opportunities for design after new insights/findings have emerged from users to guide the ideation and concepting phrases. - Ideation: Generate idea around specific aspects of the larger design challenge. You create many HMW statements and use several per brainstorm or ideation session. - Iterating: Guide iterations in prototyping to see if the prototype answered the question, and refine it as you learn new findings from users to refine the question.

Core Team Alignment Methods Before Kickoff

- Clarify project goals - Discuss team members' hopes and fears - Clarify roles and responsibilities - Learn teams' working styles - Create formal agreements

Great UX Design Principles

- Clarity - Efficiency - Consistency - Beauty

Common ESG Planet Metrics

- Climate Change - Nature Loss - Fresh Water Availability

Relationship Design Principles

- Compassion - Intention - Reciprocity - Courage

Methods to Track Success in Early Stages

- Connect to goals - Break down business goals into implications for design - Collect feedback that helps you evaluate your work through the lens of business impact - Draft your future metrics

Challenge Framing Planning Considerations

- Constraining this helps you be more precise about understanding the need and the opportunity for design (the problem, audience, context, and challenge statement). - Broadening the solution space by establishing the approach and creating a plan allows for greater opportunities to discover and explore.

Packaging Prototype Findings Best Practices

- Create a one-page executive summary - Give analytical and emotional highlights - Consider your audience - Make the document tell the story - Keep it lean

Insights Workshop Planning Best Practices

- Create an agenda that leaves plenty of room for discussion. - Bring the research insights to life. - Create a set of boards for shared viewing. - Set a time and place.

Jobs to Be Done Principles

- Customer-centric - Solution agnostic - Stable over time - Measurable outcomes

Common Mistakes in Group Ideation

- Deferrals to Leadership - Grouping by Perspective - Group Think - Dominant Personality Bias - Distractions

Common Business Success Goals

- Growth Target - Expansion Target - Efficiency Target - Customer Satisfaction Target

Scoping Planning Considerations

- Keeping this broad before the project allows for a more human-centered process to find the most impactful solution. - Narrowing this prevents wide exploration. You can always narrow throughout the process at key convergence milestones - the moments when your team narrows options and decides what to prioritize in the next phase of work.

Design Strategy Process Momements

- Kickoff - Research Moments - Synthesis Moments - Review Moments

Dot Voting Process

- Define the Context: Before voting begins, facilitators remind participants of the project's challenge statement, the purpose of the vote, and how the team will use the outcome. - Define the Options: A team member should reorganize sticky notes to cluster similar idea. The facilitator may allow participants to vote on individual ideas only, or vote on themes or groups. - Outline Voting Constraints: Everyone gets the same number of votes. Participants should get just enough that it feels hard, but not impossible, to choose. By restricting the number of dots, you're asking each participant to eliminate at least three-quarters of the options available. - Vote: During voting, participants place their votes quietly - no conversation or lobbying during the process. People often ask if they can vote for their own idea, and yes you can! - Assess Results: Depending on the goal of this, participants can discuss why they have voted for particular options or assess the next steps now that they can see which ideas resonate the most.

Three Key Characteristics of Digital Transformation Projects

- Design first - Culture - Speed and agility

Solution Concept Criteria

- Desirability - Viability - Feasibility

Strengthening Team Dynamics Best Practices

- Determine if you need to bring on new team members for certain project phases. For instance, if you decide to make sustainability content a key part of the solution strategy, add a writer to work with your sustainability expert. - Consider what skills and perspectives each person brings to the team, and then consider how to complement them with different perspectives. - Examine your team, and acknowledge if team members seem too alike. You should plan other ways for diverse voices to participate in co-creation and decision-making moments if you find you can't achieve diversity within your core team. - Make sure your design team members feel safe to have hard discussions. Make it clear through words and actions that you're fostering an environment of belonging. - Genuinely accept other perspectives from team members. - Embrace constructive conflict because it may surface obstacles and issues that could hinder your product's success once it's in the market. - Recognize the diversity in the group. Do not try to downplay it. - Recognize when you need someone to add infusions of knowledge/perspective but not be part of the team. - Ask for help if you need support in creating an environment of belonging, having difficult conversations, or addressing friction.

Common ESG People Metrics

- Dignity and equality - Health and wellbeing - Skills for the future

Choice Architecture Design Tactics

- Direct attention - Simplify messages and decisions - Use timely moments and prompts - Encourage planning and goal setting

Outcome-Driven Method Components

- Direction of change - Unit of measure - Object of the need - Clarifier

Bad SMART Examples

- Dominate the U.S. market. - Lead the market direction and shape the evolution of the Healthcare market. - Be a Great Place to Work.

Decision Making and Prioritization Methods

- Dot Voting - Decision Checklist - Criteria Scorecard - Prioritization Matrices - Trade-Off Scales

Common Trade-Offs During Deployment

- Effort vs. Value - Time vs Cost - Compromise vs. Sacrifice - Clarity vs Consistency - Aesthetics vs Usability

Emotional Appeal Design Tactics

- Empathize with what the audience values emotionally. - Authentically associate the emotional value with the logical appeal and the behavior change. - Communicate in emotional terms - Make the message personally relevant, relatable, and appealing for the specific audience.

Common ESG Prosperity Metrics

- Employment and wealth generation - Innovation for better products and services - Community and social vitality

Brainstorming Best Practices

- Encourage wild ideas. - Go for quantity. - Defer judgment of a solution. - Sketch ideas as they are generated. - Build on the ideas of others. - Stay focused on the topic - One conversation at a time. - Ask group to vote on their favorite ideas.

Executive Sponsors Project Updates Best Practices

- Ensure executive sponsors have the opportunity to hear recommendations before you present them to other stakeholders. Some executives may not want the pre-meeting, but many may take you up on the offer. - Make research insights, concepts, and prototype feedback transparent and accessible. - Invite executive sponsors to key milestones, like when the team presents findings from research and prototyping. - Always share back insights, decisions, and next steps after meeting with executive sponsors to ensure understanding and alignment. - Be confident and enthusiastic about what you present to executive sponsors. If you're not confident about it, clearly frame what you're sharing as early thinking and ask for input.

