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The guidelines are an evolution of Adrian Agho's excellent Product Management 2.0. |
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Whilst the exact methods used are up to you, you must document your product discovery thoroughly in Confluence. This is non-optional. The end-to-end process for documenting in Confluence is described here.
The guidelines use design thinking methodology
These guidelines are based on design thinking which has been popularised by companies such as IDEO, and used to great success to build successful products by Apple and others.
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If you are looking for guidance on outlining the key aspects of your design problem, check out our frame your design challenge template. |
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Stage 2 - KPIs and project foundations
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The business KPI that the Product Manager or Business Leader wishes to affect with this initiative should be re-stated. The business KPI used should directly reflect the This is to ensure the KPI and rationale for doing the project .
A goal should be set that will be measured by this KPI, including a timeline for making this change.
A guide for setting the KPI/s is below:
Business KPI | Current level | Current level date | Goal level | Goal date |
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eg. onboarding flow success rate | eg. 50% | eg. as of July 2024 | eg. 80% | eg. October 2024 |
These KPIs and goals should be agreed by the Business Leader and is crystal clear to all team members.
Create a project plan
Set the goal, key tasks, timelines, roles and responsibilities from the process below.
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Stage 3 - research
Desktop research
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We have created a template to help offer some inspiration on what research you can do, seen here.
Identifying customers for research
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We have created a template table to help record interviewees details, seen here.
Interviews
Guidelines for interviews:
Interviews should typically be 45 minutes long at least. The aim is to get deeper understanding to supplement that you gathered from quantitative data, surveys, and usability testing.
Try to have two people of your team in each interview. One person can take on the role of the interviewer, leading the conversation and building trust with the interviewee, while the second person acts as an observer/note-taker, capturing key details, behaviours, and insights that might be missed by the interviewer. This allows for different interpretations of the responses and leads to richer insights as each person may pick up on different details or nuances in the conversation. If the interview is not conducted in person, the second person (observer/note-taker) should turn off their camera to minimise distractions and ensure the interviewee feels comfortable.
Come prepared with a set of questions you’d like to ask. Start by asking broad questions about the person’s life, values, and habits, before asking more specific questions that relate directly to your challenge. A pro-forma template you can use to help formulate the right questions to ask is here.
Keep questions at a high level at early stages- do not dive into specifics on a product, or specifics such as asking ‘do you like this feature?'.
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You can find helpful tips on conducting interviews in this article. |
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Synthesise your findings from the interviews (research download)
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A template to help identify themes is here.
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Stage 4 - ideation
Create How Might We questions (HMW)
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A template to help you do that is here.
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Writing You can find helpful tips on writing HMW questions in this article. |
Brainstorm ideas
Brainstorm ideas for solutions to each 'How Might We' question. Do this with all your team present.
Focus on quantity, not quality here. Generate as many ideas as possible. In a good
session, up to 100 ideas are generated in 60 minutes.Prioritise creativity over immediate feasibility.
Bundle brainstormed ideas
Now that you’ve got lots of ideas, it’s time to combine them into robust solutions.
Bundling ideas takes you from strong individual concepts to solutions of substance. Think of it as a game of mix and match, with the end goal of putting the best parts of several ideas together to create more complex concepts. You’ve probably noticed that many ideas start to resemble each other—which is a good thing. Try different combinations; keep the best parts of some, get rid of the ones that aren’t working, and consolidate your thinking into a few concepts you can start to share.
Start by clustering similar ideas in your prototypes into groups. Talk about the best of the ideaselements of those clusters and combine them with other clusters.
Once you’ve got a few ideas for elements, start to combine idea groupings, ask yourself how the best elements of your thinking to form might live in a system. Now you’re moving from individual ideas to full-on solutions.
Now you’re moving to the first solution for testing, which contains a number of new and creative ideas.
Create a prototype
The goal is to get a robust, flexible concept that addresses the problem you’re trying to solve.
Keep referring back to the KPI you need to improve. Is this directed towards it? Are there elements missing in your solution? What else can you incorporate to come up with a great solution?
There’s a bit of trial and error here. And creating a concept means you’ll probably create a couple that don’t work out. This process is about learning, not getting it right the first time. Better to test a miserable failure and learn from it, rather than take ages making a beautiful, highly refined prototype.
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Now that you’ve got a prototype to share, get it in front of the people you’re designing for.
Capturing honest feedback is crucial. People may praise your prototype to be nice, so assure them that this is only a tool by which to learn and that you welcome honest, even negative feedback.
Share with lots of people so that you get a variety of reactions.
Write down the feedback you hear and use this opportunity with the people you’re designing for to ask more questions and iterate your ideas further.
Integrate feedback into your prototype, and iterate
Note down and gather all the feedback you gathered in the previous step. Note- wait until a batch of interviews are done and iterate your design based on aggregated comments that you’re hearing over and over again- don’t get sucked into iterating the product based on a single piece of feedback.
Build the next iteration of your prototype, based on this feedback.
Remember that this is a method for refining refining your idea, not for getting to the ultimate solution the first time. You’ll probably do it a few times to work out the kinks and get to the right answer.
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Following the completion of the above steps a clear value proposition should be formed, with a prototype that is validated with customers.
At this point, you will progress to the design & handoff stage.