Solutions are the death of a product design. Learn how a growing internal team helped to disrupt a large, product-focused organization with design, not only through educating product owners, but also including them in the exploration to define problems instead of solutions.
A small but growing internal design team within a large product-focused organization has had a strong, strategic voice in the development process of our company’s client-facing products. Instead of making cosmetic changes to old, unvetted solutions, we challenged our team to find problems that needed solving in order to create a better overall product. We introduced research methods, design studio, and rapid prototyping into our colleagues’ vocabularies early and often. Even through a series of discouraging review sessions and a multitude of poorly worded email critiques, our team came to trust and understand that our design strategy got us to the heart of our users’ needs.
I talk process—the team, communication, and validating big questions and ideas; failures—mismanaged Agile processes and unactionable critique; and how we are moving onward and upward—team sketching sessions and other design studio methods, communication improvements, and productive sprints.
Presented at IA Summit 2014.