Core Team Alignment Methods at Wrap-Up Session

- Express gratitude - Mood meter - "Take it forward" feedback - Celebrate

Core Team Alignment Methods at Project Midpoint

- Express gratitude - Mood meter - Express I like/I wish/I will statements

Benefits of Alignment

- Focus the project team's efforts on what matters most. - Drive outcomes more directly. - Improve communication and teamwork. - Improve efficiency, since people can act more independently in service of the common goals. - Reduce the possibility of friction and stray from intent, especially at handoffs. - Enable everyone to contribute their expertise in a way that supports the vision. - Increase team satisfaction because members believe in what they're doing and can see that others value it. - Increase accountability, because when everyone shares goals, we can hold each other accountable.

Job Dimensions

- Functional - Emotional - Social

Conflict Resolution Methods

- Get Curious - Get to the Heart of the Objection - Go Back to the last Alignment Moment - Name the Challenges - Acknowledge the Value of Perspectives - Explore Solutions Genuinely - Invite Collaborative Problem-Solving - Bring in Fresh Inspiration - Pause, Then Revisit

Recommended Research Methods for Exploration/Refining an Idea

- Group conversations with stimulus - Codesign/participatory design sessions

Recommended Research Methods for Inspiration/Idea Generation

- Group conversations with stimulus - Diary/journal studies - Codesign/participatory design sessions - Analogous research

Planning an Ideation Workshop Best Practices

- Have a group of 3 - 10 people. - Include people who know your users such as salespeople, researcher, customer support representatives - people who regularly interact with users at your organization. - Include people who like coming up with new ideas and have an easy time brainstorming. - Include a mix of optimists and realists. People who know what's possible and don't default to "no" or think of all the reasons why innovation won't work. - Gather a good collection of brainstorming prompts. - Write more brainstorm prompts than you can fit into a single, hour-long session and then select the best ones with your team. Best might mean the most inspiring or those that feel like they could encourage the most divergent thinking. It's typically easier to tame a wild idea - bet it for feasibility and viability - than it is to make an evolutionary idea more revolutionary.

Questions When Planning Initial Project Research

- How has your organization previously made change happen? What rules, tools, and norms were involved in making it successful, and what tends to hinder change? - Who needs to participate to ensure the success of this project, and what do they each think success looks like? Consider decision-makers, influencers, sponsors, builders, marketers, institutional knowledge-holders, and people who will maintain what you design. - Why is this project important, and why right now? Are there similar or related initiatives going on elsewhere in your organization? - What are existing hypotheses or assumptions about the project outcomes or solutions to the challenge? - What are some hopes and fears that people at the organization have about the project? What advice would they give your project team?

Ineffective HMW Statement Examples

- How might we create a website for customer service requests? - How might we build an experience that enables users to express themselves by codesigning a custom shoe? - How might we reassure website users by telling them when their package will arrive? - How might we improve the waiting period between order and delivery for customers? - How might we remove friction from our ordering process for custom items?

Effective HMW Statement Examples

- How might we make customer service more available to customers? - How might we enable users to express themselves by codesigning a custom shoe? - How might we reassure users that we're working on their orders? - How might we increase visibility into our manufacturing, shipping, and delivery processes to help customers better understand the wait? - How might we make ordering custom items as quick and easy as possible?

Inclusive Designer Skills

- Identify ability biases and mismatched interactions between people and the world. - Create a diversity of ways to participate in an experience. - Design for interdependence and bring complementary skills together.

Reasons Why Digital Transformations Fail

- Inadequate change management - Lack of C-level sponsorship - Talent deficits

Common Mistakes When Crafting HMW Statement

- Including the solution. - Using the words design, build, create, or similar ones. - Providing too much context. - Falling to include the desired outcome. - Focusing on what you do not want.

Challenge Framing Benefits

- Informs scoping, in terms of the time and skills required to solve a challenge. - Provides clarity and direction for the team. - Sets expectations of decision-makers and other stakeholders on what they will and won't solve within a project (and provides the opportunity to negotiate these). - Creates a shared definition of success for the project - Ensures the team is working on something of value to the organization.

Building a Coalition of the Willing Best Practices

- Internal alignment brings better external outcomes. - External research and collaboration are key. - Different perspectives and skill sets complement each other.

Recommended Research Methods for Discovery/Understanding

- Interview - Observations or shadowing - Diary/journal studies - Surveys

Research Methods to Inform Strategy

- Interview - Observations or shadowing - Group conversations with Stimulus - Diary/Journal Studies - Codesign/participatory design sessions - Surveys - Analogous Research

Five Questions to Assess HMW's Effectiveness

- Is it generative?: Can you get to five solutions quickly that solve for the intended impact? - Is it accessible?: Can someone outside your team generate solutions quickly for the intended impact? - Is it too narrow?: Is the solution already stated in the framing, making it hard to discover various solution pathways? - Is it too broad?: Is the solution like a boiling ocean, with so many solutions that you can't begin to problem solve? - Does it contain a desired outcome?: Can you understand what success would look like based on the statement?

Benefits of Internal Research

- It ensures that you're driving with the right company values. - It ensures that you're coordinated in your efforts and outcomes. - It helps you take advantage of existing organizational capabilities and cultural behaviors. - It helps you understand the realistic appetite for change so you can right-size your ambition. - It helps build empathy for designers and for stakeholders who make decisions.

Jobs to Be Done Elements

- Job Performer - Job to Be Done - Circumstances - Customer Needs

Job Statement Writing Methods

- Job Story - Outcome-Driven

Ideation Methods

- Journey Mapping - Asynchronous Ideation - Co-Creation

Writing V2MOM Statement Best Practices

- Keep it short - Choose your words wisely - List your priorities in order - Make it your own

Roadmap Best Practices

- Keep it updated: Review the roadmap regularly and make adjustments as necessary. An out-of-date roadmap means the product team and other internal stakeholders will be lost. - Communicate broadly: Stay connected with all stakeholders to ensure alignment. Make task ownership open and transparent, so everyone knows who to contact if there's a question. - Group features in ways that make sense to users: When you're breaking features down into bundles for the roadmap, make sure each iteration feels like a complete idea, stays true to the core concept of your strategy, and provides user value.

Alignment Best Practices

- Know your audience - Start early - Orient around outcomes - Get them involved - Create clarity - Anticipate objections

Roadmap Don'ts

- Lose the vision: Ensure the roadmap communicates both the vision and how to deliver on it. Don't overload it with details. - Forget to test: Even if the whole team thinks something is a great idea, be sure the decision is grounded in evidence. Time spent validating critical assumptions saves time down the road. - Write in permanent marker: As the saying goes, "Nothing in this world is certain except for death and taxes." This is also true of the details in your roadmap. Stay flexible.

Executive Sponsors Briefing Sessions Best Practices

- Maintain a regular cadence of short check-in meetings - Establish the agenda ahead of time, including clear expectations and key questions to drive the conversation. - Plan to spend more time listening than presenting to executives. - Always be time-sensitive with meeting duration, virtual communications, and reporting

Social Influence Design Tactics

- Make engaging or not engaging in the desired behavior observable. - Make the desired behavior the perceived norm. - Eliminate excuses for not engaging in the behavior.

Facilitating Prototype Testing Sessions Best Practices

- Make participants feel comfortable - Be present - Engage your whole team - Record insights in real time - Collect storytelling assets

Journey Map Architecture

- Phases - Actions - Thoughts - Feelings - Touchpoints - Context - Opportunities

In-Person Journey Map Workshop Logistics

- Plan for an entire day of collaboration. - Reserve a quiet place where participants can collaborate without distractions. This may mean finding a place outside your office space. - Arrange the furniture in a way that allows for easy collaboration and discussion. Try to avoid classroom-style rows! - Find a space with natural lighting to create a warm environment. - Provide healthy snacks and beverages throughout the day. - If you have money in your budget, give participants something special as a token of appreciation. - Plan to have plenty of multi-colored sticky notes, markers, foam core boards, voting dots, and colored tape to create grids.

Virtual Journey Map Workshop Logistics

- Plan four sessions, 2 hours each. It's more challenging to keep people engaged for an extended period of time. - Prompt participants to do more preparation work ahead of time in order to make the most of the collaboration time. - Use a virtual whiteboarding tool that the team can use to brainstorm together. - If you have time and money in your budget, send participants a care package with a few treats as a special token of appreciation.

Common ESG Main Metrics Categories

- Planet - People - Prosperity

The Four Types of Product Roadmaps

- Portfolio Roadmap - Strategy Roadmap - Releases Roadmap - Features Roadmap

Leadership Alignment Topics Best Practices

- Project outcomes, values, and goals - Constraints - The project approach, sometimes - Strategic vision and its value

Stakeholder/Extended Team Alignment Topics Best Practices

- Project outcomes, values, and goals - Team roles and responsibilities - Context on the audience, risks, and opportunities - Strategic vision and its value

Project Team Alignment Topics Best Practices

- Project outcomes, values, and goals - Team roles and responsibilities - Project approach - Context on the audience, risks, and opportunities - Tactical tools needed to achieve success - Design principles - Quality/fidelity/types of deliverables - Strategic vision and its value

Planning Prototype Testing Sessions Considerations

- Prototype audience - Payment - Group or 1:1 testing - Setting - Sessions and iterations - Materials - Team roles - Show flow - Post-test processing

Inclusive Design Principles

- Recognize Exclusion - Learn from Diversity - Solve for One, Extend to Many

Scaling Relationships Best Practices

- Recognize that there's not a one-size-fits-all solution. - Take the time to engage with customers and end users. - Understand that sentiment is an integral part of building relationships.

Ineffective Job Statement Principles

- Refer to technology or solutions - Mention methods or techniques - Reflect observations or preferences - Include compound concepts (ANDs or ORs).

Effective Job Statement Principles

- Reflect the customer's perspective. - Start with, "When I'm . . ." (triggering event or situation). - Ensure stability over time. - Clarify with context, if needed.

Insights Workshop Facilitation Best Practices

- Remember to pause. - Ask open-ended questions. - Listen to your stakeholders. - Allow participants to challenge and build on the ideas you're presenting. - Know what's next.

Main Types of Research

- Research for Discovery/Understanding - Research for Inspiration/Idea Generation - Research for Exploration/Refining and Idea - Research for Validating Assumptions, Decisions, and Designs - Ongoing Assessment and Customer Listening

Methods to Gain Alignment

- Shared experience - Shared understanding - Compassion for the challenge and audience - Collaborative problem-solving - Visible Friction and Conflict Resolution - Interpretation by others

Low-Fidelity Prototype Examples

- Sketches - Paper interfaces - Building block prototypes - Borrowing and recombing - Live action + survey - Role-playing

Design Debt Symptoms

- Slow Growth: Introducing changes requires a disproportionate amount of work, and the user experience is falling behind. - Reduced Adoption and Customer Satisfaction: New solutions are clunky, and users have difficulty learning and using the product. - Low Team Velocity: Each new change means additional work. - Difficulties in Accommodating New Features: Solutions developed so far were meant for a simpler and smaller product.

Six Behavior Change Stategies

- Social Influencers - Information - Emotional Appeals - Rules & Regulations - Choice Architecture - Material Incentives

SMARTE Framework Components

- Specific - Measurable - Achievable - Relevant - Time-Bound - Ethical

Experience Narrative Process

- Start with Context - Build a Case - Get Feedback - Gain Alignment

Walking Deck Elements

- The design challenge - A pinpoint on a process map showing where you are - Definition of success - People we talked to (with photos) - Key insights from research - Opportunity areas, including job stories

Key GTM Strategy Elements

- The problem you're solving and how your product solves that problem. - Details of the product you're building, including the value proposition and pricing. - Your target customer, including needs, pain points, and pricing considerations. - Your competitors, including market positioning and how your product differentiates from theirs. - How you'll distribute your product, including information on how your customers will find out about the solution. - How you'll measure and track performance and value.

Scenarios Where You Should Not Challenge Frame

- There's a clear path forward to fix the problem. - it represents an evolutionary change to an existing product/service. - Your team is working effectively and efficiently, delivering measurable improvements at predictable intervals. - Your team is addressing short-term problems, and you need them to focus on the next release.

Job Story Method Components

- Triggering Event/Situation - Need/Motivation - Desired Outcome

The Five Key Elements of Scoping

- Understand the need. - Articulate the opportunity for design. - Establish the problem-solving approach. - Create a project plan. - Identify measures of success and potential risks.

Corporate Integrity Workshop Use Cases

- Understand the values their products and services express. - Identify gaps between the current state of value expression and the ideal state. - Deepen their understanding of why leading with values in the design and build process is key - Introduce teams to values in a business context to build the practice of separating personal values from core organizational values.

Bad Job Statement Examples

- Use a mobile app to easily access customers' notes from my car to help me prepare for a meeting. - People prefer using custom gamified learning apps to taking courses on the company website. - Help me plan a bonding event that my whole team will enjoy.

Consequence Scanning Workshop Best Practices

- Use a narrow scope - Engage diverse perspectives - Assign homework: Ask participants to come to the workshop with a list of potential consequences that they've considered to keep the workshop as efficient as possible. - Make a plan.

Important Factors of Roadmapping

- Value: How does the product deliver business and customer outcomes? - Effort: How hard is it to create? - Confidence: How certain are you that it will have the desired impact?

Risks Without Alignment

- Wasting time and energy on the wrong ideas and tasks. - Inconclusive outcomes because success isn't well defined, you can never achieve clear success. - Discord between stakeholders, which sometimes becomes discord between teams. - The need to do re-work, including the need for additional investments in time and resources at a minimum. - Resistance and lack of trust in the project team and in design overall. - A lack of understanding of the importance and value of the work and the solution vision. - Project failure or premature ending due to a lack of support resources. - Low morale among employees who can't point to successful contributions to the organization or feel misaligned with company values.

Consequence Scanning Questions

- What are the intended and unintended consequences of this product or service feature? - Within these intended and unintended consequences, which are positive? - Within these intended and unintended consequences, which are negative?

GTM Strategy Considerations

- What are you competing with (including doing nothing)? - What user behavior changes are required? What barriers prevent that change? - How does this fit in the user context/system?

Questions to Help Assemble a Design Team

- What hard skills will you need to solve this challenge? - What soft skills will help you solve this challenge? - What perspectives are important to have on the core team, and which ones are important for the extended team? - Is there a capability or perspective you need but don't currently have access to? - Are there skills or capabilities you may need but just for specific moments within the design strategy process? - Do you have a good mix of thinkers, doers, dreamers, and tactical folks on the team you're assembling? - What is your project's timeline? - What is each individual's availability?

Scaling Relationships Considerations

- What kind of relationship you want to build with customers at scale. - How technology can enable these types of relationships. - The associated benefits and trade-offs

Challenge Framing Questions

- What's wrong with the status quo? - Who does the solution stand to impact? - What are the desired outcomes? - What adjacent areas should be excluded from this focus?

Good Job Statement Examples

- When I'm on the go, I want to access my notes, so I can feel confident and prepared for customer meetings. - When I need to learn new things for work, I want to use a gamified learning app, so I can have more fun while I skill up. - When I'm trying to strengthen team dynamics, I want to plan a fun shared experience so my whole team can build camaraderie while enjoy themselves.

The Five Interrelated Elements of the Exclusion Cycle

- Why We Make: The motivations of the problem solver - Who Makes It: The problem solver - How We make: The methods and resources the problem solver uses - Who uses It: The assumptions the problem solver makes about the people who use the solution - What We Make: The solution or product that the problem solver creates

Journey Map Assumptions

- Why you're doing it, or the business objectives - Who you're focusing on, the audience that will be most impacted or best served by the experience you're examining.

Medium-Fidelity Prototype Examples

- Wireframes - Mockups - Splash pages - Foam or 3D-printed models - Interactive prototypes

Scenarios Where You Should Challenge Frame

- Working on an ambiguous or complex problem. - Driving for significant change from existing work or products/services. - Aligning a new team around goals, roles, and expectations. - Proposing a new initiative that needs funding or leadership buy-in. - Trying to create enduring advantage (a strategy that will create value for customers today while laying the groundwork for growth and value in the future). - Trying to determine who is best suited to solve your problem (for instance, is it a UX problem, an org design problem, a strategy problem, a tech problem, and so on).

Crafting a HMW Statement Process

- Write down your problem statement. - Draft your design challenge using the phrase "How Might We." - Identify the impact. - Test the design challenge. - Refine the problem and impact. - Try again.

Design-First Company

A company is this when they think about the user first and don't worry so much about their competitors.

Evaluating Success Method: Societal Success

By focusing on environment, societal, and governance (ESG) metrics, companies can ensure long-term value by taking into account the needs of society at large as well as their stakeholders. Being aware of these metrics helps design strategists integrate them as goals to design toward.

SMARTE Framework

Designers can use this framework to define intent, generate ideation prompts, and critique work. It can help ensure the vision you're delivering hits your goals.

Benefits of Prototyping in Design Strategy

Doing this makes it easier for people to grasp a concept by interacting with a hands-on experience over a written or verbal explanation.

Alignment

In a design strategy project, this is about making sure that the people in the system are ready and willing to help your project be successful.

Evaluating Success Method: Business Success

In strategy projects, this often come to pass because of a business goal. It's not the job of the design strategist to define these high-level goals; they'll be defined by the business leaders in your organization.

Jobs to Be Done Element: Job Performer

In the JTB Framework, this is the person or group of people who are trying to get the specific job done. They will be the primary consumer of the solution.

Jobs to Be Done Element: Jobs to Be Done

In the JTB Framework, this is the primary objective of the job performer. This can be a problem they want to solve, something they want to avoid, or anything else they are trying to accomplish.

Jobs to Be Done Element: Customer Needs

In the JTB Framework, this is the progress a customer wants to make. In other words, this is the success criteria.

V2MOM Component: Methods

In the V2MOM statement, this defines the actions and steps to take to get the job done.

V2MOM Component: Obstacles

In the V2MOM statement, this defines the challenges, problems, issues you have to overcome to achieve the vision.

V2MOM Component: Measures

In the V2MOM statement, this defines the measurable results you aim to achieve.

V2MOM Component: Values

In the V2MOM statement, this defines the principles and beliefs that help you pursue the vision.

V2MOM Component: Vision

In the V2MOM statement, this defines what you want to do or achieve

Journey Map Architecture: Feelings

In the journey map architecture, this describes how the customer or user is feeling. Changes here often hint they're entering a new phase as well.

Journey Map Architecture: Context

In the journey map architecture, this describes the environmental, social, and time factors that are important either to your customer's ability to reach their goal, or to the experience of your product or service.

Journey Map Architecture: Actions

In the journey map architecture, this describes what the customer or user does in each phase.

Journey Map Architecture: Thoughts

In the journey map architecture, this describes what the customer or user thinks. Changes here often hint that they're entering a new phase in the experience.

Journey Map Architecture: Opportunities

In the journey map architecture, this describes where and how you can have the most impact. Are you reducing pain or reinforcing your strengths?

Journey Map Architecture: Touchpoints

In the journey map architecture, this describes where your brand, product, or service comes into play. These are the times when you are reaching the customer, or they're reaching you.

Journey Map Architecture: Phases

In the journey map architecture, this outlines the distinct stages of an experience.

Design Strategy Process Moment: Research

In this design strategy process moment, findings can sometimes be different from the experience and expertise of the team members. Creating time to process either one-on-one or asa team can help expand understanding.

Design Strategy Process Moment: Synthesis

In this design strategy process moment, taking key insights and turning them into opportunities for design - whether in challenge framing, after research, or throughout prototyping - there can be differences of opinion. These are key decision-making moments, so it's important to stay connected to the original challenge framing and what you learned from users.

Design Strategy Process Moment: Review

In this design strategy process moment, when holding this with key stakeholders, use feedback as the opportunity to learn and explore. If this is not in alignment with user feedback, it's a chance to understand more deeply the important factors from the stakeholder point of view.

Dot Voting

In this process, participants vote on their chosen options using a limited number of stickers or marks with pens.

Research Method to Inform Strategy: Group Conversations with Stimulus

In this research method to inform strategy, a researcher facilitates a discussion with a group, typically 3 - 12 people, using activities, prototypes, or prompts to guide the conversation. These allow participants to exchange opinions, ideas, and perspectives with each other and the researcher. These in strategy design are sued to increase understanding of social, emotional, and functional user needs, or to generate ideas. That's what sets them apart from focus groups, which are designed to validate concepts.

Research Method to Inform Strategy: Observations or Shadowing

In this research method to inform strategy, a researcher is given permission to watch a participant during an experience in its typical context. The participant is asked to "think aloud" or voice their thoughts and feelings throughout the experience. This is useful for collecting information on a customer journey, or to learn about friction or difficulties with an existing product or process.

Research Method to Inform Strategy: Interview

In this research method to inform strategy, a researcher meets with participants individually to ask them questions and discuss attitudes, behaviors, preferences, expectations, or experiences. This method is the most broadly used qualitative research technique.

Research Method to Inform Strategy: Diary/Journal Studies

In this research method to inform strategy, participants are given an assignment to track their actions, thoughts, habits, or attitudes over a short time. They're given a standard format with which to collect information, typically photos, audio recordings, a journal, or a combination of those things. These are useful when learning about how products fit into users' lives, or when focusing on behavioral outcomes.

Research Method to Inform Strategy: Codesign/participatory Design Sessions

In this research method to inform strategy, using sketches, paper interfaces, or sacrificial concepts - ideas sketched quickly for the purpose of provoking a research conversation about why they're bad - participants are asked to fix what's wrong, or design their own ideal version of a concept. This can be useful in deducing priorities and sparking conversations about social, emotional, and functional needs.

Risk of Only Bottom-Up Support

Initiatives become "nights and weekends" work and never really get off the ground. They lack key elements or skills needed for success, and frustrate or burn out employees who are trying to make good things happen.

Benefits of a Good HMW Statement

It unifies the team with a common purpose, jump starts the design strategy process with a question that generates many different solution pathways, and inspires teams to think creatively. It puts designers in a question-framing mindset and makes them challenge any assumptions. It turns the problem into an opportunity and assumes that no one can solve it alone. But most importantly, it reminds designers to place humans at the center of the solution.

Consequence of Journey Maps for Ideation

It won't yield the same revolutionary innovation ideas as a brainstorm because it includes too much context which can limit creativity.

Evaluating Success Method: Customer Success

Metrics like net promotor score (NPS), customer retention rate, and lifetime value can be helpful indicators at a high level, but they all take a long time to measure, which means they're a trailing indicator of success of failure. They also don't give you any visibility into your project as a standalone effort, so they can't tell you how your work is making an impact. For nascent strategies or concepts that haven't launched yet, you should evaluate desirability to gauge this, particularly in the ways you've defined desirability for your particular project. Job statements are a great starting point, since they offer a clear definition of desired outcomes. You can also look at HMWs and the customer-centered outcomes they articulate, and translate them to customer definitions of success you can gather feedback on. You can collect a mix of qualitative and quantitative data from prototyping to get a good picture of how you're doning.

Research for Exploration/Refining an Idea

Once you have a concept in mind this type of research helps you hone your understanding of the nuances surrounding the challenge and build a case for the right way to solve it. This type of research focuses on desirability and feasibility, helping teams mitigate risk and optimize for impact with their solutions.

Ongoing Assessment and Customer Listening

Once you've built and launched a product, service, or experience, it's important to stand up this type of research, and to make sure it feeds back into the product development backlog.

Assumptions Mapping

This helps your team explore the following assumptions: - Desirable: Do they want this? - Viable: Should we do this? - Feasible: Can we do this?

Social Accountability

This involves assuming responsibility for how business decisions and activities affect society, including how they create a positive impact. It also consists of mitigating any adverse impacts of a product or service.

Business Accountability

This involves reporting metrics, such as a product's market and profit performance, to connect an organization's internal work to things like revenue and optimization.

Design for Choice Architecture

The idea of this is to design the manner in which choices are framed and presented. It's a matter of increasing the cognitive ease of choosing the desirable behavior, while still ethically allowing for the opportunity for choice.

Accountability

This is the responsibility to report on the effectiveness and impacts of decisions and activities.

Neutral Individuals

The people show up but don't prioritize the project. They may not engage as much, or they may show signs of being supporters in some instances and detractors in others. They may help if you ask, but typically won't offer.

Ecosystem Mapping

This is the process used to capture all the key teams and individuals that influence a project-to-manage internal stakeholder relationships throughout a design project.

Design Strategy Process Moment: Kickoff

This design strategy process moment sets the tone for the project and the team dynamic. Making sure to balance clarity on purpose and roles and responsibilities initiates trust and the learning journey the team will go on together.

Risk of Only Top-Down Support

The vision can get diluted or stray from original intent as it is activated and experienced. People who build and deliver the vision might not have visibility into the rational behind it, might be fragmented in their attempts to support it, or might encounter aspects that haven't been defined.

Provocations

These are also known as brainstorming prompts and they inspire broad thinking about solutions to one aspect of the challenge you're trying to solve. They should contain enough context to focus the ideas on solutions that could work, but not so much context that they include the answer - this severely limits the freedom and creativity of the group.

Insights

These are foundational discoveries and understandings of the truth. Born of a combination of evidence and empath, they explain the how and why behind observable behaviors, phenomena, or constructs. These inform the basis for strategy design unlocking opportunities for innovation and leading to ideas that are meaningful to people, creating real value.

Opportunity Areas

These are high-level statements about specific types of solutions to the challenge that design can drive. - They are the solution framing. They help your stakeholders think critically about how to approach solutioning before you even start to design.

Thought Partners

These are individuals who challenge your thinking or assumptions and inspire innovation.

Influencers

These are people who are excited about and supportive of the project, but have no role on the project or extended team.

Splash Pages

These are two-page websites that use mockups to explain a concept, and offer a button so users can show interest. These can help you narrow down different directions, messages, or options for a product, service, or experience.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

These give you a quantifiable way to measure your progress and demonstrate how your project is creating an advantage.

Supporters

These people are excited to hear and talk about the project. They eagerly show up to meetings and work sessions, participate, and offer help. They're committed and take action to move a project forward.

Exclusion Experts

These people have deep insights about how they adapt solutions to their specific needs. Often, their ingenuity can lead product teams to ask better questions and create more inclusive solutions. They may or may not be formally involved in the design field, and you will benefit from seeking them out.

Detractors

These people work against project success, either in the open or behind the scenes. They may show up and bring a cynical stance to every new phase and activity. They find all the reasons why a vision won't succeed but don't help solve problems they identify. They may be against change in general or just against this particular project.

Strategy Roadmap

This displays the team initiatives needed to achieve the product goals.

Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy

This has an end-goal of achieving a competitive advantage. This outlines how you'll: - Successfully launch your product to your target audience - Acquire new customers - Drive awareness, adoption, and engagement

Data and Analytics Users

These stakeholders determine how to measure performance and define the data strategy.

UX Designers and Researchers

These stakeholders ensure that user outcomes are identified and achieved, and that the solution is desirable to customers.

Developers and Architects

These stakeholders identify dependencies, define what's possible, and determine how to deliver the product. They also build the product.

Leadership

These stakeholders sets strategic direction, identifies redundancies across the portfolio, and prioritizes resources.

Feasibility

Think of this as what's technically possible.

Viablity

Think of this as what's valuable to the busines.

Desirability

Think of this as what's valuable to the user.

HMW Statement Component: We

This HMW component acknowledges it's going to take a collaborative effort.

HMW Statement Component: Might

This HMW component allows us to imagine or explore possibilities without committing to them.

HMW Statement Component: How

This HMW component suggest that the problem can be solved.

UX Design Principle: Efficiency

This UX design principle anticipates how users will make their way through app features to streamline and optimize workflows. This helps users work faster, smarter, and better.

UX Design Principle: Clarity

This UX design principle eliminates ambiguity from your app experience. It enables its users to see, understand, and act with confidence.

UX Design Principle: Beauty

This UX design principle rewards your busy users with thoughtful, elegant craftsmanship. Users demand professional-looking experiences - all else being equal, the better UI looks, the more people will trust it and use it.

UX Design Principle: Consistency

This UX design principle uses the same names for the same things, similar graphic elements to represent the same parts of data, and so on. By applying the same solution to the same problem, you create familiarity and strengthen your user's intuition. When we reuse familiar patterns and UI elements, it's easier for the user to navigate through the experience.

Shareholder Primacy

This concept is the idea that a business's only responsibility is to its shareholders.

Stakeholder Capitalism

This concept is the idea that businesses should benefit customers, suppliers, employees, communities, and shareholders.

Curb-Cut Effect

This demonstrates that a solution that serves one community ultimately can benefit us all. In terms of market value, and inclusive solution has potential far beyond what may be immediately obvious.

Expansion Target

This is a business success goal that focuses on either creating new offerings for an existing customer audience or acquiring a new audience. New audiences might be defined by region, demographic, or behavior, and each comes with unique considerations.

Customer Satisfaction Target

This is a business success goal that focuses on making customers happier, so that they return more frequently and recommend the organization to their friends. Some examples are engagement, loyalty, or improved sentiment.

Growth Target

This is a business success goal that focuses on specific increases in number or rate of sales/conversions, visits/checkouts, or users/customers. Adoption is another common type of growth target.

Efficiency Target

This is a business success goal that focuses on ways to make existing business investments work harder. For example, reducing calls to customer service or creating more efficient business processes.

Decision Checklist

This is a checklist of considerations you want the group to use as a basis for decision-making. Include specific business, customer, and societal goals outlined in challenge framing, and process considerations like whether or not diverse voices are having a due influence on their own perspectives. This should be specific to your project.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

This is a commonly used key performance indicator to track how satisfied customers are with your organization's products and /or services.

Social Definition of Disability

This is a complex phenomenon, reflecting the interaction between features of a person's body and features of the society in which they live.

Persona Spectrum

This is a continuum of types of people who might interact with the product you're designing. It focuses on human dimensions across the physical, cognitive, emotional, or societal aspects.

Journey Map

This is a document that visually illustrates the experiences customers have with a business or an organization. This is used to analyze an existing process and diagnose issues with it. It can also be used to describe a future state experience.

Persona

This is a fictional character based on real, aggregated data that represents a group of users based on shared behavior, motivations, goals, pain points, or other characteristics. it is a composite of a certain type of user who's important to your work.

Design Thinking

This is a human-centered approach to innovation. It lets people find the sweet spot of feasibility, viability, and desirability while considering the real needs and desires of people.

Experience Narrative

This is a linear story that focuses on a single scenario.

Path of Inquiry

This is a logical progression of questions that takes you from your user's goals through an assessment and prioritization of the information needed to meet those goals in meaningful ways. We use this tool to counteract the natural inclination to universalize our own priorities. That is, to avoid designing based on key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics we might be used to as default metrics - and to help us orient our information design around the needs of a specific organization.

Coalition of the Willing

This is a mission-driven group of advocates, including project sponsors and cross-functional team members. These advocates use their skills, experiences, and networks to develop a new idea into a product or service and help bring it to market.

Challenge

This is a problem you're trying to solve that considers the users of what you're creating - specifically in how they think, feel, and act.

Consequence Scanning

This is a process teams use to interrogate solution concepts to consider their potential effects on communities and greater society. Beyond discovering potential risks, this prompts the team to decide which issues to act on immediately, which ones to influence, and which ones to monitor.

Walking Deck

This is a short summary of your latest work, no more than 10 slides long, written in a way that both informs and persuades others about your project's progress.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

This is a single-item experience metric that measures how much effort a customer has to exert to get an issue resolved, a request fulfilled, a product purchased/returned or a question answered. The idea is that the customer will be more loyal to brands that are easier to do business with. By focusing on reducing this, you'll create a better experience for your customer.

Diversity

This is about building a culture of inclusion and belonging that allows teams to constantly question bias and world views, and bring other people to the conversation. It requires leading in new ways.

Customer Churn

This is also known as customer attrition. In its most basic form is when a customer chooses to stop using your products or services. This experience metric is trickier to measure because there's no one predictor of churn. You must look at both operational insights (e.g. declining repeat purchases, reduced purchase amounts) whilst their experience along the customer journey is foundation to predicting if they will churn.

Triple Constraint

This is also known as the Common trade-offs and includes: - balancing scope - time allotted - cost / project budget

Strategic Vision

This is an aspirational view of a future state and a point of view on what teams should build to solve the project's design challenge. This is how design teams communicate highlights of the strategy's end-state to stakeholders to create buy-in and inspire excitement.

Net Promotor Score (NPS)

This is an experience metric used in customer experience programs. It's often held up as the gold standard customer experience metric. These are measured with a single-question survey and reported with a number from 0-100, a higher score is desirable.

Prototype

This is an experiment that's purpose-built to answer a specific question in the design and build process. It makes ideas tangible in ways that people can interact with them. It generates low-cost answers to questions about what a team can build and how that product, service, or experience can look, feel, behave, and drive outcomes.

Go-to-Market

This is crunch time as your product barrels toward the launch date. This stage involves a whole new set of negotiations based on time, prioritizations, and trade-offs.

Research for Discovery/Understanding

This is information gathering. It helps you understand the context and constraints of a design challenge and build on work that's already done.

Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures (V2MOM)

This is one in a series of cascading goal-setting frameworks that companies use to promote and achieve their objectives.

Universal Design

This is rooted in architecture and environmental design and is focused on designing one solution that serves all people with minimal adoption. it is a one-size-fits-all design approach.

Industrial Revolution

This is the appearance of new technologies and novel ways of perceiving the world that trigger a profound change in economic and social structures.

Customer Value

This is the benefit customers get from using a product. This is summed up in the value proposition and delivered on via key features and the experience around the product.

Product Roadmap

This is the central hub of information for everyone involved in bringing your product to market. It's a plan of action and shared source of truth that details how you're going to fulfill the product vision: what you're delivering and when.

Human-Centered Design (HCD)

This is the creative process that keeps people - the end users - at the center of the work.

Operational Data

This is the data your brand sees - the number of new customers, website visitors, call center volumes, sales figures and more. It's useful, but it presents only part of the picture - how something has performed in the past and what exactly happened.

Challenge Framing

This is the first alignment moment in a successful initiative or project. It defines the focus of the problem you're trying to solve and clarifies what your team is setting out to do.

Ability Bias

This is the habit of using our own abilities as the baseline to solve problems. This may be related to physical, cognitive, or societal aspects. Out of all the biases that designers bring to the table, this is the sneakiest.

Ethics by Design

This is the incorporation of ethical principles into the process of designing, building, and shipping software and services.

Behavior Change

This is the intentional effort to modify people's attitudes, choices, and habits.

Research for Inspiration/Idea Generation

This is the most divergent type of research in format and practice, as it's anything that inspires problem-solving at the highest level. So depending on the problem, you might find similar or analogous solutions to inform your thinking, bring in people as thought partners or co-designers, use trends and forecasts, or dive into an experience that increases your compassion for those impacted by your design challenge.

Trade-offs

This is the outcome of giving up something in return for another. They are especially common when diverse disciplines are coming together to problem solve.

Relationship Design

This is the practice of creating experiences that foster ongoing engagement and strengthen connections between people, organizations, and communities over time.

Inclusive Design

This is the practice of designing solutions that offer a diversity of ways for people to participate in and contribute to an experience. It is a one-size-fits-one design approach.

Idea Synthesis

This is the process of creating grouping of similar ideas and labeling each group as a theme, based on what types of ideas are inside.

Ideation

This is the process of generating solution ideas. A byproduct of this practice is that you discover the tradeoffs (common trade-offs are effort vs value, time vs cost, compromise vs sacrifice) implicit in your options.

Prototype Testing

This is the process of testing your prototype on real users.

Digital Transformation

This is the process of using digital technologies to create new - or modify existing - business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements.

Externality

This refers to the people, organizations, communities, or even countries that never asked to be involved in the creation of a service or product in the first place.

Sustainable Business

This refers to the quality of relationship between a business and the society and environment where it operates. It delivers value for investors, customers, and employees; improves the living standards of its employees and the communities it touches; makes wise use of natural resources; and treats people fairly.

Social Dynamic

This refers to the relationships between people, including how they interact and relate to one another to achieve goals.

Job Altitude

This refers to the scope of the job and helps us gauge whether a job is too broad or narrow.

Social Context

This refers to the structures people exist within - everything from shared public spaces, like libraries and public transportation, to the workplace.

Research Method to Inform Strategy: Analogous Research

This research method to inform strategy is a form of exploration that takes a team outside of its industry to find inspiration in the ways others have tackled similar challenges. This can be inspiration research in which the project team identifies an isolated element of a design opportunity - such as an emotional state, behavior, or social dynamic - and looks for examples of that element done well in other contexts. For instance, experiencing an escape room in order to gather inspiration around leadership through ambiguity.

Research Method to Inform Strategy: Surveys

This research method to inform strategy is the most widely used and flexible format for quantitative research. The category includes everything from pin polling - texting participants for quick responses to simple questions - to desirability testing with pixel-perfect mockups, price-point market research, and large-scale demographic, attitudinal, or behavioral studies. These are the data collection instrument, and analysis is needed on that data to provide useful insights.

Design Debt

This results from all the good design concepts or solutions that were set aside to achieve short-term goals. It is a natural and unavoidable result of moving quickly and having parallel work streams. The result affects the overall user experience.

Jobs to Be Done Framework

This says that people buy or hire products and services to get a specific job done. Seeing users through this lens provides a framework for discovering and defining jobs and needs, and it ties those jobs and needs to measurable outcomes defined in terms of success for the user.

Criteria Scored

This should list criteria you want decision-makers to evaluate. Instead of a yes/no, stakeholders grade each option (idea, concept, or priority) based on each criteria listed, on a scale of 1 - 5.

Releases Roadmap

This shows the activities (what needs to be done, when, and who is responsible) that must happen before you can bring the release to market.

Portfolio Roadmap

This shows the planned releases of multiple products in a single view.

Features Roadmap

This shows the timeline for delivering new features.

Product Manager

This stakeholder is accountable for getting a product to market that achieves business outcomes. They are accountable for the roadmap.

Project Manager

This stakeholder makes sure all the parties involved complete their tasks and ensures that the entire process stays on track.

How Might We (HMW) Statement

This turns your challenge framing into a question that can be solved. It turns problems into opportunities for generative thinking and organizes how you think about the problem and possible solutions. It starts with a call to action, and in moments of ambiguity. It guides you in how to push your design.

Medium-Fidelity Prototype

This type of prototype is great for exploration-level concepts.

Low-Fidelity Prototype

This type of prototype is great for ideation level questions.

Top-Down Support

This type of support is formal. When you get this, it unlocks budget, resources, and explicit permission to challenge the status quo. If the project requires room to experiment, this type of support gives you permission and space to do it, as senior leaders can use their political capital to protect and advocate for the work.

Bottom-Up Support

This type of support lacks formal power. However, it makes up for it in genuine inspiration. It describes the grassroots power people have to influence attitudes - people with a passion for the work, spreading the word about it by organic means and lending their skill to make it better. It often means the people carrying out the vision feel a sense of ownership of it.

Values-Driven Design

Through this practice, organizations center their design process on their core values to ensure they actively express them in their products and services.

Prioritization Matrices

When you can simplify the key criteria, or you have a lot of options to consider, use this. First the design strategist defines two axes based on your key criteria, and draws a diagram that shows the axes with a scale like high/low or more/less. Then stakeholders plot all the options relative to one another on this diagram one at a time, discussing their relative merits and risks, and any differences in opinion about placement. Groups can create multiple of these for the same set of options, using different sets of key criteria to see ow the same options fare with different criteria priorities.

Research for Validating Assumptions, Decisions, and Designs

When you know what you're designing and how it should look, feel, and behave, this type of research helps teams confirm that their solution is useful and usable.